Three layers of the same machine
Citizens United is the campaign-finance architecture. The political-mechanics audit is what that architecture produces at the policy layer. The propaganda audit is the narrative layer that ratifies the result. Each has its own page with full audit data; this is the cluster overview. Sources are Princeton (Gilens-Page), OpenSecrets, the Brennan Center, OECD, the Church Committee, and the Federal Election Commission.
Citizens United
The 5-4 ruling reversed sixty years of campaign-finance precedent on the empirical claim that independent corporate expenditures "do not give rise to corruption." Fourteen years of data have not been kind to that sentence. The architecture funded the next decade of American politics.
- Super PAC spending grew six-fold across the post-2010 cycles
- Dark-money spending quadrupled
- A 2014 Princeton study (Gilens & Page) found policy outcomes track elite preference, not majority preference
Politics
A four-party audit of the actual policy positions, donor coalitions, and voting patterns inside the two-party shell. Includes an interactive ideology quiz that places you across nine dimensions and a political-lifecycle chart of how parties shift across decades.
- Both parties run on a voter coalition that does not match their donor coalition
- Conservative + liberal + Green + Libertarian: stated positions, donor positions, voting record
- PAC spending, ideology lifecycle, the policy-influence channel
Propaganda
Five interactives covering the narrative architecture: civic-religion timeline, OECD-mirror peer-country comparison, the CIA-coup record across 14 cases, exceptionalism reactions, and an attention-spend calculator that quantifies how much of US adult life is captured by media.
- OECD mirror: where US ranks across 30+ peer-country indicators
- CIA-coup record by stated reason vs civic-benefit programmes blocked
- The civic-religion timeline: the framework that ratifies the rest
Why these are clustered. The 2010 Citizens United ruling created the funding architecture; the political-mechanics audit documents what that architecture buys at the policy layer; the propaganda audit documents the civic-religion frame that makes the policy outputs ratifiable to a majority that does not benefit from them. Reading them as three pieces of one system is the point.
Where to go from here. The presidents page documents the executive-branch decisions made under this system across thirteen presidencies. The carceral page documents the substantive policy output that the system has produced most consistently.