As part of the Brookings Scholar Lecture Series, Brookings Mountain West invites you to a lecture titled "Alt-Truth: Can Reality Survive the Era of Trump?" by Brookings Fellow in Governance Studies, Jonathan Rauch.

The ability of our citizens, media representatives, and public officials to distinguish objective truth from opinion depends on social conventions that accept a claim as knowledge only if it is tested by critical third parties. President Trump and other social-media devotees are only the latest of many challenges to maintaining the distinction between established fact and personal opinion, but they apply modern technology and modern cynicism in ways that are proving hard to counter in real time. What are these new challenges, and how can we preserve the concept of objective knowledge?