About
Purpose, posture, colophon
Purpose
This site is a public argument about discursive closure: a claim is closed when an adverse check produces not revision but the reclassification of the checker. Its flagship case examines Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. The site is not a neutral archive; it makes factual and interpretive judgments, sources them, and separates them from one another.
It is also a set of names. The moves it catalogs have older ones — begging the question, poisoning the well, No true Scotsman — and naming a manipulation technique measurably improves resistance to it: McGuire showed it in 1961, and Roozenbeek and colleagues in 2022, with five short videos and seven preregistered studies. It is written for people who argue, teach, moderate, report, or vote, and who want a test for self-sealing claims that still works when it is turned on their own side. No prior training in rhetoric or philosophy of language is assumed; the glossary carries the terms of art.
Authorship posture
The work may be published pseudonymously. The Method page exists so that the work is checkable independent of authorship: verifiability, not authority, carries the credibility. The dataset can be deposited under an organizational identity, so citation does not force de-anonymization.
LLM assistance and its limits
A language model materially assisted the July 2026 clarity revision of this site. That is a disclosure, not a credential. Models can mirror the conclusion requested by a user, accept a false premise, invent a citation, and make a weak inference sound finished. Model output is therefore treated as an untrusted draft: factual claims must lead to inspectable records, quotations are checked in context, inferences are labeled, and unfinished tests remain unfinished in the copy.
The risk is demonstrated—and the model’s own overstatements in an earlier draft are documented—on the AI mirror page, which measures the visible behavior of accepting and elaborating an unsupported premise.
Corrections policy
Material corrections — a wrong date, figure, quotation, or claim — are listed separately from ordinary edits on the changelog, and every revision remains inspectable in Git history; the source state before the July 2026 clarity revision is preserved by a named tag. There is no public intake channel yet: no published email address, form, or hosted repository. The evidence expected from a useful challenge is described on the Method page.
License
Text under CC BY-NC-ND, graphics under CC BY-NC with attribution, and data under CC BY 4.0. License files accompany the full release.
Colophon
Built with Astro; static output; no server, no database, no accounts. Typography: Libre Franklin (display and labels), Newsreader (body text), IBM Plex Mono (provenance lines and the codebook), all self-hosted, so a page load makes no third-party request. No analytics, no trackers, no cookies; the only state kept on your device is the trainer and mapping worksheet progress, stored locally and never transmitted. No photographs of any politician appear on this site, and no audio of the subject’s voice — prosody carries the affect the rule exists to exclude; where sound would aid analysis, a neutral narrated reading is used, with the primary video one click away. Dossiers are print-styled to read as clean two-page briefs for the seminar table.