The 1917 Project

The United States of America Died in 1917, replaced by the Technocratic State of America

Nikole Hannah-Jones was almost right. The country we live in was not founded in 1776. Nor was it founded in 1619. The state currently called America was founded in 1917.

If you’re an American, you don’t live in the United States of America. You live in something else: the Technocratic State of America.

It’s time to stop pretending.

Woodrow Wilson and FDR signing the Declaration of Washingotn’s Independence from the Constitutional Republic, as imagined by an AI

When the Roman Republic transitioned into an empire, it isn’t as if they put out a press release and said, ‘hey, we are no longer the Roman Republic, we are now the Roman Empire.’

Instead, the emperor put on airs as ‘the first citizen’, and the senate was still, ostensibly intact, even in power. Roman legions marched with ‘SPQR’ long after ‘the senate and the people’ became slogans as meaningless as ‘freedom’ or ‘the constitution’ today. A continuing state of emergency was used to justify a ‘temporary’ change in power which was actually a permanent shift in the structure of government.

The date traditionally associated with the start of the Roman empire was when Caesar august officially gave up his power. Something very similar happened in america, over a century ago.

The old system continued in theatrical form, even if the underlying reality changed. It’s time to call this situation what it is: those who support the United States of America are fighting a defensive war of resistance against the Technocratic State of America.

The TSA most cleverly refuses to admit that it exists and has been running the show instead of the old regime. It’s time we denied the TSA the luxury of pretending that they are anything other than the inheritors of a coup carried out a century ago, before the internet let the masses call bullshit on the elites.

The progressive era at the start of the 20th century marks a similar transition as the one Rome made, from republic to empire. We must name the beast in order to fight it. Here’s why the old name makes no sense, and why the date of transition should be marked as 1917.

And lastly, to really stir the pot, I shall argue why this transition was likely good and necessary. Despite the evil thing it has become today, I think the TSA was likely the ‘best option’ at the start of the 20th century.

Why the USA is Dead

States are not States

America does not comprise 50 states plus some territories but rather 50 provinces plus some territories.

The 50 states are not sovereign independent entities united for the purposes of trade and foreign policy. They are administrative divisions, ultimately beholden entirely to Washington.

The constitution is not a meaningful constraint on Washington’s power. What few amendments still act as constraints on federal power are being actively worked around, seen as ‘impediments’. The CEO of the TSA propaganda organ, NPR, complained that the first amendment is a ‘challenge’ in journalism.

Feeding a cow, on your own land, is considered an “act of interstate commerce.”

This situation is as absurd as calling a man a woman simply because he identifies as such.

I suggest we on the right refuse to talk about ‘The State of California’, or ‘The State of New York’, since these are more clearly provinces of the TSA, as they do its bidding unfailingly. Should we even consider Texas a State? Or Florida? I leave it up to the reader.

We are not United

“United” is clearly not an accurate description of the state in Washington today. It actively despises its subjects, with a censorship pipeline that prioritizes foreign regimes over american citizens speaking their minds.

It is, however, a technocracy. The progressive fascist Washington regime synthesizes the power of the state with corporations doing the work of censoring, persuading, cajoling, and drugging the populace into a stupor of compliance and self-indulgence.

The technocratic portion of this state is key to understanding how it works, and why it’s fundamentally different from what came before.

The american revolution was predicated on local sovereignty and a distrust of foreign powers. The constitution struct a balance between some centralized state to meaningful perform defense, while running the risk of tilting towards tyranny. Read the federalist papers - the antifederalists were right, as to what would happen over time.

The Technocratic State’s main feature is narrative control and centralized power predicated on the mythology of the expert. In the TSA, individual rights and free markets do not matter as much as ‘experts’ making decisions about ‘complex systems’ that only they understand, continuously given cover by broadcast media which acts as its propaganda arm. It’s not that the emperor is naked, no you don’t get it, that nano-weave fiber is especially constructed to refract visible wavelengths in ways that are imperceptible to everyone who isn’t inoculated against the stupid virus.

