Exposing propaganda, wealth inequality, and political corruption — documented, fact-checked, and traced to the record. No corporate ownership. No advertisers.
How concentrated wealth rewrote the rules — and who pays for it. 25
An autopsy in nine wounds: the Powell Memo, the trade deals, the bank deregulation, the airwaves, the dumbing down, the lost rights, the courts, the safety net, and the wars. Every law named, every signature recorded — Republican and Democrat.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassCongress's own nonpartisan scorekeeper ran the numbers. The poorest tenth of households lose about $1,200 a year. The richest tenth gain about $13,600. The CBO tables, the Arkansas test of work requirements, and how to check it yourself.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassTwo banks, one town. Bailey's or Potter's? How America picked the wrong one — Friedman, the Powell Memo, a 290-to-1 pay ratio — and how to tell which runs yours.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassEconomic collapses don't just happen. Documented patterns showing how financial crises are created, who benefits, and who pays the bill every time.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassThe person running the Pentagon decides whether your kid deploys prepared. Five résumés checked against five jobs — every claim linked to an official record.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassStepped-up basis, carried interest, opportunity zones — the favors are written into the Internal Revenue Code, and both parties signed off. Statute by statute, with the section numbers linked so you can read the law yourself.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassIt didn't evaporate. It moved. Wages suppressed, pensions looted, taxes shifted, healthcare costs transferred — five documented channels through which working people's money was legally redirected upward over 50 years. Your middle class life was taken. Not by accident. By design.
Read the investigation → Power & Class4 in 10 Americans can't cover a $400 emergency. Pensions earned over decades were legally taken. The Wall Street Journal investigation, the PBS Frontline documentary, and Federal Reserve data document exactly what was taken — and how Reagan-era deregulation made it possible.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassThe Koch network pledged $889 million for a single election cycle. ALEC writes legislation in all 50 states. The Federalist Society built the Supreme Court. Most Americans have never heard of any of them. Here's the 50-year documented paper trail.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassFor 50 years, a network built by Charles and David Koch has quietly rewritten the rules of American democracy — blocking wage increases, busting unions, and pushing to rewrite the Constitution itself. The 50-year documented paper trail, in primary sources.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassOne billionaire's name you know by heart. The other's network wrote the laws that shrank your paycheck. The receipts, side by side.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassSeventeen documented questions that reveal the same Wall Street donors fund both parties, the same trade deals passed with bipartisan votes, and the same Supreme Court opened the floodgates to dark money. The partisan divide is real. The cause isn't what they're telling you.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassBillionaires are counting on your confusion. East German state socialism and American regulated capitalism are not the same thing. Social Security is not the Berlin Wall. Medicare is not the Stasi. When a billionaire calls your fire department "socialism," he's describing his tax bill.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassFrom WWI to Iraq, the same families profit every time. Smedley Butler called it in 1935. The receipts have only grown since. Primary sources only.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassHe co-founded the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and the Moral Majority. Then he told 15,000 preachers on tape: "Our leverage in elections goes up as the voting populace goes down." His machine is still running.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassInvestigative journalists Craig Unger and Scott Carney cross-reference the Epstein Files with the Paradise Papers — revealing a hidden financial world bigger than the entire U.S. economy, with familiar names at its center.
Read the investigation → Power & Class40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency. 55 Fortune 500 companies paid $0 in federal income tax. This is not an accident — it's the documented architecture of a decades-long influence operation. Every receipt is public record.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassA documented timeline from the original Gilded Age to today — the laws passed, the rights stripped, the $50 trillion transferred upward, and the plan written in 1971 that made it all possible. Every claim sourced. Every law named.
Read the investigation → Power & Class13.4 million leaked documents show how the ultra-wealthy — including convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — used offshore shell companies and elite banks to legally avoid the taxes ordinary people can't. It's not that they broke the rules — they wrote them. That's the scandal.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassHow the financial system that bailed out Wall Street in 2008 was designed — and who it was designed to serve.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassA documented look at the expansion of detention capacity, private prison contracts, and the legal frameworks enabling large-scale civil detention.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassThe patterns of democratic backsliding are not new. From Weimar Germany to Pinochet's Chile, the playbook has been used before.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassThis was not spontaneous. It was engineered. Lewis Powell's 1971 memo laid out the blueprint explicitly — and the network built exactly what it described, piece by piece, over five decades. The 50-year documented timeline.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassEvery entry is a date, a decision, and a document. From the 1933 Business Plot to the pension raids to Citizens United — sourced to the record. No theories. Just what happened, and when.
