The Battle for History: Herodotus, Truth, and the Rise of Authoritarianism
In this new essay I follow Herodotus—the world’s first fact-checker—into the twenty-first-century war over memory. Beginning with his insistence on weighing every side of a story , I trace how today’s strongmen —from Xi’s 2024 Patriotic Education Law to Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order —use the same ancient playbook: rewrite the…