One Researcher. One Year. 28 Investigations.
Mapping the mechanisms behind America's institutional collapse in 2025.
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Over the past twelve months, I’ve published twenty-eight investigative pieces, many of which sought to document how American democratic institutions have eroded in real time.
This wasn’t abstract or theoretical analysis. It was documentation of specific mechanisms: surveillance infrastructure designed into the commercial internet, ideological extremists placed in positions of power, institutional guardrails dismantled through executive order, law enforcement weaponized against political opposition, and courts systematically choosing not to constrain executive action.
You should understand what you’re actually funding. As an independent security researcher, I operate without institutional backing. I work across multiple domains, including those in which I have some formal training and professional experience, such as information security, open-source intelligence, financial crime analysis, and policy research—at times through the use of specialized tools and databases that require subscription costs. This website constitutes the output of literally just one person (me) expending thousands of hours annually to working on problems that consulting firms charge $150-250 per hour to analyze.
By the numbers: 28 stories. 2.3 per month. Each requiring approximately 20-30 hours of research and verification. The average reading time across articles is 8-12 minutes. If you’ve actually read this material, you’ve invested roughly 250-300 minutes in sustained analytical work. If you are a paid subscriber, your donation directly funds professional-grade security analysis. Thank you.
What I’ve noticed over the year: The work became demonstrably better; I continue to show improvement, year over year. My stories grew broader in scope as the year progressed and emerging patterns became clearer.
The following twenty-eight investigations published between January and December constitute one woman’s attempt to trace how American democratic institutions have eroded through multiple coordinated mechanisms since the second ill-fated inauguration of Donald J. Trump on January 20, 2025.
January
Explainer: How AdTech Doubles as an Intelligence Platform
Real-time bidding systems in digital advertising aren’t just commercial infrastructure. This story documented how the ad tech ecosystem generates detailed digital dossiers on billions of users through hundreds of billions of auctions daily.
This is infrastructure that serves dual purposes: Commercial profiling for marketing. Intelligence gathering for state actors. The investigation traced connections between advertising operators, political figures, and state security services, showing how companies like Brevo maintain networks linking American operatives to Russian infrastructure.
Why this matters: governments don’t need to build secret surveillance systems. The commercial internet already provides the infrastructure. They can just repurpose what already exists.
Constitutional Crypto: How Trump’s Solana Token Could Force a SCOTUS Showdown
The $TRUMP cryptocurrency launched days before inauguration, structured so that Trump-affiliated entities received automatic revenue sharing from trading. The analysis detailed how blockchain transparency creates advantages for prosecuting constitutional violations compared to traditional business structures. Foreign purchases of the token would create recorded, permanent evidence of foreign payments to Trump entities: effectively a public ledger of Emoluments Clause violations.
As of year’s end, the token has operated without legal intervention. Institutional reluctance to constrain the executive's financial activity is the status quo.
Hybrid Warfare Tactics During the Los Angeles Wildfires
Suspicious criminal activity during LA wildfires showed patterns consistent with hybrid warfare reconnaissance. Coordinated reconnaissance, impersonation of first responders, arson targeting critical infrastructure. Adversaries probing emergency response systems to identify vulnerabilities before actual conflict.
My story warned these operations provided intelligence about capabilities and weaknesses. Acts of sabotage through the use of covert agents, intermediaries, or “disposable individuals” have increased across Europe in line with a growing recognition that Russia is a primary aggressor of the same. Meanwhile, the United States remains unable or unwilling to connect the dots regarding growing numbers of suspicious incidents, including acts of mass violence or terror.
The GOP’s Quiet Draft Plans: How the 2025 NDAA Almost Transformed Military Registration
GOP proposals in the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would have transformed Selective Service from voluntary to automatic registration. The provision was ultimately removed from the final bill, but the proposal revealed intent. When a major party is willing to push legislation enabling large-scale military mobilization, they’re signaling strategic planning.
Even failed proposals matter because they reveal what leadership thinks is politically possible.
