In 2004, American journalist Ron Susskind recounted a conversation with a White House aide

widely believed to be Carl Rove.

Quote, the aide said that guys like me were in what we call, quote, the reality-based community,

which he defined as people who, quote, believe that solutions

emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.

That's not the way the world really works anymore, he continued.

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 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 term reality-based community was born into public consciousness that day.

This aids claim to create reality reeked with a kind of imperial pride that precedes a well-deserved fall.

It set the stage for the rise of Trump, that lover of conspiracy theories, from birtherism to Q&N to the Big Steel.

As Hannah Arendt explained in the origins of totalitarianism, decoupling politics from

reality has a long history. She wrote, before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their

lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such,

for in their opinion, fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.

No wonder, Dr. Timothy Snyder said, post-truth is pre-fascism. And no wonder sage, author, and religious

educator David Dark said, sin is active flight from a lived realization of available data. Christianity, especially since Galileo and Darwin,

has had an uncomfortable relationship with available data.

But people can easily jump from the Christian frying pan into a secular fire with its own unreality,

...