Have we entered an age of post-truth politics? Can anything stop the power of conspiracy theories and fake news? Facts, statistics and officials are becoming an increasingly fragile foundation for democratic politics across the world. But this decay is symptomatic of the neoliberalism they espouse. Against a climate of anti-vaxxers, 5G truthers, Q-Anon conspirators, Covid-deniers and the ‘stolen election’, we aim to make sense of these ‘alternate realities’ and what drives them.

Join Red Pepper and Repeater Books for a panel discussion on the politics of truth, leading on from Red Pepper’s Winter 2020 issue ‘Struggles for Truth’. We will be joined by:

Marcus Gilroy-Ware is a writer, researcher and teacher who works at the intersection of politics, culture and communication. He is the author of Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media and After the Fact?: The Truth About Fake News.

Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. The author of Work Won’t Love You Back and Necessary Trouble, she has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation and many other outlets. She tweets as @sarahljaffe.

Thomas Konda is the author of Conspiracies of Conspiracies and professor emeritus of political science at State University of New York at Plattsburgh. He wrote the article The Conspiracy Election in the Winter 2020 issue of Red Pepper.