A Futurist's Six Takeaways from the Debate

More bombshells ahead.

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to talk about what that frickin’ debate means for the frickin’ future. Or at least start by talking about the debate so I can talk about Russian prison later.

If you’re like me — a futurist who can’t forecast a whole lot of things until this election is decided — you’re emotionally exhausted from the polls and from the bad suspense about how this debate was going to turn out, so this one’s going to be short, if only because I have some bonus content for you over the next week or two.

Anyway, my takeaways from the debate as a futurist are a little different than the usual debate takeaways (other than who won) because those sorts of analyses oddly have almost no utility for forecasting.

Here we go:

1. That debate may have been the first and last threshold Kamala Harris needed to cross to prove herself to the world to be presidential, coherent, competent, savvy, and capable of delivering verbal and nonverbal smackdown. Now that Trump’s sentencing on his 34 convictions so far has been moved to after the election, the only remaining potential Richter-scale-level event on the calendar that could move the needle between now and Election Day is on September 26 when Jack Smith is required to present his argument and much of his evidence against Trump in the 2020 election interference and January 6 Capitol Riot case. Smith certainly has more evidence than the public knows so far. And the publicly-known evidence so far has been so bad that Trump’s lawyers already previously crapped their pinstriped pants so badly that their dogs, looking over their shoulders at the computer screen, crapped their pinstriped pants, suddenly gained the power of speech, said Bad Facts, Puppy-Lawyer-Daddy, checked their financial liquidity and possible flights to countries without extradition, picked up their food bowls and called an Uber to Dulles. So starting September 26 we’ll get weeks of media and legal analysis of the evidence we can see — and weeks of speculation of the material we can’t see because it’s still sealed. Or classified. Including speculation about the contents of one particular document — the existence of which is now public but the public hasn’t quite noticed yet. I have no idea what’s in it (dammit-dammit-dammit) but you’ll know the mystery box when you see it. And all of that together might/maybe/probably’s gonna/will be the October Surprise.* Her numbers may not go up but that drill press will push his numbers (or his turnout) down.

2. *One or the other of them might inadvertently manufacture their own October Surprise, though, because <waves hands around> holy crap. Or the world might.

3. That endorsement delivered that way revealed to the world that Taylor Swift has nuclear weapons and she ain’t afraid to use them. I already knew she had her own military force of tween girls, aspiring tween girls, and old blues singers the world over but damn — even Moscow saw that endorsement-mushroom-cloud and Tay-Tay just disqualified herself from ever having a show on Tenet Media. In her endorsement she included links for people to register to vote and by 2pm yesterday www.vote.gov had received 337,000 visitors. I don’t know how many of those will result in new registered voters and I don’t know where any of those new folks live but that number alone is maybe what Biden’s margin was in the swing states in 2020. And that’s without J.D. Vance helping. So we’ll all need to account for her arsenal and military capabilities going forward. That’s just geopolitics.

4. Inauguration Day falls on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day next January. (Yes, really.) Whether he wins or she wins, God is going to throw down a lightning bolt and split open the heavens that day. So consider this your 130-day advance weather and theological forecast for Inauguration Day. Plan accordingly.

5. I will learn the Russian for prison bitch. Either for him if he loses, or for us all if he wins. I will also provide step-by-step instructions for how to make a shiv out of your toothbrush if you can’t find enough pebbles in the prison yard to put into a sock to make a sap to knock Big Yuri out in the gulag. (Note: That’s an example of a common contingency plan that works across several potential future scenarios.) However…

6. By now we all know that I’m a futurist which means I say things it’s too early to believe but and but and yet-but and while-but, y’all, after that debate, and despite polling that terrifies the entire world, and even though no one should count their cats before they’re out of the oven, we have finally caught up to what I’ve been saying all along and now one thing is true:

It is now no longer too early to believe.