There is a deep human impulse to whittle reality down into familiar and self-flattering fairy tales.

We all gravitate toward information that validates our preconceptions and vindicates our in-groups. It is cognitively taxing to revise one’s model of the world. And it is emotionally uncomfortable to recognize fault in our allies or merit in our adversaries. So, we are all tempted to sand the jagged edges off events until they fit into ideologically convenient frames.

If this impulse is universal, however, liberals (such as myself) like to believe that we are less vulnerable to it. After all, we are the side that favors scientific inquiry over religious fundamentalism, universalism over ethnocentrism, and critical accounts of American history over jingoistic ones.

Conservatives, by contrast, often recoil at moral complexity. And their leadership is unbound by any sense of fealty to the truth. Or so the progressive historian Heather Cox Richardson suggested, in a recent Substack post.

In Richardson’s account, McCarthyism taught the American right the political utility of shameless lies. By crafting mendacious and simplistic “us” versus “them” narratives — and repeating them ceaselessly — conservatives found that they could “construct a fictional world,” which many voters would unknowingly come to inhabit. Liberals in the “reality-based community” — to use a phrase made famous by the George W. Bush administration — might feel compelled to align their claims with discernible facts. But the American right, feels no such obligation.

As an example of conservatives’ mendacity, Richardson cites the Trump administration’s attempt to pin Charlie Kirk’s assassination on the left. And not without reason: The White House’s brazenly dishonest propaganda about that tragedy does much to support Richardson’s portrait of the right.

And yet, shortly after decrying the GOP’s privileging of “narrative” over “facts,” Richardson wrote the following:

[I]n fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical. Rather than grappling with reality, right-wing figures are using Kirk’s murder to prop up their fictional world.

Richardson’s post in fact deftly illustrates the hazards of tribalistic thinking and epistemic immodesty, just not quite in the manner that it intended.

When Richardson published her column on September 13, there was no sound basis for asserting that Robinson was “not someone on the left,” much less that he was a far-right extremist who’d killed Kirk for being........

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