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 · October 10
Analysis Finds 40+ Trump Administration Appointees With Fossil Fuel Industry Ties
2025 · October 10Musk's Boring Company Accused of 800 Environmental Violations in Las Vegas
2025 · October 10DHS Awards Secretive $915 Million 'Self-Deportation' Contract to Connected Firm
2025 · October 10DOJ-Cited Report on Soros Shows No Evidence of Terrorism Funding
2025 · October 10Dominion Voting Systems Sold to Former Republican Election Director
2025 · October 10Princeton President Eisgruber Calls Trump Administration's "Compact for Academic Excellence" a "Dangerous Step in the Wr
Recent additions to the record
Judge Sooknanan Vacates DOJ's Voter List Maintenance Policy in Common Cause v. DOJ: Vacatur Only, With No Order on Data Already Transferred
Democracy Forward Publishes ICE's 166-Page FOIA Production of HSI Voter-Fraud Reports, With a Minnesota Report Listing Whipple Shield
ProPublica Tallies 506 U.S. Citizens Detained by Immigration Agents, Including at Least 70 Children and Teens
DOJ Announces Charges Involving 16 Aliens for Election Crimes
Mother Jones Reports ICE Separated Children From Parents in the Interior and Referred Them to ORR as Unaccompanied; Interior Referrals and Stays Rose
Draft Agreement Calls Alexandria 528-Bed Family Facility ICE Detention While Its Pamphlet Says Non-Detained
Nine Somali Men, Three of Them Minnesotans, Deported From Guantanamo to Somalia
Polling-Place FOIA Suit Winds Down: DHS Withholds a 12-Page Record in Full, ICE Sends Its Final Response, and the DNC Will Not Challenge the Searches
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.