Glossary of Power
The machinery vocabulary — the techniques of institutional decay, named by the people who use them, defined in plain English, and documented in the Kronology, our source-backed chronology of events. Every term below links to the evidence.
Regulatory Capture
When the industries a regulator is supposed to police effectively take over the regulator itself — through appointments, lobbying, funding dependency, or revolving doors — so the rules get written by the regulated, for the regulated. The agency keeps its name and seal while serving the opposite mission.
Institutional Capture
The systematic placement of loyalists across a government's institutions — inspectors general, prosecutors, election boards, courts — so that every check on power answers to the power it is supposed to check. Capture is not one appointment; it is the pattern of them.
Flood the Zone
A propaganda strategy named by Steve Bannon: produce so much noise, so many outrages, so many norm violations that institutions, media, and the public cannot process them all. Individual fact-checks drown; the sheer volume makes truth itself feel unknowable.
Narrative Laundering
How an unverified or false claim travels from fringe outlet to mainstream headline through a chain of citations: a blog cites a tweet, a "report" cites the blog, a cable segment cites the report, and the origin is laundered away. The claim arrives with the sparkle of having been "reported."
Amnesia Loop
The burying of public scandals by rapid-fire news-cycle pivots: each outrage occupies the news for days, then is displaced by the next, and the previous one is never resolved — only forgotten. The strategy makes the record itself the first casualty.
Election Subversion
The full machinery of overturning or tilting elections short of winning them: fake electors, pressure on officials to "find" votes, litigation designed to run out the clock, voter-roll purges, and rules changed after the votes are cast. Documented event by event, it stops being a theory.
Voter Suppression
Legal and extralegal measures whose purpose or effect is reducing who can register and vote — purges, documentation burdens, closures, and database dragnets that catch eligible citizens in nets built for a different story.
Democratic Backsliding
The gradual, mostly legal erosion of democratic institutions — elected leaders using the system's own tools to weaken its checks, term by term, appointment by appointment. Political scientists mark it by events, not announcements: each one is a data point.
The Big Lie
A falsehood so large and repeated so relentlessly that its scale becomes its credibility: the 2020 election fraud narrative, maintained despite 60+ legal losses and the absence of evidence, used to justify new power over future elections. The lie lost in court and won in legislation.
Firehose of Falsehood
A propaganda technique identified in Russian doctrine: many channels, rapid-fire, repetitive, and shamelessly inconsistent — because the goal is not to persuade but to exhaust and disorient, until audiences give up on distinguishing true from false.