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Book excerpt: “The Death of Truth” by Steven Brill
Knopf
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Journalist and author Steven Brill (whose company, NewsGuard, aims to identify and rate the credibility of online news and information sources) has written “The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World – and What We Can Do“ (Knopf).
It explores how misinformation and conspiracy theories, spread via social media, destroy the common thread of facts and shared truths that holds a democracy together.
Read an excerpt below, and don’t miss Ted Koppel’s interview with Steven Brill on “CBS Sunday Morning” September 8!
“The Death of Truth” by Steven Brill
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This is a book about how facts—truths—have lost their power to hold us together as a community, as a country, and globally. The diminishing belief in truths, in favor of “alternative facts” or even conspiracy theories, has massively eroded trust around the world—in institutions, in political leaders, in scientists, in doctors and other professional experts (even that word is suspect), and in our own ability to solve our communities’ problems. As a result, civil society is unraveling.
If different people believe in different versions of the truth, there is no real truth shared by all. Truth shrivels away and dies—and what binds us together shrivels away, too. Mistruths, invented “reality,” manipulation, distortion, and paranoia replace truth. Chaos replaces reason and civility. Power comes not through ideas debated civilly in democratic processes but to those who generate the most distrust for their own purposes.
This crisis is not inevitable or irreversible. There are a variety of specific, practical steps … that we can take to reverse this devastating erosion of trust. But first we have to confront its magnitude and understand how it happened.
There has always been an instinct on the part of some people not to want to face facts or at least to try to paper them over. I remember parents’ visiting day thirty years ago, when my daughter’s grade school teacher answered “I disagree” when a student said that six times seven was forty-one. Yet even at this progressive school most parents rolled their eyes. We all seemed to agree that it’s a fact, not an opinion, that six times seven is not forty-one, just as we believed that the 1969 moon landing was not faked.
Those who preferred alternative facts or to demote facts to matters of opinion were a relative few, and the issues they focused on were not nearly as abundant. That has changed. Newer myths, invented “facts,” and conspiracy theories have much greater followings, boosted, as we will see, by the amazing reach and power that social media and other technology now have to target and convince susceptible believers. We thought these were communications innovations that would bring the world together. Instead, we have seen them split us apart into an infinite collection of warring tribes with infinite fears and grievances.
The decline of truth—the level of distrust in what should be accepted facts, conveyed by what were once trusted sources of information—is unprecedented.
There is nothing new about people being whipped into a frenzy and turned against each other with misinformation or disinformation. Cleopatra was smeared by her and Mark Antony’s enemies two thousand years ago. There were the religious wars of the Crusades in the eleventh century, the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and, of course, the twentieth century horrors of Hitler’s propaganda and killing machine in Europe. There were Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, Stalin’s political repression in the Soviet Union, and the Red Scare and Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt in the United States. More recently, American politicians have frequently misled their constituents, notably about progress in the Vietnam War and proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And, of course, yellow journalism and religious extremists around the world often pushed people and countries into wars throughout the last two centuries.
But now the power to create that frenzy—the power to communicate—has gone from the slingshot age to the nuclear age.
From “The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World – and What We Can Do” by Steven Brill. Reprinted by permission of Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Steven Brill.
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“The Death of Truth” by Steven Brill
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Police arrested a man on murder charges this month, 14 years after he allegedly killed a man in Virginia, but the victim’s body has never been found.
Shane Ryan Donahue, a Virginia man, is presumed deceased, the Prince William County Police Department said Tuesday. He was last seen leaving his parents’ home in Nokesville, Virginia, on March 22, 2010. Donahue, 23, was headed to his house in Nokesville, but never made it there.
Donahue was added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System after he vanished. According to records, Donahue did not have a car and regularly got rides from friends. He frequented Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Fauquier County, Virginia, and Northern Virginia.
The case stumped investigators, who followed a number of leads over the years. This spring, detectives reactivated the investigation and started looking at every detail of the case from scratch, officials said. They revisited people who had been interviewed during the initial investigation and reviewed “digital evidence in greater detail due to advances in analytical technology and modern police investigative practices,” according to a news release.
Officers said Donahue was last seen leaving his parents’ home with Timothy Sean Hickerson, now a 43-year-old Florida resident. Investigators connected Hickerson to a burglary at Donahue’s home that happened just days before the Virginia man disappeared.
