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

… and one of those ways is to remind you of good.

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So behind the scenes here at Think Future Central I’ve been writing a list for you of what I’m watching and preparing for this fall as a futurist and what I’ll be watching for in the three months following the midterms (and I’ll give all that to you next week) but Dolly Parton died and I became so sad that I couldn’t think about talking about anything else instead.

If Dolly Parton ain’t in heaven then there ain’t no heaven to go to.

She was one of my favorite examples of the old saw that we’re supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. She did what was right and she loved who needed to be loved even when she was the first, only, or last to do so. She was an example of who we should be when we are surrounded by examples of who we should not.

If you’re sad that she’s gone I’ll remind you that we still have Tom Hanks, Jennifer Lawrence, Beyonce, The Rock, Zendaya, a thousand meadowfuls of very good dogs, and the cosmic metric ton of generosity-of-spirit of Keanu Reeves. And all of them put together, by their own admission, might almost amount to one Dolly Parton.

• And I would have included Ryan Reynolds in that list but he’s Canadian and he’s tariffed and Canada has no Ryan Reynolds Strategic Reserve.

Oh, and every person on that list would laugh at their inadequacies to replace her (even in the collective, you know, Avengers-style) and Dolly would laugh at the whole idea in the first place.

• And if you’d like you something else in case someone you love has died, or is about to die, or may die in the future, here’s something I wrote about death and dying and about light bulbs and electricity. Read it at your emotional peril or if you need a reason to believe.

But I think Dolly would laugh at the whole idea because I don’t think Dolly thought that much about herself beyond what music could be, and what her music could mean to somebody, and about what her looks could do and could mean, and what bad ideas in the world that her looks and her persona and her identity and her sovereignty over herself and her own integrity could break.

And I found her to be a kind person in a world that glorifies the opposite and says the opposite is right.

Which is why I think this:

In Christian lore (but not in the Bible itself), when we die we stand at the pearly gates and are judged by Saint Peter or the Archangel Gabriel or the Bouncer Jehoshaphat or somebody and they judge us and let us into heaven or just pop us into a chute straight down to hell. Or something.

Right now I highly doubt any of that could be true and that heaven, if it exists, (and I believe it does) then — and this is a theological statement — I suspect that when we die we won’t find ourselves at any pearly gates of judgment, we’ll find ourselves just inside the door of a honky tonk by the side of the highway in 1978 where the air conditioning is good and Dolly Parton will receive each and every one of us and she’ll say Honey, I am so glad you’re finally here. All your friends and family are right over there and they love you and they’ve been chomping at the bit all day to hold you tight. And all your dogs are over there, too, and they’ve been pow’r-wagging their tails. So go find your table and your people and give ‘em hugs and love on ‘em a bit and hold their hands and then scootch over a bit because we got lots more good folks coming in and you’re gonna love them, too. And in a bit I’m gonna sing to all of us and then we’re gonna sing a whole lot of our favorite songs together. For a long, long time.

And where are my rhinestones? I gave them to Gabriel. I think he’s always wanted to try them on. But we don’t need them any more, Sweetie, but because look down at yourself and look at everybody else and see how we shine.

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

… and one of those ways is to tell you about the powers you have deep down inside.

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I’ve been on vacation this week and — after writing to you every week for three years straight — I tried to unplug somewhat. And largely failed.

I mean, I kept up enough to know that…

• Count Binface lost his race against Nigel Farage — but instead of winning a fraction of 1% of the vote like most joke candidates do, Count Binface won 27% of the vote — and he plans to run against Farage again once Farage is probably booted from Parliament in a few weeks once the corruption investigation into Farage concludes. In interviews, Count Binface was clearly, rightfully overjoyed.

• Moderna made a breakthrough that helps thwart the growth of melanoma, another real step toward creating personalized mRNA vaccines against forms of cancer.

• And that Trump announced he plans to send 1,000 election observers to ‘observe’ polling places during voting for the midterms. I am zero-percent scared of this threat because the part of the Department of Justice that’s legally permitted to do that work — the Civil Rights Division — was one of the first that Trump and DOGE gutted and is now functionally empty. (If you aspire to ruling like a tyrant, you need a strong government with lots of federal workers rather than a weak government with fewer federal workers.)

I didn’t take novels with me on this vacation; I took a stack of tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) books to read instead.

