The Cynical View of Politics

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How cynically do you view this? Like, do you think that people in power are actually lying about these things or do you think they're just sort of believing these narratives and that just happened to benefit them? Yeah, that's a great question and I think it's always a mix. There are times where it becomes kind of inescapable. For instance, we can look at the way in which the Bush administration ... got Congress to write an authorization of use of military force in Iraq. Some of the people in the Bush administration believe that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; other people knew that he did not.

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Nick Gillespie is an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine of "free minds and free markets", and host of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Gillespie served as the editor in chief for Reason.com and Reason TV from 2008 through 2017 and was Reason magazine's editor in chief from 2000 to 2008. Under his direction, Reason won the 2005 Western Publications Association "Maggie" Award for Best Political Magazine. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, Slate, Salon, Time.com, Marketplace, and numerous other publications; and he is a frequent commentator on radio and television networks such as National Public Radio, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox Business, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and PBS. He holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He also holds an M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from Temple University and a B.A. in English and Psychology from Rutgers University. Follow him on Twitter at @nickgillespie.