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 5
Blue Owl Announces OBDC/OBDC II Merger That Would Impose 20% NAV Haircut on Private Fund Investors to Solve Undisclosed
2025 · November 5FAA Reduces Air Traffic by 10% at Major Airports as Unpaid Controllers Face Staffing Crisis During 40-Day Shutdown
2025 · November 5Judge Gettleman Issues TRO Ordering Minimum Conditions at ICE's Broadview Facility (Moreno Gonzalez v. Noem)
2025 · November 5Government Shutdown Becomes Longest in U.S. History at Day 36
2025 · November 5Judge Scolds Comey Prosecutors for "Indict First, Investigate Second" Approach
2025 · November 5Zohran Mamdani Elected NYC Mayor: First Muslim, Youngest in Century
Recent additions to the record
Abdul El-Sayed Defeats Mike Rogers in Michigan Senate Race, Becoming the First Muslim Elected to the U.S. Senate
Arizona: SpaceX Hosts Cochise County Meeting on Proposed Six-Gigawatt Data Center Filed Under Tombstone Resources LLC
November 4, 2026Mississippi Secretary of State Says About 3,600 Absentee-by-Mail Ballots Remain Outstanding as Counties Have Until Nov. 13 to Certify
November 3, 2026AP Calls the Texas Senate Race for James Talarico Over Ken Paxton; Texas Democrats' Senate Drought Had Run Back to 1988
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, 2026Democrats Win Control of the Senate, CBS News Reports
Florida PSC Rejects Duke Energy Florida's Data Center Tariff 5-0 as Not Complying With the State's Large-Load Cost Law
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.