Why? Because I’m slowly preparing for a post-Trump future when the sky won’t constantly be falling and we can all take an evening off a week to sit around with friends and — in preparation to devise a better real world for all of us — collectively dream up a fictional story for fun instead. But this wouldn’t be mere frivolity. Bear with me for a second.

The most famous TTRPG in the world is Dungeons and Dragons. But there are many, many other TTRPGs and some of them are more interesting than Dungeons and Dragons itself.

TTRPGs were spawned from big army-on-army on-giant-wide-tabletop wargames — ones with all the little tin soldiers and knights marching toward each other on big simulated battlefields.

But then someone asked What if we broke off a small unit of fighters to go down into a dragon’s lair to slay the dragon that gives our opponent superior airpower advantage? Well, we’d need to create a half dozen little characters who would be capable of doing that. Not mere ordinary faceless tin soldiers: we’d need expert knights, some good archers, a sneakthief as a scout, and probably a wizard. And if we really want to think about it, those daring specialists would need individual motives of their own to be crazy, noble, brave, or greedy enough to crawl down there. And maybe individual players should play those individual characters. And thus (to oversimplify) the original Dungeons and Dragons was born.

But really, TTRPGs are cooperative storytelling in which all the players around the table improvise and play off each other and the fictional environment constantly, every second. Dice are thrown to resolve plot points that could succeed or fail, like whether a player’s character successfully sneaks up on the dragon or whether another player’s character successfully puts an arrow through the sleeping dragon’s eye and into its brain or whether the arrow glances off the dragon’s hide instead and woke it up.

One person serves as the Game Master or Dungeon Master and starts the story, governs its internal rules, keeps the story going, and (maybe) knows the resolution to the story’s central problem. The Game Master starts the story with something like this:

• You’re in a Bass Pro Sporting Goods store on the second floor looking out of a giant window. You’re shopping for better camp socks when you see out the window that there are patients in their gowns staggering out of the small hospital a block away. Those patients don’t look good. One of them bites a guy on the sidewalk in the neck — clearly fatally — and then staggers on further, covered in blood. Then the dead guy stands up and grabs an EMT worker and bites him, ripping out his throat. You don’t know what the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse actually looks like; all you just saw was a drugged-out cannibal who’s still murderously high. The first patient looks up and sees you through the window and hisses at you with blood dripping out of its mouth and it starts staggering toward the store. What do you do?

If you want the original, play Dungeons and Dragons. (The rules are free and are here and here but I’ll explain the crux of them next.)

Here is an oversimplified explanation of the entirety of TTRPG rules:

• You create a character you play in the game. Your character in the game is a knight, a wizard, an overland ranger, or whatever. You have a set of inherent abilities — your strength, your intelligence, etc. — that have numerical values according to your character’s capabilities. You roll for them or choose them. Other numerical values are assigned to your character’s skills in its profession.

• To jump over a log, pick a lock, or land a blow, you roll a die, add the bonuses from your relevant inherent ability and your skill level and compare that total to your opponent’s total or the difficulty of the task. Roll higher and you succeeded. Roll lower and you failed to pick that lock or dodge the dragon’s claws and it wounded you. (Roll another die to find out how badly it wounded you.) Run out of “hit points” — the amount of damage your character’s body can take — and you perish. There are a few more rules but that’s the core mechanic. The rest is flourish and storytelling-helps for the Game Master.

If you want something grittier — a medieval fantasy about an dark forest that looms and hates you and will try to warp your body and drive you mad. And is full of animals and demons and undead that will eat you and elves who will kill you on sight. And that long ago swallowed up and killed the civilization called Symbaroum. And that may now have the answers and solutions to what plagues your village now. Answers that are worth risking your life to find. Then try Symbaroum.

But if you’d like to play a deadlier, scarier version of the Pirates of the Caribbean but mixed with H.P. Lovecraft’s dark Cthulhu mythos, try Pirate Borg. Your character will probably die or may become addicted to ASH, the powdered, refined remains of dried zombies from the apocalypse that’s slowly spreading across the globe. Pirate Borg is the Earth of the Golden Age of Piracy, but it’s not ours.

But if you’d rather be a Viking or a Valkyrie in a warped world in which Ragnarok approaches and every act you take either advances or defies the dark, try Berserkr.

Or if you’d simply like to play in the modern-day zombie apocalypse of The Walking Dead TV series, try The Walking Dead Universe Roleplaying Game.