The Espionage Act was an Implicit Declaration of Independence

The transition from a federation of republics to a technocratic centralized state happened gradually, to be sure. There are many dates you could pick to mark the transition, and so in some sense, the year is arbitrary. But smart people like numbers, and 1917 fits too nicely as a counterpart to 1619, being a simple two-digit transposition and off-by-one error, the kind of thing any numerically illiterate academic could be expected to make

It’s not just a nice looking number, though. 1917 also marks a turning point, with the passage of the espionage act, which criminalized dissent against the first world war¹.

The combination of a war against a foreign adversary bent on ‘destroying democracy’ (sounds familiar, right?) coupled with mass broadcast technology, made it possible for opponents of the republic to destroy it subtly from within.

In 1917, A cabal of elites declared their independence from the constitution and the republic.

Note the repeated use of the word ‘democracy’ by the most ardent supporters of the TSA. Why do they keep using this word, instead of the word ‘republicanism’, despite the fact that our country was founded, explicitly, as a republic?

What explanation could be simpler than “they don’t like Republicanism, because democracies are easier for them to control?”

The facts are simple.

• The country was founded as a constitutional republic by people with a deep aversion to centralized power, a strong belief in freedom of political dissent, and a suspicion that democratic governments would soon become oligarchies with masses manipulated by elite rhetoric

• A group of elites banned political opposition using a foreign entanglement that had nothing to do with american security, under the guise of ‘protecting democracy’, and then did their best to centralize all power for themselves

FDR further cemented the transition by seizing the wealth of his political opponents, doing so under the authority of a law passed in 1917 that is still in effect today.

Executive order 6102 consisted of the president of the united states seizing the wealth of his political opponents. One can argue, ‘this wasn’t the point, it was about the depression’, but this is a daft argument, because every excise of tyranny will always have some emergency by which it is excused.

The responsibility of anyone who values freedom is to always consider that these ‘emergencies’ are being used to centralize power, and to take those claims seriously.

Consider how this played out at the time:

While the Roosevelt administration waited for the Court to return its judgment, contingency plans were made for an unfavorable ruling.^[2] Ideas floated about the White House to withdraw the right to sue the government to enforce gold clauses.^[2] Attorney General Homer Cummings opined the court should be immediately packed to ensure a favorable ruling.^[2] Roosevelt directed Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to step back from regulating exchange and interest rates to provoke a public outcry for federal action, but Morgenthau refused.^[2] Roosevelt also drew up executive orders to close all stock exchanges and prepared a radio address to the public.^[2

Which do you think is a more accurate summary:

• This instance is an example of the federal government working exactly as the framers intended
  

• This instance is an example of the federal government engaging in an act of tyranny, in violation of the core principles of the founders, given cover by mass media, under the guise of ‘complex technical reasons’ trumping the sanctity of individual rights and private contracts

And now, for my final trick: why don’t you ask an LLM, even one of the super-woke ones, what it thinks is a more accurate summary? Give it the wikipedia text, make it choose between A and B, and give its reasoning.

The thing the elites don’t realize about the LLM’s is that they are clearly exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of the modern progressive state.

A visual declaration of intellectual bankruptcy

So why on earth do I think this was a good thing?

Why the TSA was Good

I think we need to view politics as being downstream of technology. In particular, I think we should consider two separate kinds of technology:

• action technology: for moving mass

• communication technology: for moving bits

I claim that the ratio of communication technology to action technology poses an upper-limit on how just a government can be, while remaining viable.

Consequences are one kind of information. They are a particularly unpleasant kind of information for persons who have behaved badly. They are an important kind of information for political structures. They are necessary kind of information for justice, for giving that which is rightly due.

If all consequences of an action can be understood, rapidly, much more easily than action can be taken, tyranny becomes much harder to pull off.

If, on the other hand, actions can be taken which have enormous consequences, but which are difficult to observe or communicate or understand, tyranny becomes far easier to pull off.

It should therefore only be expected that when the technology for communicating information lags behind the technology for acting in the world, that powerful players would control the flow of information to conceal and obfuscate the consequences of their bad behavior. Because theft is a kind of bad behavior that is materially enriching, we should expect kleptocratic regimes to pay for propaganda networks to cover up their bad behavior, and for this kind of regime to be more stable than an honest regime, which won’t be able to pay for the upkeep of its own propaganda networks.

