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 3
Fulton County Asks Georgia to Let It Rescan Just Over 1,000 Early Voting Ballots After Two Scanner Problems
2025 · November 3Trump Administration Announces 2027 Medicaid Work Requirements Affecting Nearly 5 Million
2025 · November 3Trump Administration Announces Partial SNAP Benefits After Court Orders
2025 · November 3Trump Admits on 60 Minutes He Doesn't Know Changpeng Zhao, the Binance Founder He Pardoned
2021 · November 3US Commerce Department Adds Candiru and NSO Group to Entity List
2020 · November 3Facebook Rolls Back Election Safety Measures Immediately After 2020 Vote, Enabling "Stop the Steal" Misinformation
Recent additions to the record
Fulton County Asks Georgia to Let It Rescan Just Over 1,000 Early Voting Ballots After Two Scanner Problems
DOJ Asks the Supreme Court to Make California Set Aside About 20,000 Flagged Mail Ballots the Day Before the Election
Florida Flooding Prompts Governor's Executive Order 26-227 and Election Day Polling-Place Moves in Seven Counties
November 2, 2026GEO Announces ICE Deal Through the City of Big Spring, Texas, Activating a 2,329-Bed Complex
November 2, 2026Intercept Reviews More Than Two Dozen Incidents of ICE Using Vehicles Against Immigrants and Activists; 2025 CBP Directive Widens Discretion
NewsGuard Sting: 21 of 60 Political Influencers Showed Interest in an Undisclosed Paid TikTok Campaign Ad
NYC Mayor Mamdani Warns DHS and ICE to Stop Using City Parking Lots or Face a Lawsuit
Sen. Padilla and Rep. Costa Are Denied Entry to ICE's Golden State Annex on an Unannounced Oversight Visit
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.