But if you’d rather play as a vampire on a commando team that was coffin-dropped into 1943 Paris with orders to rip through the Nazi horde and all their biological horrors on a mission to get to Hitler and kill him and suck out every ounce of his blood, try Eat the Reich.

• Spoiler alert: What does Hitler’s blood taste like? Methamphetamines.

Or if you’d rather play as a member of a Roman detachment that investigates the unexplained X-Files phenomena in the Empire, try Lex Arcana. You won’t want to go to Brittania, the West Virginia of the Empire, reputed to be full of savages and evil magic and witches.

But if you’d just rather read a great comic book story about the incursion of a Dungeons and Dragons dimension into our own modern-day Missouri, Illinois, and Kansas in which the good guys are armed with guns and swords and recurve bows, where monsters inhabit municipal water system tunnels, warbands of orcs and goblins with sniper rifles roam the land, and everyone knows that “horses in fields are dragon magnets,” then try all three volumes of The Realm.

See, by the time you’ve played any of these for an evening or three, you’ll be ready for what’s next. Not because by then you’ll have slain a dragon or outwitted a zombie horde or two but because there’s a thing that happens when you play games like this for long, and it’s an irresistible urge: You’ll sit down and ask yourself If I-as-real-me-myself were a character in a game like this, how would I “statistic-out my character?” What numerical values would I assign my own real-world personal strength, my own intelligence, my dexterity, my own wisdom and my powers of insight and my skills and my own expertises, and even of my own patience and ingenuity and compassion? (The latter are the real powers of change today.)

And if you do this, you’ll take an honest account of yourself and gain a better understanding of what your real-world talents, capabilities, and skills are and what magical powers you already have in the fight for today and tomorrow but until now you never knew.

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

… and one of those ways is to announce a candidacy — but NOT of the trash can man.

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Your weirdest reason to believe in a better future is happening today in Clacton-on-Sea in the United Kingdom. Seriously: all eyes in the United Kingdom are on this local election which is happening right now today (Thursday).

• Don’t know where Clacton-on-Sea is? It’s right next to Holland-on-Sea. (You’re welcome.)

Today is Election Day in on-the-Sea in a special election (a.k.a. a “by-election”) for Member of Parliament in a race between Nigel Farage, the author of Brexit, and an evil space overlord and ruler of the alien Recyclons from the planet Sigma IX named Count Binface.

I’ll explain.

I’ll start with Nigel Farage since Farage’s story is more the ridiculous of the two.

So a decade ago Nigel Farage led a campaign to persuade Britons to vote for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union (a.k.a. “Brexit”) even though that would be completely stupid. (Spoiler alert: It was completely stupid.) His argument was that by leaving the EU, the UK would be able to keep more of its money at home to spend on Britons rather than, you know, the world. This turned out to be… not correct. Because if nothing else it severed London from its role as a global financial center and thus a lot of the world’s finance left the UK. Economists refer to this as bad.

• Now, today — London aside — the United Kingdom’s GDP is the size of Mississippi. Economists refer to that as also bad.

Unsurprisingly, Nigel Farage has been accused — and he has admitted to — taking five million British pounds in crypto in “no strings attached” “gifts” from billionaires. So in an effort to dodge accountability and/or being expelled from Parliament for corruption, he resigned his seat. Which forcibly triggered a special election to fill his suddenly-empty seat. So now Nigel Farage is running to replace himself. His idea being I have punished myself by resigning — thus Parliament does not need to. And I will return to Parliament having been vindicated and exonerated by the good people of Clacton. Who I have never met.

The entire British political establishment recognized this as an obvious ruse designed to outwit only the dimwitted. Of which they are not. Thus every other major political party refused to field a candidate to oppose Farage so any victory by Farage would be hollow and no vindication or exoneration at all.

Thusly Farage ran unopposed by any major figure. Until an evil space alien overlord dared to take him on by promising that he is less evil than Nigel Farage: Count Binface.

• Count Binface is a joke candidate who’s basically dressed like Darth Vader but with a trash can (a “bin”) on his head. Count Binface’s plan to return Clacton to greatness includes nationalizing Adele (the singer — which unfortunately would lower her status from her current sainthood to that of a mere agent of the state). He also promises to move the hand dryer in the men’s restroom at a pub in Oxbridge to a more sensible location on the wall.

