America recently lost a great social historian when New Yorker Fred Siegel died in May at age 78. Siegel was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His work, as the obituary in City Journal noted, “was central to the renewal of American cities beginning in the 1990s, especially New York, where he was a senior adviser to Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 mayoral campaign and later wrote speeches for the mayor.”
The great Christian theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand once observed that an incomplete truth can be worse than a lie. An incomplete truth can confuse the listener more than a lie and cause more damage. For example, it’s technically accurate to tell young people that sexual activity is a healthy biological activity that releases stress and anxiety, yet if you leave out the part where such activity can be terribly damaging to body and soul if not done within the moral codes that are a part of common sense and long religious wisdom, you send someone on a path of destruction.
All the President’s Men, the classic 1976 movie, looks very different today. The story about political corruption is the same, but in the political climate of 2023, all the players have switched sides. Rather than Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as famed journalistic heroes, it’s now the press who are the bad guys. They fell hard for the Russia collusion hoax, defending it even after it was destroyed by multiple analyses, including the recent Durham report.