Keystone Progress Summit 2016

There's a lizard lurking inside each one of our brains. When it dominates, guns fly off the shelves after the latest mass shooting, Trump’s appeals to xenophobia and racism are rewarded with a spike in the polls, and a majority of Americans accept the cruelty of refusing desperate refugees as “common sense.” The co-directors of the HearYourselfThink Project bring our years of grassroots organizing and advocacy experience to this challenge of reclaiming America’s brain from the grip of right-wing media. Participants in this workshop will learn how to deprogram people who have been trapped inside the "Fox Bubble" and take away effective strategies to diffuse and diminish the influence of right-wing media over our politics and culture

Throughout its history, the “New Right” has rewritten history and science to support its policies on issues ranging from separation of church and state to climate change. The result of 40+ years of this is a nation not only polarized by differences in opinions, but unable to agree on basic facts. In this sesssion, we will dissect five specific, widely believed but nonfactual myths including: 1) where they came from and how they were disseminated; 2) the underlying and sometimes not-so-obvious purposes they serve; and 3) how we can better counter these myths.

It seems as if, every day, there is a new social media catastrophe in politics. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective!), the vast majority of those catastrophes are preventable, and caused by human stupidity or error. In this session we will walk you through the dumbest things every done on social media, what went wrong, and how you can avoid becoming another slide in this presentation.