'Rescuing Reality: Can Americans Have Shared Facts Again?' with Jonathan Rauch

Rescuing Reality: Can Americans Have Shared Facts Again?

Millions of Republicans believe (falsely) that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. Millions of Democrats believe (falsely) that Republicans stole the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election. Conspiracy theories, trolling, disinformation and canceling seem to run amok, fracturing the country and causing what former President Obama and others call an epistemic crisis, where Americans can’t agree on even basic facts. Can we restore a common reality?

This is the topic of the upcoming lecture with Brookings Institution senior fellow and author Jonathan Rauch. He joins the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership as a speaker in the Civic Discourse Project 2021-22 series “Renewing America’s civic compact” to discuss how to fight back against trolling, disinformation, canceling and other cutting-edge propaganda tactics that seek to unmoor our country from reality, the subject of his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

The event is co-sponsored by the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at ASU. Light refreshments will be served.

Rauch’s work focuses on the pressing contemporary subjects of freedom of speech and thought, political polarization and gay marriage. He is a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington DC and contributing writer for The Atlantic, author of eight books and many articles and has received the two magazine industry’s leading prizes – the National Magazine Award (the industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) and the National Headliner Award.

School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership
scetl@asu.edu
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Memorial Union, Turquoise Room