Read the investigation → Power & ClassCarlin said it on stage. Cronkite confirmed it on camera. Two Bayer scandals, forty years apart, show the machine in action — capital, capture, and cover. $1.9 billion in dark money in one election. The foundational investigation.
Read the investigation →Documented cases, traced to primary sources. 45
Farmers keep under 6 cents of your food dollar. Four packers kill 85% of fed cattle. Beef origin labels were erased in a backroom deal. And when Rep. Massie forced votes on boat-strike killings and the Epstein files, the House went home. A sourced case file.
Read the investigation → Investigation · NewWashington eased Russian diesel sanctions to lower pump prices before the midterms, and told Ukraine to find a new leader. Germany, Canada and the EU held the line. A sourced ledger of what America got, what it paid, and what Russia gained.
Read the investigation → InvestigationThe White House looked at suspending habeas corpus, your right to have a judge check why you're being held. What that right is, why it matters even to citizens, and the primary sources.
Read the investigation → InvestigationFact-checked investigation into Microsoft's data collection practices, Windows Recall, TPM chips, telemetry, and what we can do about it. Primary sources only.
Read the investigation → InvestigationThousands of AI cameras log where your car goes and store it in a searchable database police can query without a warrant. In June 2026 the Supreme Court ruled that tracking your movements is a search. Here is what you can do.
Read the investigation → InvestigationA March 2025 executive order told federal agencies to merge everything they know about you into one accessible file. The legal cover was public. The mechanics were not.
Read the investigation → InvestigationFifteen primary documents, 1951 to 2026 — the State Department's own history of the 1953 coup, NSDD 114, the CIA's chemical-weapons files, two ICJ rulings. Each entry states what the document establishes and what it does not, with a counter-ledger of equal weight.
Read the investigation → InvestigationThe President says communities that question data centers will end up “backwards and poor.” The documented money trail — SEC filings, White House orders, and Hut 8’s $9.8 billion AI lease — tells a more complicated story, and part of it runs through his own family.
Read the investigation → InvestigationA Civil War law about mule contractors is now a five-year felony for talking to a federal agent — no oath, no recording, no lawyer, and no underlying crime required. A twelve-name docket across both parties, from Poindexter to Comey, and what to actually do if agents come to your door.
Read the investigation → InvestigationI shipped my laptop to HP for repair. It came back missing a 4TB drive. HP said it was never there. The machine’s own operating system says otherwise — and HP won’t show the records it used to deny the claim.
Read the investigation → InvestigationMedicaid is the main payer for 63% of nursing home residents. The 2025 budget law freezes the provider taxes states use to fund it, pauses the staffing rule until 2034, and leaves home care first in line for cuts. What CBO’s own numbers show.
Read the investigation → InvestigationA president sued agencies he commands. His former defense lawyer signed away the family’s tax liability the next day. On July 13, 2026, a federal judge voided it all. The paper trail, documented.
Read the investigation → InvestigationTen charges, sorted by what was actually proven. One conviction, one civil finding, three cases that ended without a verdict — and none of the three ended on the evidence. Every disposition sourced to the court record.
Read the investigation → InvestigationNot Medicare. Not one day. Roughly $1 trillion out of Medicaid over ten years, with work requirements and six-month eligibility checks starting January 1, 2027. The dated timeline, who is exempt, where nursing homes and rural hospitals actually get hit — and what the same administration found $40 billion for.
Read the investigation → InvestigationThey said it was about the unborn. After Dobbs, the same states that banned abortion funded the campaign against it — while refusing Medicaid expansion, letting the Child Tax Credit expire, and leaving Texas’s foster care system under federal court order. Every figure sourced to a state budget, a roll-call vote, or a court record.