Explainer: How American Sports Teams Will ‘Sanewash’ Donald Trump
Sports organizations were going to participate in “sanewashing”—using sports legitimacy to cleanse political figures of authoritarian associations. The story predicted Trump would be integrated into sports despite documented threats to democratic norms, providing a cultural pathway for normalization.
This predicted something that seemed impossible in January but became normal by December: mainstream institutions treating authoritarianism as acceptable if it comes with sufficient social prestige (or protection).
February
The Ghosts of American Eugenics
The sad truth is that American eugenic theories directly inspired Nazi racial policies. In fact, American institutions funded research underlying the Holocaust. My story connected historical mechanisms covered by a noted World War II historian to contemporary policy proposals and warned that modern genetic science posed comparable risks.
Administration proposals have since moved from historical comparison into literal policy. Among many issues, there have been frightening rumblings about creating databases of autistic individuals and institutionalizing them in “camps”, ostensibly for their own good.
Trump’s Enabling Act of 2025
On February 18, Trump issued an executive order on independent regulatory agencies that structurally paralleled Nazi Germany’s 1933 Enabling Act. Both mechanisms used legal forms to concentrate unprecedented executive power. Both maintained constitutional appearance while fundamentally restructuring governance. The analysis warned that if courts upheld the order, it would establish precedent for progressively unconstrained executive authority.
The Supreme Court subsequently sharply curtailed federal judges’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions. The precedent was established: presidents could act, courts could nominally review, but injunctions would be limited.
Neoreactionary Forces Are Capturing U.S. Government Infrastructure
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, represented systematic capture of government infrastructure by ideologues explicitly hostile to democracy. Neoreactionaryism is anti-egalitarian, hierarchical, anti-democratic. The story explained how private actors with explicit anti-democratic philosophies were being granted control over sovereign functions through appointment rather than election.
Musk’s DOGE organization was eventually dissolved, but not before institutional guardrails were systematically dismantled, enabling what are surely some of the worst data breaches in the history of the nation, and scattering its personnel throughout the federal government.
Musk’s Private Guards Get Federal Powers: What History Tells Us This Means
Elon Musk’s private security forces were integrated with federal authority through the U.S. Marshals Service. Historical parallel: early Nazi Germany integrated Nazi Party paramilitaries into official police structures, a process that eventually transformed law enforcement into a partisan instrument. The story revealed something deceptively simple but historically crucial: the moment when public authority and private power become indistinguishable.
Precedent was established, normalized, integrated into standard operations. This proceeded without meaningful Congressional action or transparency, but not for lack of trying on the part of Democrats, who do not hold any majorities. There has been no accountability for these actions, including DOGE’s successful attempts to physically limit members of Congress from conducting oversight as their likely-illegal activities were in progress.
Trump’s Rapid Response Apparatus Trumps Democratic Discourse
The investigation used computational linguistics to analyze coordinated responses to one of my viral posts. 172 coordinated responses exhibited characteristics of automated or LLM-assisted generation: identical numerical references, parallel sentence structures, predictable clustering. The analysis identified four distinct author profiles, each playing specific roles. White House involvement through @RapidResponse47 was suspected.
The pattern scaled throughout the year. Coordinated influence operations have become the dominant form of political discourse, with algorithms at some major social media platforms amplifying rather than constraining these activities.
March
America’s Cyber Surrender
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered U.S. Cyber Command to cease offensive cyber operations against Russia. CISA was directed to de-emphasize Russian threats. Massive CISA layoffs, firing of election security specialists, removal of internal oversight mechanisms. Strategic alignment with Russia was encoded in cybersecurity policy.
The follow-up documented official denials alongside contradictory statements from unnamed sources, revealing how governmental secrecy enables unaccountable decision-making.
Cybersecurity disarmament is now undeniable. My warning about degraded defensive capacity proved conservative.
U.S. Treasury’s New Financial Surveillance Program Targets America’s Border Communities
Treasury’s Geographic Targeting Order lowered currency transaction reporting thresholds from $10,000 to $200 in thirty border ZIP codes. Anti-money laundering regulations function as pilot programs for financial surveillance targeting immigrant communities. The story warned this geographic pilot could serve as the template for nationwide implementation.