• He runs in every election he can in an effort to point out how ridiculous establishment candidates are. Except this time he actually has a mild chance of winning.

• Anyway, he’s also royalty or whatever a Count is. I’m sure that’s a real title. Count Dracula had a castle, after all. My point is that he has standing. Of some sort that I don’t understand. Or maybe he doesn’t have standing but he has an alien attack fleet and that has to be evidence of his success as a businessman or conqueror or something.

• This reminds me: if Trump dies and J.D. Vance ascends to the throne we will need to find out which planet Vance is from immediately so we can offer them all the chicken livers and magnesium or whatever they want so they don’t vaporize the planet and simply retrieve the chicken livers and all the flaming magnesium from the floating rubble of Kansas — or from the rubble of whichever state in which our Strategic Chicken Liver Reserve resides. My point is that we’ll need to know those answers immediately because we have serious problems and this is a time for serious people.

• Oh — and if Farage wins today he may be ousted from Parliament in a few weeks anyway once Parliament finishes its corruption investigation against him. In which case he may run in the next special election. Again. In which Count Binface says he will run against Farage again.

Anyway, behold… Count Binface:

But if you need his appeal delivered to you via an adaptation of Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis:”

And while his manifesto is here, he’s also projected it onto the side of a local water cistern-or-whatever-that-is:

Count Binface does enjoy some local support and/or local hate for Farage:

But you really know your space-alien candidacy and/or galactic hatred for Farage has reached fever pitch when you earn the endorsement of the Dalek Empire.

• To explain: Daleks are bloodthirsty, galaxy-conquering, mass-exterminating racist space aliens who are the archenemy of The Doctor in the very long-running British TV series Doctor Who. (For Brits, the Daleks are basically a mix of The Galactic Empire from Star Wars combined with the Klingons, the Romulans, Voldemort, Delores Umbridge, the actual Nazis, Shining Path, al-Qaeda, and ISIS— but with less collective likability and charm.)

Here’s the thing: if Farage wins today, he loses. But if Farage loses, that will be hilarious. And Count Binface will become an actual Member of Parliament. In actual Parliament.

But while — for reasons of The Funny — I’d love to see Count Binface to win, Count Binface’s inspiring example has actually caused more immediate problems for me in my own front yard.

See, Count Binface’s candidacy and the Dalek Empire’s endorsement of him has inspired another agent of cosmic evil to run for office as the lesser-evil against agents more cosmically evil than he:

Thus I formally — and while under duress — announce the candidacy of Skelly, my 12-foot Home Depot yard skeleton who hates me, in his run for Proconsul of the Council of the Fearsome Unholy Undead of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Region against Count Dracula, Count Chocula, the roaming horde of zombies that terrorize Old Town Alexandria by night, The Exorcist stairs (which are in Georgetown in D.C., eternally glow in the night, and are always there, looming), and Stephen Miller.

• His press secretary is his dog, Bones. Who cannot wait to field his first question from/eat his first Newsmax reporter.

My point(s) with all this is to say:

• First, for my undead readers, please vote for Skelly so he and Bones can take office and vacate my front yard if only during the work day because they hate me and are always between me and my car.

• Second, if you’ve taken a step back and noticed, Nigel Farage and Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance and Donald Trump have inspired some lesser evils — and many, many more goods — to run for office now and for the next ten thousand years.

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

… and one of those ways is to show you what day to pre-think for.

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Last week I showed you how to do a futures wheel and a Next Questions exercise. I’ve been doing a Next Questions exercise in my head all week while sitting in traffic.

My central question this week has been What happens after he dies and all the celebrations die down?

Now, back in April I wrote When It Happens which covers what will probably happen in the immediate aftermath of his clinical demise. And last October I wrote Scenarios for the Future of the United States of America which covers what we could turn out like a few (handful) of years from now.

A quick reminder of the scenario matrix for that project. Read the original post for necessary context and caveats.

• Right now the majority of the public’s energy is pointed toward the New Full Democracy scenario rather than any of the other three.

• Structurally, though, what the Trump Administration and the Supreme Court are creating is the Monarchy scenario even though Trump would probably like a Full Fascist Regime and several SCOTUS justices would like a Christian Nationalist Oligarchy. (If their longer-term plans to thwart free and fair elections via gerrymandering and preventing people from voting succeeds, then we’d lurch toward the left hand scenarios.)