Read the investigation → InvestigationDemocracy in Germany didn't end with tanks in the street. It ended with a vote: 444–94, following legal procedure — 23 days after a fire. The full text, the vote record, and the renewal history of a four-year law that ran twelve years.
Read the investigation → Investigation“Republicans freed the slaves.” True. Also one of the most effective pieces of historical misdirection in modern American politics. The vote records, the platform texts, and the realignment — traced from 1854 to today.
Read the investigation → InvestigationSix billionaires now control most of what America sees, reads, and hears. The documented record of how CBS killed a finished 60 Minutes story, how Paramount paid Trump $16 million to get a merger approved, and how the news became a business negotiation with the White House.
Read the investigation → InvestigationHe posted "nobody died" about dismantling USAID. The Lancet estimates 762,000 dead including 500,000 children. Workers were killed at his factories. The agency that certifies your respirator and tracks black lung was gutted. This is what the primary sources actually show.
Read the investigation → InvestigationSmedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history, blew the whistle on a plan by American industrialists to overthrow FDR. It's in the congressional record.
Read the investigation → InvestigationWhat the federal government's own records, court filings, and inspector general reports show about detention conditions and due process violations.
Read the investigation → InvestigationUndisclosed gifts, luxury travel, and manufactured nominees — how the highest court in the land lost its independence.
Read the investigation → InvestigationOwnership concentration, advertiser pressure, access journalism — the mechanisms by which powerful interests shape what you read, watch, and believe.
Read the investigation → InvestigationThe First Amendment protects you from government censorship. It says nothing about billionaires buying the platforms where speech happens.
Read the investigation → InvestigationSetting aside conspiracy theories — a look at what the government's own declassified documents confirm about the assassination and its investigation.
Read the investigation → InvestigationA documented look at how anti-immigrant rhetoric is constructed, amplified, and used to distract from economic policy failures.
Read the investigation → InvestigationThe Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 to sell flags. "Under God" was added in 1954. Trickle-down economics was named by a comedian. Documented origins of four narratives presented as timeless American tradition.
Read the investigation → InvestigationNot rumors, not spin — the published blueprint itself, what it proposes, who wrote it, and who funds them. Read what's actually in the document and verify every claim against the primary source.
Read the investigation → InvestigationFour convictions for non-citizen voting. 150 million ballots cast. That's one case for every 37.5 million votes — 0.00000267%. Public records and state attorney general reports show the facts don't support the fear. Don't let rare crimes become excuses for voter suppression.
Read the investigation → InvestigationComparing it to the 1933 Enabling Act does not mean "America is Nazi Germany." It means watching for familiar authoritarian patterns: crisis language, concentrated power, weakened checks, scapegoated groups, and "rescue" laws that gut the guardrails. The documented parallels, side by side.
Read the investigation → InvestigationA sitting Supreme Court Justice wrote down a fifty-year strategic plan in 1971. It was leaked, published, and archived at a major university — hiding in plain sight for over five decades. It is the reason the country you live in does not look like the country your grandparents built.
Read the investigation → InvestigationYou've seen the claim. Here's the record: it wasn't a gift, wasn't foreign aid, and wasn't taxpayer money. It was Iran's own money — paid to the U.S. in the 1970s for military equipment never delivered, frozen after the revolution, and litigated for decades. The documented history.
Read the investigation → InvestigationAs voting rights attorney Marc Elias explains: this is not a voter protection bill — it is a voter suppression bill, calculated to disenfranchise the people most likely to vote against its authors. What's actually in the text, documented.
Read the investigation → InvestigationNobody robs a gas station on the way to a job they love. People with a paycheck, a mortgage, and a future almost never gamble it on a felony — not because they're better people, but because the math doesn't work. What a century of criminology says about crime, opportunity, and what actually makes communities safe.
Read the investigation → InvestigationA viral meme claims the SPLC "manufactures hate." The true part: a real 2026 federal indictment over paid informants inside extremist groups. The false part: what the meme claims it proves. Worth knowing the difference before you share it.