Scaling this program is as simple as an administrative decision, and we don’t yet know if this has already occurred.
Ghosts in the Machine: The Rise of Hidden AI on Social Media
Language models deployed as hidden influencers maintain the appearance of human participation while operating as artificial agents. The story identified detection methods and explained how hidden AI enables influence operations at scale, weaponized for election disinformation and manipulation.
In late 2025, researchers documented bot swarms generating millions of views on political X posts through the use of LLMs producing disinformation that was indistinguishable from human content over 50% of the time. Rather than constraining these technologies, key companies have accelerated deployment.
The technological drift toward comprehensive artificial manipulation has become operational and daily reality.
Trump’s Capital One Lawsuit: The Conservative Push for Banking Deregulation
Trump sued Capital One for account terminations following January 6. The litigation aimed to weaken banks’ ability to make independent risk-management decisions, potentially forcing financial institutions to maintain relationships with high-risk customers.
This positioned the lawsuit as part of Trump’s comprehensive financial crime deregulation which dismantles banking safeguards against money laundering.
The Trump Administration Just Disregarded a Court Order to Stop Deportations
The administration defied Federal Judge James Boasberg’s order halting deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. White House officials explicitly stated they wanted deportees “on the ground first, before a judge could act.” The analysis connected this to broader patterns: treating executive action as operating beyond judicial review.
My follow-up documented the White House’s calculated admission that the case was “headed to the Supreme Court” and “we’re going to win”, revealing confidence in how the judiciary would rule. SCOTUS’s subsequent curtailment of federal judges’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions validated that confidence. With that decision, the moment when courts ceased functioning as constraining institutions had arrived.
Only one year into Trump’s second presidency, his administration’s defiance of the judiciary has already become normalized.
The Politics of Pathology
Minnesota State Senator Justin Eichorn proposed classifying “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as an official mental illness immediately before his arrest for soliciting a minor. The story draws parallels to Nazi Germany’s use of psychiatry as political weapon and warns about weaponizing mental health terminology for political purposes.
Efforts to establish further precedent for pathologizing dissent are ongoing.
April
Not Joking: Trump’s Third-Term Strategy and 20 Global Precedents
Trump repeatedly declared he’d pursue a third presidential term, once characterizing his statements as “not joking.” My research catalogued twenty global precedents where leaders eliminated term limits through constitutional manipulation, from Peru’s Fujimori to Venezuela’s Chávez, from Turkey’s Erdoğan to Belarus’s Lukashenko. The story demonstrated term limit elimination follows predictable patterns and calculated specific pathways available to Trump: constitutional amendment, vice-presidential succession mechanisms, or Supreme Court reinterpretation.
As the year progressed, alleged mechanisms for third-term implementation became increasingly normalized in political discourse. Constitutional scholars now discuss the Twenty-second Amendment’s vulnerability in ways that seemed impossible in April.
America has joined the list of countries contemplating term limit elimination.
May
No posts this month.
June
Tattooed for War: How Pete Hegseth’s Extremist Ideology Is Sabotaging Ukraine
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s extensive tattoo collection encoded extremist ideology: medieval Crusader imagery, revolutionary war symbolism suggesting current government illegitimacy, Arabic text denoting hostility toward Islam. His repeated unauthorized freezes of Ukraine weapons shipments aligned with restorationist ideology that views post-founding America as “corrupted”. Ideological extremism had been placed in control of the Department of Defense which would carry direct operational consequences for Ukrainian survival and NATO credibility.
My early documentation of his ideological motivations explained his subsequent policy announcements as logical extensions of documented extremism which are fundamentally incompatible with modern American traditions and values.
July
How We Got Here: My Thoughts On Our Nation’s Birthday
My July reflection synthesized research into narrative analysis of how America arrived at constitutional crisis. The story connected discrete investigations into coherent pattern: information warfare to infrastructure capture, surveillance expansion to institutional purges, judicial abdication to executive concentration.