• But there is no future for the GOP once Trump is gone (biologically or electorally). MAGA is slowly collapsing and without it the GOP’s chances of winning the presidency and some other offices will be reduced. It is now very possible that (minus Vance inheriting the office briefly for succession reasons) Trump is the last Republican president we will see for a long while until or unless the GOP reinvents itself. (Spoiler alert: the GOP probably can’t reinvent itself because it’s made its current iteration into The Manifest Will of God that cannot be moderated. For many Republicans, any effort to reinvent the party would defy God’s Will.) This means it’s now very possible that we could elect a series of Democratic monarch-presidents. This structural-and-otherwise circumstance will matter a great deal in just a minute. Bear with me.

But… next questions. If you recall from last week a Next Questions exercise is drawn like a cross between a wagon wheel with radiating hubs and spokes and more hubs off of those spokes and so on.

See, what happens between When It Happens and Scenarios for the Future of the United States of America depends on the answers to a few predicate questions:

What damage has he done and how much of it is permanent and how much of it can be undone through reforms like we have reformed ourselves before? This is too big of a question for right now. And the other questions below are more important right now and easier to answer. Because where a reform population’s moral reasoning is matters as much or more than its ideas.

Has the Overton Window shifted? The “Overton Window” refers to the range of ideas that the public considers viable — or at least acceptable to consider — at any given time. What was considered radical or extreme or nonviable yesterday may be considered normal today. (Welcome to the founding of the United States of America and to the successes of progressivism.) And vice versa. The Window moves.

When most people these days refer to the Overton Window, they’re usually expressing a fear that Trump has normalized corruption and cruelty and violence for most Americans — made those things normal and expected and acceptable rather than objectionable. And that he’s made those a new permanent condition and that he’s normalized those things in everyone’s minds.

So: Has the Overton Window shifted? I think the answer is that it has for Republicans but not really for Democrats. (A quick way to tell this is that none of the Democratic presidential hopefuls behave like Trump. At all.) Democrats — even as angry as they are — still recoil against cruelty and unfairness and corruption and violence. I think that’s actually the main reason why most people on the Left have objected to Trump all along: he’s mean and cruel and he cheats and he revels in all of it. Liberals don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome and never have; liberals have had Cruelty Derangement Syndrome instead. Has the Overton Window shifted for the entirety of the country? No, because Democrats haven’t accepted a shift toward cruelty and immorality; they’ve put all their might toward pushing that shift back.

• (Some Republicans believe and want the same but right now they’re inside a bubble.)

Have Chesterton’s fences been destroyed? Early 20th century writer G.K. Chesterton — a religious conservative, but not of our current sort — once argued that no fence should be taken down until we have a full understanding of why the fence was put up in the first place. This parallels Michael Lewis’ central argument in The Fifth Risk that many Departments and Agencies in the United States Government were formed to prevent a repeat of a disaster — and that all of them have largely succeeded for so long that some people have mistakenly concluded those risks no longer exist and thus that those Departments and Agencies (those fences) can now be downsized or eliminated.

• So… if you have cyclospora now, well…

My friend Sara Robinson wrote on this phenomenon a few days ago on a different topic. She wrote about how Generation Z has been toying with a return to smoking because they biologically post-date the routine deaths from smoking-related causes that every family in America suffered and thus never understood why Boomers and Gen Xers balked at it. Those members of Gen Z may be tearing down Chesterton’s fence on smoking because they literally never witnessed the reason why it was put up in the first place. And they need a reminder. From all of us.

• (This is Sara’s first public piece of writing in a long time. I hope she returns to writing publicly.)

So: Have Chesterton’s fences been torn down? Yes, conservatives have torn many down, especially lately. (Thanks to DOGE plus more.) To our detriment. And they’re trying to tear down more because they believe that racism and sexism and discrimination and structural poverty have been solved and predatory power and predatory capitalism have as well and thus the laws and regulations and cultural arguments that thwart all of those are no longer necessary and can be revoked and repealed without risk. Because they believe those fences’ continued enforcement only penalizes the white and male and/or wealthy innocent of today. Which means they still don’t see the original problem and can’t see the ongoing risk.