Read the investigation → InvestigationAfter WWII, U.S. taxpayer money compensated the corporations that had armed Hitler's war machine — at a ratio of 566-to-1 against the fines they paid in. Not opinion: federal court records, Senate hearings, and U.S. Army field reports. Senator Harry Truman saw the evidence himself.
Read the investigation → InvestigationTikTok was banned on national security grounds — backed by Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court. Then it was un-banned. Who was invested, who got paid, and why the reversal looks like pay-to-play hiding in plain sight. Documented.
Read the investigation → InvestigationEvery credible data source — libertarian to academic — reaches the same conclusion: immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. The "migrant crime wave" is one of the most thoroughly debunked claims in social science. So why is it the centerpiece? Because the crisis is the point.
Read the investigation → InvestigationIn 1971 a corporate lawyer wrote a 34-page memo that became the blueprint for a half-century billionaire takeover. Every think tank, every tax cut, every court — documented with federal records.
Read the investigation → InvestigationSurveillance built directly into Windows — turned on by default, buried in settings, never disclosed. Documented privacy violations and free hardening tools to take back control.
Read the investigation → InvestigationFive documented historical patterns compared to current American events. Every claim sourced to RAND, USHMM, ACLU, and Brennan Center. Judge for yourself.
Read the investigation → InvestigationDOGE is building a centralized database combining your IRS records, Social Security data, medical history, and more. 330M+ Americans at risk. Primary sources documented.
Read the investigation → InvestigationThey don't need to rig voting machines. They need to make sure you never get to vote. 21.3M voters purged, 1,688 polling places closed, 94 restrictive laws passed. Documented.
Read the investigation → InvestigationA fired DOJ insider, a $300,000-a-month fixer, mergers waved through over staff objections, and pardons that erased $1.3 billion owed to fraud victims. 33 states refused the deal, finished the trial alone — and won on every count. The receipts are in federal court dockets.
Read the investigation → InvestigationA 19-year-old college freshman packaged as a serious political analyst. A Fox News host who privately texted he didn't believe what he was broadcasting. Two forensic case studies in how influence operations build credibility from nothing.
Read the investigation →How the frame gets set before you ever hear the facts. 21
Russian bot farms are documented in federal court: fake Americans, counterfeit newspapers, $10 million in hidden money. How many minds they changed is another question. What's proven, what isn't, and how to spot the signs.
Read the investigation → PropagandaProductivity up 90% since 1979, typical pay up 33%. Perot's 1993 NAFTA warnings graded against what happened, the House vote by party, and why smart people fall for it. Every claim tiered by evidence.
Read the investigation → Media LiteracyOne angry sentence, five verdicts. Where American empathy actually went, and the one word I couldn't prove.
Read the investigation → PropagandaAll of this information was publicly available. They counted on you not looking it up.
Read the investigation → PropagandaOn air they call it news. In court they call it hyperbole no reasonable viewer would believe. The Supreme Court, the FCC record, and $787.5 million in receipts — court records only.
Read the investigation → PropagandaEnvy rarely feels like envy from the inside. Facial sensors, lottery-winner neighbors, and a salary study show how it hides in the body, in moral language, and in spending — and how to check yourself before blaming anyone else.
Read the investigation → Propaganda & FearNo confirmed weapon. 60% uranium is not weapons-grade. The real proliferation risk arrived after the bombs fell — so who benefits from keeping us afraid? Butler warned us in 1935. Orwell warned us in 1949.
Read the investigation → PropagandaThe techniques used to manipulate public opinion have a long history. Learn to recognize them — repetition, fear, scapegoating, manufactured consent.
Read the investigation → PropagandaEdward Bernays called it "the engineering of consent." A documented history of how mass persuasion techniques were developed and deployed.
Read the investigation → PropagandaPlatform algorithms, engagement optimization, and the business model that profits from outrage — how social media became a propaganda delivery system.
Read the investigation → PropagandaThe psychology of in-group/out-group thinking — and how political operatives and algorithms exploit it to keep working people divided.
Read the investigation → PropagandaConfirmation bias, the availability heuristic, in-group favoritism — the documented cognitive shortcuts that propagandists exploit by design.