The analysis examined how ordinary citizens adapt to escalating authoritarianism through psychological mechanisms documented in historical studies of democratic collapse. I warned that individual stories, however well-researched, can become noise in endless cycles. Pattern recognition and meta-analysis were becoming increasingly essential.
Rights and law violations documented in early 2025 have become such established governance features that new violations require ever-greater levels of outrageousness to command attention. Sadly, American psychological adaptation to authoritarianism, which I had predicted as a serious risk, has become observable fact.
The Strzok Test: When Friendship Leads to Political Purge
FBI Director Kash Patel systematically purged experienced counterintelligence professionals. Michael Feinberg, a decorated FBI agent, was forced to resign after being informed he’d face demotion and polygraph examination regarding his friendship with Peter Strzok, a figure on Patel’s published enemies list. Political loyalty tests were replacing professional competence as employment criterion. Feinberg’s account detailed “struggle sessions” and forced loyalty pledges mirroring authoritarian purges.
Beyond the wide number of policy, assignment, and other changes driving low morale within the FBI, the precedent that personal relationships with blacklisted individuals could trigger career destruction has created chilling effects throughout federal employment. By the time of this writing, hundreds of federal employees in security, law enforcement, and intelligence roles have been terminated or forced to resign, elevating the overall national security crisis.
August
Trump’s India Tariff Bullshit: Maximum Political Theater, Minimal Strategic Impact
Trump’s executive order targeting India for Russian oil purchases characterized itself as “maximum political theater, minimal strategic impact.” The tariff action against New Delhi undermined American strategic interests without meaningfully constraining Russian behavior. One of the most sweeping unilateral trade actions against a major partner in recent memory actually weakened rather than strengthened the anti-Russia coalition. The policy rhetoric (countering Russian energy revenue) was completely disconnected from actual mechanisms (tariffs on Indian trade).
India, the crucial U.S. strategic partner in Indo-Pacific competition with China, found itself penalized for purchasing Russian oil, a decision driven by geography, pricing, and energy independence. These tariffs damaged the relationship without providing alternatives or meaningful constraints on Russian energy sales, which had the effect of pushing India towards Russia.
The Zarnowski File: A Case Study in Live Disinformation
A circulating conspiracy manifesto, styled as authored by a “former CIA paramilitary officer,” employed classic disinformation techniques: overwhelming Gish Gallop through dozens of unverified claims, strategic evidence deferral, cultivation of curated audiences through paywalled distribution. The story identified the work as sophisticated political mythology designed to erode institutional trust across all political sides. The investigation documented my own personal encounter with an apparent cultivation operation attempting to draw me into potential infiltration networks.
Early documentation of disinformation architecture can prove valuable for recognizing subsequent variations.
I Read Stochastic Terrorist Laura Loomer’s Deposition
Despite public characterization as an “independent journalist”, Laura Loomer’s role as a Trump campaign operative was revealed through her deposition in a defamation case against Bill Maher, which included extraordinary campaign access (flying on Trump’s private plane) while maintaining legal distance. I covered her targeting of this author through coordinated harassment campaigns in a tactic known as “stochastic terrorism”: the use of public messaging to incite violence against identified targets without direct incitement.
Since the writing of that story, Loomer’s odious influence has only expanded.
Rather than constraining her access, the Trump administration appears to have integrated her operational model into official communication strategy.
The Case for American Genocide: A Special Report
Applying UN Convention definition and Genocide Watch’s ten-stage framework to administration policies. Project 2025 explicitly planned mass deportation, transgender identity erasure, forced sterilization, family separation. The investigation demonstrated how the administration had progressed through multiple documented stages of genocide. Administration alignment with other states facing genocide accusations (Israel, Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan) formed an “Axis of Genocide” united in undermining accountability mechanisms, triggering unprecedented “Red Flag Alerts” from the nonprofit Lemkin Institute.
Genocide characterization has since moved from academic analysis into increasingly mainstream discourse. Genocide scholars have documented progression through documented stages. Trump is openly targeting members of the International Criminal Court with sanctions and threats.
September
No posts this month.
