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 9
HSI Identified More Than 185,000 Administrative Subpoenas Potentially Responsive to EFF's FOIA Request, Court Filing Sho
2026 · November 9Ohio Capital Journal: Voters in All 18 Ohio Communities With Data Center Measures Chose to Curb or Ban Them; Piqua Recal
2025 · November 9Trump Promises $2,000 'Tariff Dividend' Payments Despite Insufficient Revenue and Treasury Secretary Skepticism
2023 · November 9Senate Judiciary Subpoenas Harlan Crow Over Thomas Gifts After Resistance
2021 · November 9Office of Special Counsel Report Documents Hatch Act Violations by 13 Senior Trump Officials, Finding "Willful Disregard
2016 · November 9Private Prison Stocks Surge After Trump Election Victory, CoreCivic Up 43% and GEO Group Up 21% in Single Day
Recent additions to the record
HSI Identified More Than 185,000 Administrative Subpoenas Potentially Responsive to EFF's FOIA Request, Court Filing Shows; WIRED Reported It as Subpoenas Sent
Ohio Capital Journal: Voters in All 18 Ohio Communities With Data Center Measures Chose to Curb or Ban Them; Piqua Recalls Commissioners Who Approved a Meta Data Center
November 8, 2026AP: Staff of the Commerce Department's AI Safety Center Were Asked to Report Informally to the White House; the Center Has No Permanent Leader and Has Stopped Publishing Research
November 7, 2026Trump Orders DOJ to Investigate Democrats Who Pledged Oversight; Blanche Will Not Rule Out Prosecuting Lawmakers
Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger Opens Investigation After a Seminole County Memory Card Left Out of the Count Flips the House District 154 Lead
November 6, 2026Judge Charlotte Sweeney Orders ICE's Field Office Director to Court Over Re-Arrests of Colorado Detainees Federal Judges Ordered Released
November 6, 2026Judge Lewis Kaplan Orders New York City to Give ICE the Names and Birthdates of Residents of the Bruckner Boulevard Shelter, Enforcing an ICE Subpoena
November 6, 2026New Jersey Tells Court DHS Has Decided to Pursue Roxbury Warehouse Detention Center After Reported $31.8 Million SK2 Conversion Order
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.