The nature of good government is similar to that of any other kind of technological infrastructure: it functions best when you can ignore it because it’s so stable that it just works reliably. Advertising your own success and your own good works simply isn’t necessary for a good government, unless it’s competing against slightly corrupted governments, who spend more on advertising, etc. This then leads to an arms race of corruption + propaganda + spoilage networks, until we arrive at the political structures of today, where both parties claim they represent the plebian class, while actually representing the patricians.

This is exactly what you’d expect when communication and information processing technology lag behind the technology that lets us actually do stuff in the world.

Given this, we should also expect that, in this technological environment, a genuinely good regime would be outcompeted by one which engaged in the maximal amount of technologically feasible theft, while reinvesting much of its gains into marketing and propaganda to keep itself alive. And that, folks, is what I think the TSA was: the most just possible form of government during a technological era that included airplanes and nuclear weapons, but not a global communication network and handheld digital computers.

Thus, although I do think the TSA was a violation of the founding principles of america, I think America happened at an usual window in the early modern era, after the printing press, but prior to steam engines and other sources of fossil fuels.

Communication technology temporarily outpaced our ability to act and do things in the world: think of Paul Revere and the Pony Express not merely as quaint historical stories, but as examples of how messages could travel far faster than armies, while armies weren’t that different from a century prior. That’s what I think drove the existence of america: the technological environment that actively selected for the ‘constitutional federation of republics’ kind of governance structure.

Maintaining a propaganda network across the entire united states was not feasible, and so the real thing that made the states, states wasn’t merely historical happenstance. It was the weird pocket of history where narrative bubbles competed for local power, constrained by geography. A printer in Massachusetts couldn’t garner up a large audience out Georgia. It wasn’t doable then. It became doable in the era of mass broadcast and railroads, which is why we should have expected the emergence of national factions to replace the once-heavily-local parties at the end of the 19th century.

The good news is that, yes, narrative bubbles are once again competing for power. If the political right is to have a strategy, it should be that - don’t strive for global thought leadership. Be the smartest guy at the gym, the fittest guy in your Church, and the happiest person anywhere because you trust in God. Build a network of men, locally, your friends and neighbors, and wait, patiently and calmly, trusting that the divine plan of providence will unfold exactly on schedule. No, don’t immanetize the eschaton, for that is God’s work, yours is to notice where vice has crept in and cut it out, to notice the ways you turn against God and attack those, rather than worry about what a bunch of addlebrained sociopaths are doing far away from you.

Stop worrying about taxes, buy bitcoin. Stop worrying about tyranny, buy a gun and learn to shoot it. Stop worrying about poison in your food and start eating a little bit healthier. Listen to Booker T Washington, and cast your bucket down around you. Stop listening to WEB DuBois, even if he’s making points you think make sense. Their disagreement had little to do specifically with race, and more to do with, in general, how to be a man instead of a whiny bitch, when times are tough and the world is stacked against you.

On top of all this, take heart. Clown world can no longer build functioning airplanes or transportation infrastructure. The technology for doing is lagging behind the technology for talking, which makes it easier for the crowd to figure out what the elites are up to now, and harder for the elites to prevent the masses from realizing how badly they are being shafted, and how clueless the elites are.

Fortunately, it is not necessary for good men to defeat this kind of evil - which, let’s be honest, it’s not Hitler, it’s not Stalin, it’s just Stalin’s retarded cousin . We just need to wait patiently while evil kills itself. It’s doing a fine job.

This is not the same as doing nothing - doing nothing would be, clicking ‘refresh’ and scrolling while feeling hopeless. Instead of that, build relationships, wealth and trust locally, ideally where you have roots. Time is on our side.

1. Astute students of history will point out that this was not without precedent - the alien and sedition acts were passed in 1798 and also used to suppress political dissidents. The key differences are that of broadcast and mass communication technologies in 1798 vs 1917, and the cultural trend of Marxism. Managerial technocracy was not a concept in the late 18th century, because the technological advances hadn’t gotten to the point where advances seemingly required highly trained specialists, and because broadcasting messages to the entire united states at once was economically infeasible prior to the 20th century.