October
Pete Hegseth Revives Segregation in the “War” Department
Hegseth’s September 30 address at Quantico announced policy reversals explicitly targeting women, minorities, and religious minorities for military exclusion. Mandatory loyalty tests (resign if his words caused “dismay”), elimination of diversity programs, transgender troop bans, cancellation of climate research. These policies were logical extensions of documented ideological extremism. Republican alarm at the speed and radicalism had become visible.
Military reorganizations and firings have since proceeded far further than initial projections. Signs point towards degraded morale, accelerated resignations of experienced personnel, and reduced operational capability; policy-based extremism is increasingly present.
November
The Spy Who Tried to Silence Me
I had a nasty encounter this year with an individual presenting himself as “Grant Wescott,” allegedly an American defense consultant based in Ukraine. This story was about his unverifiable credentials, coordinated network amplification, systematic deflection from Russian activities, and psychological warfare techniques consistent with Russian doctrine while maintaining a pro-Ukrainian facade.
This story represents my most direct encounter with adversarial information warfare in 2025. After publication, additional sources came forward with information and allegations regarding Wescott’s engagement in adversarial operations against the Georgian Legion, the volunteer unit of Georgian soldiers fighting for Ukraine.
Subsequently, the subject of my story denied the allegations of operating under a false persona and filed a DMCA Takedown Request with Substack, leading to the removal of their selfie photograph from my story.
December
The Real Target Is Us
I wrote a story about terrorism’s classic strategic playbook: exploiting democracies into damaging themselves. I examined how adversaries weaponize fundamental democratic vulnerabilities against the system itself. Democratic accountability mechanisms, free speech protections, and institutional competition become vulnerabilities when adversaries understand how to exploit them. Russia has adopted this framework against the U.S., and the West more broadly.
Rather than attacking democracy directly, Russia’s strategy involves manipulating America into creating authoritarian constraints on itself. American security establishment’s fear of foreign influence justifies surveillance, censorship, institutional purges that democracy can no longer withstand. Every counterintelligence action, every deportation, every purge, every surveillance expansion could be characterized as some legitimate response to foreign threats, yet each action degraded the democratic institutions supposedly being protected.
Russia’s greatest strategic victory is not military or economic; it is their ability to convince a significant-enough number of Americans that saving democracy requires destroying it.
Wrong Suspects, Real Consequences
FBI Director Kash Patel’s pattern of identifying wrong suspects in mass violence cases. In two documented cases, Patel identified wrong suspects in each instance. In a third case, a direct subordinate of DNI Gabbard did the same. Gabbard and Patel’s documented ties to Russian interests and removed surveillance oversight mechanisms indicate repeated misidentifications might reflect deliberate obstruction rather than simple incompetence, given consistent effect of protecting actual perpetrators while creating investigative confusion.
This late-year investigation tied together multiple threads. Unified analysis suggested coordinated obstruction of justice! Potential implications are severe: if the FBI’s top official has deliberately misdirected investigations, our entire system of accountability in federal criminal justice has been compromised.
What Happened This Year?
Early warnings documented in January became operational reality by year’s end. Mechanisms described in February became policy by March. Patterns identified in summer were normalized by fall. What began as concerning trajectory became operational governance. By December, the progression from concerned theory to lived experience was complete. The institutions that were supposed to constrain executive power: courts, Congress, federal agencies, law enforcement—had either actively participated in the concentration of power or failed to provide meaningful constraint or resistance.
The reader who invested time in this work witnessed specific mechanisms through which American democracy is dying. This progression is neither mysterious nor mystical; it follows patterns documented in comparative historical analysis. What matters now is whether recognition of these patterns can inspire institutional or social resistance sufficient to alter trajectory as it has become clear we’re all on the wrong track.
Your paid subscription represents investment in documentation of this moment. Not pure consumption of analysis, but perhaps an investment in record-keeping.
Whatever comes next, the record exists, and my work continues in 2026.
Happy Holidays to you and your loved ones!
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Sent chat request by the similar fake Ukrainian soldier and Grant.
That’s 2 we know of
Accolades to u