Democracy doesn’t fall.
It cascades.
4288 verified events. 7,682 named actors. Court records, government filings, investigative reporting — sourced and indexed from 1142 to today.
Which capture lane was dominant when?
Each year normalized to 100% — the bands show which mechanisms of institutional capture were most prominent across 56 years of record. Hover a band to isolate it. Click any year to enter that year.
On this day · July 12
GENIUS Act's July 18 Deadline Looms: Banks Poised to Enter Stablecoin Market as Trump's WLFI Conflict Intensifies
2025 · July 12Bondi Fires 20 Justice Department Employees Tied to Trump Prosecutions
2025 · July 12Trump Calls Own Supporters "Weaklings" and "Selfish People" After Demanding Epstein File Transparency
2025 · July 12Trump Organization Launches Luxury Tower Project in Romania
2024 · July 12Georgia State Election Board Passes Illegal Rules to Disrupt 2024 Election
2018 · July 12Tech Workers Coalition: Establishing Digital Resistance Infrastructure
Recent additions to the record
GENIUS Act's July 18 Deadline Looms: Banks Poised to Enter Stablecoin Market as Trump's WLFI Conflict Intensifies
OSINT Investigation Documents ICE Using Vehicle-Containment Tactics Designed for Violent Felons in Routine Civil Stops
Federal Judge Orders Washington State Health Inspectors Into Tacoma GEO Group ICE Facility
Nevada Federal Judge Rules ICE Is 'Rebelling' Against Court Order, Forces Release of 17 Detainees
Bipartisan Congress Investigates FBI Director Kash Patel Over Jet Junkets, BMW Fleet, and Undisclosed Stock
Fed Chair Warsh Appoints a16z's Marc Andreessen to Co-Lead AI Productivity Task Force
Trump Fires Top Election Assistance Commission Staff as SAVE Act 'Backdoor' Implementation Advances
US Government's Pre-Release Authority Over Frontier AI Becomes Operational; OpenAI's Equity-Stake Proposal Advances in Parallel
Curated timelines
Hand-picked swimlane views — pick a thread and read the cascade as it built. Each is a story you can read in five minutes and share as a URL.
Eleven named figures, one think tank, and a transition team blueprint that became governance in real time.
From Reagan-era founding through the six-three majority — the named architects and the justices they …
The Roberts Court ruling on January 21, 2010 — and the cascade of dark money, super PACs, and constitutional …
Two corporations, one agency, and a quarter-century of building the infrastructure that 2025 weaponized.
Both terms on one chart. The first term was chaotic, the second is operational. The difference is the …
Jeffrey Epstein's operation depended on institutional cooperation — from a U.S. Attorney's secret …
Built to be used
Compose, share, cite.
Pick actors. Set a year range. Filter by lane. The chart re-renders live; the URL is the citation. Every event has stable IDs and a JSON endpoint.
For journalistsPatterns, not anecdotes.
Twelve capture lanes show coordination across decades. Actor pages plot every event on a swimlane. Source tiers tell you what is court-record solid.
For citizensRead it as history.
Walk decade by decade. Every event has plain-language context: what happened, why it matters, where it fits in the cascade.
The most-documented actors
The patterns become unmistakable when you put them in order.
This timeline is the data layer for an ongoing investigation. The reporting traces how each captured institution enables the next.