Detectives got an arrest warrant this month and, with the help of Florida’s Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, Hickerson was taken into custody in Palm Coast, Florida. Hickerson was charged with murder and burglary, is now set to be extradited to Virginia.
Former President Donald Trump, an avowed proponent of tax cuts, is floating the idea of reversing a measure passed during his tenure in the White House that effectively raised taxes for many U.S. homeowners.
In a post Tuesday on Truth Social, Trump suggested he would scrap a $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes (SALT) that was passed as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a massive revamp that he has said boosted economic growth.
Now, in the run-up to the November election, Trump said in the post he would “get SALT back, lower your taxes, and so much more,” although he stopped short of offering details. Trump made the post ahead of a speech he’s giving Wednesday at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.
Trump’s new proposal for getting rid of his $10,000 SALT deduction cap comes as the presidential hopeful is pitching several additional tax cuts that would, if enacted, reduce taxes for major groups of voters. He’s also vowed to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, a pledge that could get support from the nation’s senior citizens, as well as to end income taxes on tipped workers and on overtime pay, ideas that would help lower- and middle-income Americans.
Yet Trump’s reversal on the SALT deduction has sparked skepticism from lawmakers as well as economists and policy experts.
“So … now Trump is against the SALT tax cap which *checks notes* is a key part of the — only — major piece of legislation passed during his administration?” noted Chris Koski, a political science professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, on X.
Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Nassau, Queens, said in a statement on Wednesday that he is “happy that the former president is saying that he has finally reversed his devastating decision in 2017 to cap the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction.” He also urged Trump to convince Republican lawmakers to vote to restore the full deduction “if he is truly serious.”
The SALT deduction cap “has been a body blow to my constituents for the past 7 years,” Suozzi added.
Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, wrote on X,”Donald Trump took away your SALT dedications and hurt so many Long Island families. Now, he’s coming to Long Island to pretend he supports SALT. It won’t work.”
Asked for details about Trump’s proposal to restore the SALT writeoff, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign told CBS MoneyWatch: “While his pro-growth, pro-energy policies will make life affordable again, President Trump is also going to quickly move tax relief for working people and seniors.”
Here’s what to know about the SALT deduction.
What is the SALT deduction?
The state and local tax deduction allows taxpayers who itemize to deduct property taxes, sales taxes and state or local income taxes from their federal income taxes. Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, there was no limit on how much people could deduct through the SALT deduction.
But the 2017 tax overhaul passed under Trump limited the deduction to $10,000 – a blow to many homeowners in states with high property taxes, many of which are Democratic leaning. At the time of the law’s passage, the Treasury Department estimated that almost 11 million taxpayers in high-tax states like New York and New Jersey would forfeit $323 billion in deductions.
Who benefits from the SALT deduction?
Homeowners with high property taxes, such as people in New York, New Jersey and California, were the biggest beneficiaries of the the full SALT deduction.
But some experts also noted that the SALT deduction primarily put more money in the pockets of higher-earning Americans. About 80% of the full SALT deduction had helped people earning more than $100,000 a year, according to the Tax Foundation.
What happened after Trump capped the SALT deduction at $10,000?
The limit has increasingly impacted middle-class homeowners across the U.S. because of rising property taxes and incomes. Some lawmakers have also sought to either repeal or increase the SALT cap, but none of those efforts have borne fruit.
Earlier this year, some lawmakers sought to double the SALT deduction cap to $20,000 for married couples, with the change retroactive for the 2023 tax year. But that bill was blocked in the House in February.
Won’t the SALT deduction cap expire anyway?
Yes, the SALT deduction cap is a provision that’s due to expire in 2025, as are many other parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, such as a reduction of the individual tax brackets. But Trump has previously indicated he wants to extend the provisions in his signature tax law.
How much would it cost the U.S. to repeal the SALT deduction cap?
It won’t be cheap, according to the the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that focuses on budget and policy issues.
Eliminating the $10,000 deduction limit “would increase the cost of extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) by $1.2 trillion over a decade,” the group estimates, adding that such a measure would be a “costly mistake.”
Extending the TCJA’s tax cuts would increase the nation’s deficit by $3.9 trillion over the next decade, the group estimates. By adding in a expiration or repeal of the SALT deduction cap, that would grow to $5.1 trillion, it added.
“Lawmakers should not extend the TCJA without a plan to – at a minimum – offset the costs of extension, but ideally the plan would raise revenues relative to current law and help put the nation’s debt on a better trajectory,” the group said in a statement.
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