The most effective distortions contain no lies. When someone invents a fact, you can disprove it — but when someone assembles true facts into a false shape, there's nothing to disprove. Every claim survives verification, and the conclusion still isn't true. Drawn from two decades in the rooms where narratives get built, this field note breaks down four mechanisms — timeline splicing, hindsight as evidence, drift within tolerance, and manufactured confirmation—and how to spot