Authoritarian Arrogance and the End of the 'Reality-Based Community'

This perspective is part of a series of provocations published on Tech Policy Press in advance of a symposium at the University of Pittsburgh's Communication Technology Research Lab (CTRL) on threats to knowledge and US democracy.

At a recent press conference, a news correspondent asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt who selected Budapest, the home of right-wing leader Viktor Orbán, as the site for a meeting between United States President Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Leavitt’s reply was as concise as it was juvenile: “Your mom did.”

The fusion of imperial prerogative with adolescent snark is telling. There was no need to plant stories in the media about Budapest as a desirable site for a summit, or generate some pabulum rendering its status as a right-wing hotbed with a degree of plausible deniability: just “your mom.” No data, no warrants, no evidence, just a schoolyard jape. Yet, the comment contains a world.

There is a rather famous off the record quote from a senior aide to then President George W. Bush—possibly GOP political operative Karl Rove, though he denies it—in a 2004 Ron Suskind essay in the New York Times about the character of the post-9/11, mid-invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush era of high military adventurism and kitschy patriotism. Critiquing the journalistic idea of a “reality-based community,” the Bush aide argued that the correspondence between a shared reality and government decision-making was an anachronism:

That’s not the way the world really works anymore….We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

The quote is famous in part for the worry it inspired in observers, who found the naked commitment to an imperialistic ethos a sign of a worrying trend in a post 9/11 United States: the substitution of naked authority for evidence, the confusion of action for information, and a disinterest in considering the nature of the world before acting within it. Indeed this is a quote that in part drove work that followed which invoked terms like epistemic closure and asymmetric polarization (and its constitutional relative). Yet, parts of the passage may look quaint today: the quotation reserves a place for journalists, librarians, academics, critics, archivists, and the like to undertake an examination of the decisions made by the administration and the consequences thereof and, one assumes, to at least work from a reliable archive of evidence related to said events and decisions.

The new regime reserves no such place for critics, scholars, or even loyal opposition. Among its weapons of choice are a mix of federal and executive sovereignty, rhetorical shitposting, brute technological coercion, and physical force. Its choice of such tools—and the pathways that inform those choices—is less a pattern of elongated thought which produced them as strategically optimal as the logical endpoint of hostility to reality itself.

It's well-documented that the most toxic corners of the internet have slipped into the mainstream: the networked harassment of Gamergate has metastasized into something that can be more readily perceived now as generally threatening. The softer version is “Your mom,” but the more wicked version is embodied in Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought’s desire to traumatize workers in federal bureaucracy, in a pipeline of posting-to-deportation directed at voices in solidarity with the people of Palestine, and invading major cities on the basis of fabricated claims of crime and disorder. In truly dystopian fashion, this trauma can be a goal as in Vought’s plan to wreck the liberal governing apparatus; it can be cynically reappropriated by enemies of higher education who wrongly label the discomfort generated by democratic dissent against war crimes as antisemitic; and in the case of militarized federal occupations of Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, the deployments not only traumatize the residents but try to goad them into the kind of violent resistance that will make more federal repression a fait accompli. In each case the actions reconstruct reality as one of thrumming, incessant trauma.

But situation is even worse than that. The impartial, material reserves of information capable of combating these fantasies and pathologies is now shot through with fading relevance. The user-curated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for example, is one of the rare icons of the internet’s democratic promise realized: reliable, inclusive, and easily accessible. Yet teeming armies of scrapers are threatening the functionality of the Wikipedia website, which also faces political attacks from the right. Tech oligarch Elon Musk is creating an AI-based funhouse mirror of Wikipedia—Grokipedia—to which traffic is presumably funneled by an internet that increasingly resembles a linear, on-rails experience rather than sandbox video game: users are sent on specific tracks and must obey certain parameters of travel rather than freely exploring. They flee Twitter in droves following its descent into a swamp of white supremacist conspiracy theorizing—what platform lets a user select the name @gaschambers?—but as they move to platforms like Bluesky, a steady drumbeat of reactionary centrist discourse complains that these refugees hate free speech and the open exchange of ideas. No problem: the same understanding of free speech that’s being weaponized to crush democracy on American college campuses will be invoked to turn the screws on whatever internet platform is capable of incubating a little civic virtue.

What is standing in the way of “Your mom” becoming the reason authorizing various federal and corporate decision-making? Very little. And as such trolling continues to arrogate power and authority, reality’s move from bent to broken accelerates.

What are some available paths for action? For one, anyone who has any kind of professional role to play in politics, journalism, and academia should seriously limit if not fully de-couple themselves from Musk’s X platform. No individual is beyond being influenced by propaganda, and the website’s algorithm is built to bathe people in extremism, harassment, and reality-distortion to the point that it all seems customary and normal rather than intolerable and combatable. Second, liberal and progressives groups and donors need to start to make the case for funding journalistic enterprises that will lose money but produce good journalism. For decades the American right invested in infrastructure and networks, often to their short-term financial detriment. All that it has won them is the world. For what would be in the world of big money politics a modest sum, an all-star team of journalists could be assembled from the talent that has fled CBS, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and other outlets crumbling amidst rising authoritarianism. These are at least a couple steps to consider going forward.