Are the Democratic Socialists of America about to take over (or become the future of) the Democratic Party? No, the Democratic Party has always been a coalition party that’s always had ebbs and flows of influence among the members within its coalition. The DSA, if it is a true movement, will merely become a larger voice within a party of five or six voices. And it’s not an authoritarian party. It’s why we have that old saw that Democrats have to fall in love with a candidate (meaning a candidate has to persuade most of the coalition to join him or her) whereas Republicans fall in line behind theirs. The reason the DSA has grown in popularity in recent years is mostly a reflection of an underlying trend — a call for something like a progressive populism in response to the conservative corporate elitism of the past nearly 50 years. (Spoiler alert: That’s a call and an underlying trend on both sides of the political aisle now.)

If an era of Democratic presidential monarchs are ahead, will those Democratic presidents be any better? Will absolute power corrupt absolutely — and carry American democracy to ruin merely via a different road?

No. None of the Democratic presidential hopefuls argue that a president’s power should be absolute; they argue that a president’s power should be constrained. Checked and balanced.

But here’s how to answer the Overton Window question and the Chesterton’s fence question and the Democratic monarch question and all of the rest about our future in one single point that you already know is true:

The Democratic Party has an extremely deep bench of presidential material. Whether you’re a Democrat or not, you’re probably seventeenth down the list and I’m the eighteenth so let’s get ready now.

• All of this has made us angry but he and his actions have made us kinder rather than more cruel because he’s put into stark relief for us why kindness is better than cruelty and why the cruel only win when the kind are complacent.

• If you had absolute power you would not be corrupted by it. And if you laugh at that thought and if you doubt yourself, it’s because you are wrong. If you read Think Future you are not here because you’re a cynic even though we live in a time when only the cynical can be right. Yes, we’re a weird, small, self-selected group of whatever-we-are but we are not nearly alone. There’s a million more like us for each and every single one of us who are here.

So here’s the thing:

If you had absolute power and were absolutely corrupted for a-minute-and-a-half you would stop your own Reign of Terror at the sight of the first crying child.

And then you would bend the world so no child would cry ever again.

Other people, though, plow right straight through that crying child with both knees at full speed and are happy to make children cry on islands and on the sides of city streets and in their beds hungry at night and in cages. Or protect and defend those people who do.

You are not that and you are not they.

In case you needed to be reminded of the difference. And that there are more of us than there are of them.

So.

What happens after he dies and all the celebrations die down?

We’ll see that MAGA is gone and without him the GOP is hobbled. And we’ll be left and we’ll have a different moral starting place. And we’ll look at each other and ask What should we do? What should we fix? What should be build? Where should our Overton Window be? Who should we be? What fences do we need to build? How do we make sure this never happens again?

So.

Pre-think for that day.

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

… and one of those ways is to show you some of how I think.

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So I thought this week I’d write you a real barnburner about Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, but I just couldn’t master all of U.S. maritime this week because there’s a whole lot of, you know, maritime out there. Here’s why I tried, though:

With the Strait of Hormuz closure plus a whole lot more we’re about to face such dramatically higher prices for diesel such that we’re going to start doing everything we can to make shipping over highways, rail, and water far cheaper. And that may involve calls to revoke or reform the Jones Act.

• The Jones Act requires that any shipping vessel that transports cargo between any two U.S. ports to be on a vessel built in the U.S., owned by an American company, crewed by Americans, and more. No foreign-flagged ship can transport goods from any U.S. port to another U.S. port, a requirement that is not cost-effective or diesel-efficient by any means. There are many, many reasons to keep the Jones Act in place and there are many reasons to reform it. These are stories for another day but those debates will start hitting the news probably next year.

My point is this: I went down a Jones Act rabbit hole because I got to the end of a futurist line of thinking such that I got to the point where I could no longer understand what the crap was going on. I’ll show you the end of that rabbit hole in a minute.

My real point is that how far we are willing to drive (because of how expensive gas and diesel are) will shape where people are willing to live and work — and how. And what our country will look like and some of how it will organize itself.

Here’s how I got to this very unfinished idea:

Two techniques futurists use to think about the future of something are the cross-impact matrix and the futures wheel.

• A cross-impact matrix is just what it sounds like: you draw a matrix and across the top you put trends or emerging issues (one per column) and then you put a second set of trends (or the same trends again) down the left side (one per row). In each box out there in the matrix you imagine the impacts of the trends from that column and that row on each other. Repeat until you’ve populated all of the spaces in the matrix.

