Maxwell Lord manage to (temporarily, at least) ramp up his powers so much that he wiped out any memory of himself from every person on Earth...
But, given this:
But even if that mysterious energy explosion with Captain Atom somehow magically wiped out every record of Max (and only records of Max, and "fixed" those records so there were no Max-sized holes in the record, if you take my meaning)...even if that was so, there is still every physical back copy of every newspaper and magazine that ever mentioned Max, every gossip column, every unauthorized biography and National Enquirer expose, every piece of paper that Max ever signed while heading up JLI or Checkmate, etc...
In other words, if we're to believe this scenario, Max Lord is more powerful than Darkseid. After all, even with the Anti-Life Equation, Darkseid couldn't control the minds of every person on Earth, couldn't destroy of manipulate all of the data on Earth to that degree, couldn't impose such a total mind-frak. For the scenario to make any sense, Max Lord must be so ridiculously powerful, you wonder why the hell he's dicking around like this.
I'm just sayin'...