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 · November 1
All Saints Day: Auxiliary Bishop García-Maldonado's Formal Delegation Barred at Broadview Gate; 2,000+ Gather for Outdoo
2025 · November 1PJM December 2025 capacity auction hits record $333/MW-day; data centers account for 40% ($6.5B) of total $16.4B cost
2025 · November 1SNAP Benefits Halted After USDA Suspension of November Allotments
2025 · November 1United Kingdom Suspends Intelligence Sharing with US Over Caribbean Boat Strikes
2025 · November 1Pentagon Awards Record $620M Loan to Trump Jr.-Backed Vulcan Elements for Rare Earth Magnets
2022 · November 1Malafaia Publicly Urges Bolsonaro to Invoke Article 142 — Evangelical Adviser Advocates Armed Forces Intervention After
Recent additions to the record
Mississippi Free Press: Polling-Locator Errors Remain Before Election Day; Neshoba Clerk Says Address Can't Change
October 31, 2026Newsom Writes California's Chief Federal Judges About Search Warrants for Ballots
Walz's Minnesota Truth Council preliminary report: Metro Surge and PARRIS violated constitutional rights, 70+ children detained, an estimated $244 million in lost wages
October 30, 2026Chutkan Sets a Saturday TRO Hearing on DHS's Voter-Data Policy as the Government Tries to Tie the Case to Boasberg's
Civil rights groups sue Gwinnett County over more than 1,800 undelivered mail ballots
DHS Secretary orders Acronis products excluded from federal civilian procurement and removed from civilian IT systems under the supply-chain security act
October 30, 2026DOJ's Alaska Injunction Memo Relies on the Division's June 15 Finding Against the Second Sullivan; the Alaska Courts Had Reversed It and Said It Lacked Evidence
DOJ's Minnesota enforcement release: 13 defendants, nearly $83 million in intended losses, Medicaid and SNAP
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.