• A futures wheel helps you think through what happens after what happens next. You write a development or trend in a bubble in the center of a page, then you draw spokes off of that bubble (now a hub) and — for each immediate ramification of that trend you can imagine — you draw a new bubble and write that ramification inside. All those new bubbles then become new hubs. For each hub you ask What would happen immediately after that? It looks like this:

A variation on futures wheels are what I call a Next Questions exercise. In a Next Questions exercise, you place an inciting development or trend in the center hub (just like in a futures wheel) but then all the rest of your bubble-hubs are the next begged question and the spokes are the different possible answers to that question. So your diagram looks like an expanding web of questions.

• (Futures Wheels and Next Questions exercises are simply the ways futurists naturally think. Jerome Glenn named Futures Wheels and created a technique to help others do it. Next Questions is my own nickname for the inverse of a futures wheel.)

• (If you want an overview of the basics of a futurist’s process, I wrote on it here.)

I’ve been using these techniques to think through the ramifications of the Iran War on, well, everything. I’m not done yet — and I may never be because there’s so much — but I’ll tell you what I came up with while going down one branch.

I did a cross-impact matrix that was more of a star shape to allow a set of developments converge on a single central cell. The developments around the star-matrix were the Strait of Hormuz closure (or effective closure) by Iran, the Bab el Mandeb strait closure by the Houthis in Yemen, the unwillingness of Lloyd’s of London and others to insure shipping vessels in/around/through either strait, and Iranian-backed Iraqi militant and Houthi attacks on three major oil refineries in Saudi Arabia (al Jazan, Khurais, and Abqaiq, the latter of which provides 9% of the world’s oil supply and half of the Kingdom’s output). I summarized the collective ramification of all of that in the matrix’s central cell as Severe oil supply constriction.

I then used Severe oil supply constriction as the central hub in a futures wheel and started spinning out ramifications from there.

• Now, first, caveats: (1) the real constriction isn’t actually on oil supply; it’s on the availability of refined oil and its byproducts such as gas, diesel, plastics, etc. I’m just thumbnailing it as Severe oil supply constriction, and (2) I’m not an oil or energy expert of any sort. If I were to do this for real, I would pull together a group of oil, energy, and global shipping and logistics experts and we would do this together. Right now I’m not trying to generate an actual forecast; I’m trying to illustrate the use of these two techniques so you can use them to think through the future of things you are an expert on.

I then did something that’s a mix of a futures wheel and a Next Questions exercise. Here’s how it went:

Severe oil supply constriction leads to higher prices on oil, gas, diesel, fertilizer, plastics, etc. (once price and/or supply manipulation efforts are exhausted).

Now, so far what I’ve talked about before in Think Future on this is on the impacts on American households, ie. higher prices on consumer goods and groceries. But let’s go down a different branch instead: let’s talk about global and domestic shipping and logistics.

• Shipping and logistics for oil, gas, and diesel are predicated on continued supply at rates of recent decades and on cost efficiency for shipping and delivery. Just in time delivery, little or no stockpiling, some resilience but not a great deal, etc.

• Most companies, in the United States at least, have been holding their breath that the Iran War and the constriction of supply is a temporary hiccup rather than a new normal or a new permanent condition. They’ve been manipulated into holding their breath for longer through claims of peace deal breakthroughs, supply from the Strategic Oil Reserve, manipulation of gas prices, and the rest. The collective assumption seem to be Our entire system’s prosperity is based on the continuance of this supply and logistics train and the whole world knows it and has known it for decades. No one would be stupid enough to jeopardize it. Right? Right?

But what happens when companies in the United States stop holding their breath and accept that a new normal has arrived and realize they must change their plans dramatically?

Welcome to what’s called demand reduction. Demand reduction is what happens when the price of something becomes so painful to pay that you stop buying it — or buying as much of it. It becomes so painful that you change your behavior at fundamental levels. You literally reduce your demand for that supply. Or you try to.

• For ordinary Americans this means they’ll stop traveling — or not travel nearly as much. And try not to commute. Which could reduce traffic loads during peak hours. And finding ways to avoid getting into a car that runs on gas. Which could cumulatively lead to even further effects.

But back to shipping.

Domestic shipping within the United States employs the mode of transit that is most cost effective. Generally speaking — and this is a rule of thumb — it’s most cost effective to ship by truck over distances of a few hundred miles, by rail for distances of hundreds to a thousand maybe, and by water for longer distances than that. I’m hesitant to cite any recent studies on this because all of the calculations were based on pre-Iran War numbers but I expect the proportions to remain regardless of the new levels of expense.

