In Elon Musk’s “dark MAGA” there is no truth.—which for historian Jill Lepore creates a fear that everything might collapse because everything is so fragile and so fake, so untrustworthy — and so — unreal. For Lepore — it is a fear created by the “Artificial State.”
Back in January of this year – 2026 — BCR hosts spoke with William Hartung about his political stand-up routine and his recent book “The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Hone.”
It was a BCR episode in which jokes and world destruction did a cha cha.
Hartung is an expert on the US military industrial complex at The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Recently, Bill emailed his Substack readers several articles on Silicon Valley’s hard right tilt towards advanced militarism. He had been reading a copy of Jill Lepore’s soon-to-be-released book – “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” Bill’s email was somewhat scary. It appears that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey have embedded themselves into US government policy-making — and profiting from dismantling our democracy. Their “firms are enabling genocide and aggression abroad and profiting from repression at home.”
I replied to Bill’s email and asked if he wanted to meet and talk about what he was finding – his response was immediate: “YES” – all caps with exclamation – “Let’s do something, the sooner the better.”
Alan Winson
