I first encountered Muravchik’s take on reality when I read his article about John Demjanjuk, in which he insisted that JD “might” have been Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka after all and that ultimately “we may never know”.

Even though by then it had already been established that Ivan the Terrible was Ivan Marchenko and that it wasn’t some alias but a very concrete human being with a different biography, with a family he had left behind and with a daughter that was still alive in the 1990s, while Demjanjuk is listed with his real name in all the German documents (putting him in Sobibor and Flossenbrg, never in Treblinka), which excluded the use of any alias.

So reality denial is nothing new for Muravchik.