How could the great American newspaper, whose standards for excellence are known around the world, have reported the very opposite of what we now consider to be an unassailable fact, an idea fundamental to our understanding of the war—that Germany invaded Poland as the opening salvo of Hitler’s scheme to conquer Europe?

Since the 1960s, trust in the institutions of modernity has sunk, and the second decade of the 21st century saw the rise of populist movements that blatantly repudiate the ideals of the Enlightenment.1 They are tribalist rather than cosmopolitan, authoritarian rather than democratic, contemptuous of experts rather than respectful of knowledge, and

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