>historians don't just make up stuff to scare people - otherwise they'd have more fun and money being fiction writers like Stephen King Historians don't want t

>historians don't just make up stuff to scare people - otherwise they'd have more fun and money being fiction writers like Stephen King Historians don't want to scare people as a terminal goal. They want to scare people as a means to an end--promoting their ideology. Being Stephen King might scare more people, but it would fail to accomplish that end. And most of it isn't literally making stuff up, it's failing to mention some things and overemphasizing others, making things sound more or less certain than they really are, implying connections which may not be true, etc. It's like journalists--they can mislead without actually telling literal lies. Also, some of it is motivated reasoning, not lying. They honestly believe some things, but they honestly believe them because it's convenient for themselves.