Poisoned Politics: Truth, Lies, and the Decline of Discourse—and Democracy

Poisoned Politics: Truth, Lies, and the Decline of Discourse—and Democracy

Join us for an evening with acclaimed authors Renée DiResta, a professor and social media researcher at Georgetown University, and Andrew Marantz, a staff writer at The New Yorker, who will discuss the way the online and offline worlds have collapsed, leading to a new—and altogether darker and more confusing—age in both politics and society.

Their conversation, moderated by Joshua Yaffa, Marantz’s colleague at The New Yorker and Bard College Berlin’s writer-in-residence, will touch on how the ideas, rhetoric, memes, and half-truths that sprout from online subcultures have, in many ways, come to determine the American mainstream. The particular nature of social media and how it spreads both information and misinformation has come to hold a great power in determining the relationship between citizens and their government, and how that government in turn views its own role and power. In the context of the second Trump Presidency, these questions have become all the more relevant, and urgent.

Both DiResta, the author of “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality,” and Marantz, author of “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation,” have deep experience researching and reporting from within the communities and personalities that have come to hold outsized sway in today’s politics and culture—from right-wing message boards to the so-called “mansophere” of male-oriented podcasters.

This evening will offer both a fact-based description and diagnosis of political discourse in the current moment, as well as highlight possible scenarios for the future.

Renée DiResta is associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown. She is the author of “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality,”  a contributing editor at Lawfare, and also contributes to The Atlantic. DiResta was previously the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She was a Presidential Leadership Scholar and has been named an Emerson Fellow, a Truman National Security Project fellow, Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, a Harvard Berkman-Klein affiliate, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member. She has advised Congress, the White House, state legislatures, and business organizations on issues related to technology and policy, including information operations, generative AI, election security, researcher transparency, child safety, and more.

Andrew Marantz is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has worked since 2011. He is the author of “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation,” which was published in 2019 and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and many other publications. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, New York, Mother Jones, the New York Times, among other places. A contributor to The New Yorker Radio Hour, he has spoken at TED and has been interviewed on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and many other outlets.

Joshua Yaffa is the inaugural Writer in Residence at Bard College Berlin. He is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia,” which won the Orwell Prize in 2021.

Admission is free. Please register via https://eveeno.com/207905772