American politics over the past several years has proven to be highly eventful and highly controversial, rendering the upcoming midterm elections highly consequential. The role of language and the use and misuse of symbols in politics, along with their relation to facts and political realities, have long been a concern for general semantics. Having organized several lively and engaging programs on this topic during and after the 2016 US Presidential election, we were pleased to begin our Fall 2018 programming on October 3rd with a panel discussion that explored current American political discourse with little more than a month to go before the midterm elections that will decide the composition of the US Congress in the coming year.

 The participants on this program were:

Arshia Anwer is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Manhattan College, with research interests in the areas of integrated marketing communication, philosophy of communication, religious communication, and intercultural communication.  She holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and an M.A in Integrated Marketing Communication from Duquesne University, and an M.A. in Psychology from Osmania University in Hyderabad, India.  She has worked in the communication and education fields in a variety of marketing communication, editing, and teaching roles.

Thom Gencarelli, Professor and Chair of the Communication Department at Manhattan College, member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of General Semantics, and the Board of Directors of the NYSGS, and the new editor of ETC: A Review of General Semantics.

Arthur S. Hayes, an Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, is the author of Press Critics are the Fifth Estate: Media Watchdogs in America; Sympathy for the Cyberbully: How the Crusade to Censor Hostile and Offensive Online Speech Abuses Freedom of Expression; and the editor of Communication in the Age of Trump.

The program was moderated by Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, Trustee of the Institute of General Semantics, and President of the New York Society for General Semantics, as well as author of several books including the award-winning Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition; and Amazing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited.

It was a compelling and captivating discussion!