On the Inchoate and Yet Unnamed Department of Truth
Dario Amodei published a statement today. I want to be clear about what it is before I say what it also is.
It is a principled document. The CEO of one of the most powerful artificial intelligence companies in the world looked at the demands of the executive branch of the United States government — demands backed by threats of designation as a national security risk, threats of invocation of the Defense Production Act, threats of removal from systems his company has spent years building — and he said no. Not on mass domestic surveillance. Not on fully autonomous weapons. He held the line. He named the threats explicitly, in public, which itself takes a kind of courage that is rarer than it should be among people of his stature and his exposure.
I take nothing away from any of that. I mean it.
And then he called it the Department of War. Eleven times.
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It is not the Department of War.
Of course, we can say that such stylistic matters are minor infractions of law. But I disagree! The National Security Act of 1947 established the Department of Defense. That is its name. That is what the statute says. The president of the United States does not have the authority to rename a cabinet department by preference, by executive order, by press release, or by the simple repetition of a preferred designation until everyone around him begins using it too. The name “Department of War“ has no standing in law. It is not what the institution is called. It is what this president calls it.
Article II of the Constitution requires the president to faithfully execute the laws. The laws say Department of Defense. The president says Department of War. This is not a trivial deviation. It is, by any serious constitutional scholarship, a failure of the Faithful Execution clause — a deliberate misuse of official power that meets, under the Common Law understanding from which the phrase “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” derives, the definition of a misdemeanor committed from within public office.
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George Orwell did not write Nineteen Eighty-Four as a novel about a distant dystopia. He wrote it as a diagnosis. A tendency he had watched operate in real time — in Spain in 1936, in the Soviet Union, in the England of his own day. The tendency: that the corruption of language comes first. That you don’t need jackboots to destroy a republic. You only need enough serious, well-meaning people to start using your words.
Newspeak was not propaganda for the ignorant. The ignorant can be moved by cruder instruments. Newspeak is for the intelligent — for the people who think carefully about words, who would resist an obvious lie but won’t notice a quiet rename. It works because it doesn’t ask them to believe anything false. It only asks them to say something slightly different. And once they’re saying it, the old reality begins to recede.
The Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four does not primarily operate through dramatic falsification. It operates through the patient, systematic replacement of words. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. The Department of Defense has always been called the Department of War. Not because anyone was forced to say so. Because enough serious people found it easier, in the moment, to use the language of the people they were negotiating with.
Hannah Arendt saw something adjacent. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she observed that the totalitarian project doesn’t primarily operate through lies. The propagandist who lies still acknowledges the existence of truth — he’s trying to replace one true account with a false one, which means he still inhabits a world where the distinction matters. The totalitarian project is more radical. It doesn’t ask you to believe the false thing. It asks you to accept that the distinction no longer applies. That truth is a category invented by the weak to constrain the strong. That what is real is simply what power says is real, for as long as power says it.
This is why the rename is not merely incorrect. It is an epistemological attack. The Department of War doesn’t need to be true. It only needs to be said, often enough, by enough people, until the category of correct institutional names begins to feel like a quaint preference rather than a legal fact. The goal is not to convince you the institution was always called the Department of War. The goal is to make you feel that insisting on the correct name is pedantic. That the person who says “actually, the statute says Department of Defense” is the difficult one. The stickler. The one not living in the real world of power as it actually operates.
That is the move. And it works. It is working right now.
