How we grade.

When you see a claim graded on this site — the News Desk, the Project 2025 Wing, Spot the Lie — it's marked on the scales from Sean's sister project, declassifiedbysean.com. One principle underneath all of them: claims are weighed against primary sources, and what the record shows is kept strictly separate from what opinion infers.

Three readings travel together — what the claim is (the Verdict), how good the evidence is (the Bogost scale), and how dangerous it is (the Benkler calibration). A claim can be FALSE but harmless, or TRUE but built on weak evidence — keeping the three apart is the whole point.

1 · The Verdict — what is the claim?

(On the Project 2025 Wing you'll also see PENDING — an OHS add for "proposed, but not yet enacted / still in the courts": too early to know, said honestly.)

2 · The Bogost Citation Scale — how good is the evidence?

Named for game scholar Ian Bogost: a tiered evidence-quality rating. The better the source, the more it counts.

3 · The Benkler Calibration — how dangerous is the claim?

Named for Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law), whose research on network propaganda showed that a claim's danger is a function of structural conditions, not just its truth value. A composite score from 0 to 4, where 4 = CRITICAL — maximum institutional harm. It's why a lie that travels far and damages trust can rate more dangerous than a bigger lie nobody repeats.

The principle under all three

Sean calls it the “Bone-Honest” standard, borrowed from pro se federal litigation: assess against primary sources, draw a hard line between what the documented record shows and what opinion or inference suggests, and never overreach into unsupported claims. It's the same floor the whole house runs on — the record is the arbiter, and no lying.