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 4
Axon acquires Carbyne for $625 million, consolidating Israeli 911 surveillance tech with US police body camera giant
2025 · November 4DOJ Escalates Investigation of 66-Year-Old Activist for Distributing Stephen Miller Protest Fliers
2025 · November 4California Special Election on Redistricting to Counter Texas GOP Gerrymandering
2025 · November 4DHS Releases Mobile Facial Recognition App for Local Police to Identify Immigration Status
2025 · November 4FBI Agents Association Issues Unprecedented Rebuke: Patel "Disregarded the Law" in Campaign of Retribution
2025 · November 4Memphis Residents Report Widespread Racial Profiling by Trump's Federal Police Task Force
Recent additions to the record
CBS News Projects Democrats Will Retake the House Majority
Chicago Polling Places Run Out of Paper Ballots Across the City; Board of Elections Investigates Split Precincts
November 3, 2026Florida PSC Rejects Duke Energy Florida's Data Center Tariff 5-0 as Not Complying With the State's Large-Load Cost Law
Fulton County Asks Georgia to Let It Rescan Just Over 1,000 Early Voting Ballots After Two Scanner Problems
ICE Posts an Election Day Warning to Voters: "If You Vote Illegally, We Will Find You"
Michigan Officials Contact DOJ After Reports Its Election Monitors Questioned Poll Workers in Dearborn and Flint
New Haven Ward Officials Say a DOJ Monitor, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Approached Voters Outside a Polling Place
North Carolina Extends Voting Hours at Precincts in Several Counties After Stoppages
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.