Kevin McCarthy's toxic career is like black mold from the Trump flood

Photo credit: Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images file

The news coverage emanating from Washington, DC, around the political aspirations of Kevin McCarthy seem like dispatches from an alien land and a society apart.  

It is a world increasingly detached from the goings-on of ordinary people across a vast republic who are looking for dignity, prosperity, security and opportunity for their families. Roughly 40 per cent of the American people have less than $400 of cash savings. The enlisted members of America’s Armed Forces are preyed on by a grotesque consumerism that makes them financially hostage to the usury interest rates of the payday lending industry that preys on the guardians of American liberty. There is a veterans’ suicide crisis that remains hidden and an American military presence in 100 countries around the globe.

We stand at the edge of an age that will be dominated by artificial intelligence and robotics. Intelligent machines designed to kill will be interwoven into the decision-making frameworks around weapons that give mankind the destructive power of the gods imagined in the literature of ancient societies.

Those machines will play dominant roles in a globally integrated economic system that seeks to import the necessary components from the cheapest sources possible to keep those machines operating. The competition over resources, including water, will be an increasing aspect of the global competition that lies ahead between countries which see a future where disruption is guaranteed, and where new powers will rise, while others fade. This has always been the story of history and the eternal rhythm of human civilization. We are at an end of an era that was imagined into existence by Americans who were born in the last decades of the 19th century.

The vision architected by FDR and the American-led coalition of free nations has endured for nearly 80 years. Its endurance will be tested in the decades ahead, and for the first time in a new era in which there are no living human beings who were participants in history’s most titanic event that changed the world, and birthed what it is that we process as reality.