Read the investigation → PropagandaYou didn't decide bacon and eggs was breakfast. A PR firm did. Edward Bernays wrote the playbook for engineering consent in 1928 — and his own words reveal his contempt for ordinary people. Meet the men responsible for your likes and dislikes, from Bernays to Frank Luntz. Documented, primary sources.
Read the investigation → PropagandaAmericans ate light breakfasts until a pork company hired Edward Bernays. He got 5,000 doctors to endorse a heavier breakfast, sent it to newspapers as medical news — and bacon and eggs became the American default. How your preferences get manufactured, with the videos to prove it.
Read the investigation → PropagandaDefunded schools, gutted civics, and a media diet engineered for outrage instead of understanding. An uninformed public isn't a side effect of the system — for the people who own it, it's the product. The documented record.
Read the investigation → PropagandaDr. Wilson Bryan Key spent two decades documenting how advertisers embed stimuli your conscious mind never registers — and your subconscious does. The annotated evidence, image by image, and why the practice remains legal.
Read the investigation → PropagandaAmerica's biggest threat isn't ignorance — it's willful ignorance. The difference between not knowing and refusing to see, why educated people fall for it too, and what it costs all of us when they do.
Read the investigation → PropagandaSix documented manipulation techniques — repetition, rigged questions, fear framing, issue blending, fake constitutionality, and loyalty tests — dissected with a real broadcast example.
Read the investigation → PropagandaAn opinion without research isn't analysis — it's just noise with confidence. The Jersey Test, the three questions that don't care about your team, and a self-audit for telling critical thinking from tribal cheering.
Read the investigation → PropagandaA 2002 Usenet post. A leaked internal Facebook report. A documented industry that gets paid every time you take the bait — traced from the term's origin to a network reaching 140 million Americans a month.
Read the investigation → Fact-CheckViral videos and posts get checked against the actual studies they cite — what holds up, what's overstated, and where an accurate study gets stitched onto a claim it never made. Case 001: the attention-economy video everyone's sharing.
Read the investigation →Learn the techniques. Check the sources yourself. 11
Sixteen Free Tools I Use Every Day on Windows 11 — what each does, how I use it, and the one thing that trips people up. Plus the rules for downloading software without getting burned. No bundled installers, no affiliate links.
See the tools → Tools & EducationOne $1,500 check saved a working man $14,091 on his mortgage. Nobody taught him that in school. Eight lessons they left out of your education — compound interest, tax brackets, your rights at work — and who profits from the gap.
Read the story → My Take · PersonalFifty years of friendship, ended over $350. No documents to check this time — just what happened, told as gently as I can tell it.
Read the essay → Tools & EducationA guide to the most common manipulation tactics used against working people — and how to spot them before they work on you.
Read the investigation → Tools & EducationA practical guide to finding reliable information, evaluating sources, and building a media diet that serves you — not the algorithm.
Read the investigation → Tools & EducationCurated resources — books, documentaries, and investigative journalism — for going deeper on the issues covered across this site.
Read the investigation → Tools & EducationFrom David Cay Johnston to Jane Mayer, Greg Palast to Noam Chomsky — the books that provide the documented foundation for understanding power.
Read the investigation → Tools & EducationFive Zach Allen lessons that changed how I swing — embedded videos, key concepts, drill cheat sheets, and personal notes. The core unlock: it's not about holding lag, it's about how fast you release it.
Read the investigation → Tools & EducationThe same media-literacy method, aimed at a marketplace built on manufactured certainty. How to read your own launch-monitor numbers, catch the lies — including the ones the machine itself tells you — and buy the club your swing actually needs. Often for under $100.
Read the investigation → Tools & EducationThe truth doesn't have a marketing budget. The people selling lies do — think tanks, PACs, cable networks, algorithms. Who runs this site, why every claim is sourced, and why you shouldn't take anyone's word for anything — including mine.
Read the investigation → Tools & EducationThe journalists and outlets doing the investigative work corporate news won't — the sources search engines bury and algorithms hide. From Pulitzer winners to ad-free daily broadcasts. Bookmark it.
Read the investigation →