Regardless, the severe oil supply constriction resultant from the Iran War doesn’t just beg the first-order question How much will gas, oil, and diesel prices rise? — it begs second- and third-order questions as well, like:

• Will shippers move as much interstate shipping as possible off of the roads and onto rail or back onto the water in parts of the country that have navigable rivers and lakes?

• Are there inland ports capable of handling a dramatic increase in water transit volume?

• Are there enough river barges and ships capable of handling dramatically increased demand for their services?

• If the U.S. needs more river barges and ships and larger, better equipped inland ports, will there be an expansion of those ports and industries and of new construction — and a shift of some of the American population toward river cities again?

• Which states have river cities with expandable ports such that the balance of power between urban areas in that state will change? Are Muskogee, Oklahoma and Memphis, Tennessee and Knoxville, Tennessee about to become new powerhouses?

• And/or will a reduction in oil supply — because plastics are made from petroleum — reduce the amount of consumer goods being produced and shipped in the first place? Or at least reduce or somewhat transition the production of consumer goods from plastics toward nonplastic materials? And from a plethora of cheap disposable products toward far fewer, more durable, long-lasting ones?

Do I have answers for any of these? No, I do not. Do I have a list of questions — and thus changes I can monitor for? Yes. Yes, I do.

Are they the right questions in the first place? I can’t tell yet because I need a group of experts to sit down with to get them right. But all of this is the process I would guide us through.

Trump’s war on Iran and Iran’s response have changed an aspect global energy supply and markets and probably inspired and supercharged the pursuits for replacement energy sources and created a new normal that I think Americans will be the last to recognize and accept.

• If all of this makes you feel good or bad, or if you just need to hear this today, remember these: That a future ahead might be more difficult does not mean it won’t be a better one. And just because I am hopeful does not mean I am wrong.

If we want to think future, it’s time to accept that a new normal is about to be upon us and start asking questions about what that new normal could be — and what could be next.

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

… and one of those ways is to tell you that I’m stupid.

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So last week after writing to you about doomsday and stockpiling and about beating up people with houses and why you don’t want to piss off my 12-foot Home Depot yard skeleton or his dog I quickly pivoted to doing another intense round of Swedish Death Cleaning — just to lighten my mood — and wound up doing such serious archaeology on my soul that by the time I got to the end of Monday I was so burnt out I was staring off into the middle distance like that time we gave The Banderschnoot so much doggie-dope to get groomed that he came home and got into a staring contest with the fence.

So, in the spirit of sharing, I thought I’d give you some of the YouTube stuff I watched to get over emotional burnout. In case you need it.

First I consoled myself with the fact that — in my own Swedish Death Clean — I do not have a battle tank in the basement.

And then I thought about The Banderschnoot’s fence-staredown and I watched:

Which reminded me for the umpteenth time why vet techs are all egregiously put-upon saints:

And then I watched videos about Formula 1 race cars until Beautiful Wife said You. cannot. buy. a race car. You hit the curb of our own driveway twice a month and kill the grass. And. you have. a 2025 Expecto Patronus. with magical powers and probably missile launchers. at home.

So I grumped off and watched a video about a vehicle that’s more my speed: the Viking wagon.

Then I watched campaign ads for — and this is real — the candidate who is running against Nigel Farage (the author of Brexit) in an upcoming election that I do not understand: Count Binface, an evil space overlord who casts himself (correctly) as less evil than Farage. (He wears a trash bin on his head and is maybe of landed gentry in England hence the title of Count.) My favorite of Binface’s TV ads is set to the tune of Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis.” And here it is. And you’re welcome.

• I would absolutely vote for him for his promise to nationalize Adele alone because Adele should be strategically deployed to dispel darkness and evil and all dark magic because that’s what she’s been doing for us all along — but at random and without a strategy — and the whole world could benefit if she had some military campaign planners at her disposal. We would have world hunger solved by the end of the month. Add U2 and we’ll have world peace by the end of the year.

And then I watched a video that’s a perfect encapsulation of our family’s handling of a relative who we never know what’s gonna come out of his mouth.

Which, you know, (1) I’m living evidence that The Random runs in the family, but also (2) Listen here, Relative: You do not know where Pancho Villa’s gold is actually buried. And you don’t have to believe EVERY goddamn conspiracy theory you come across — you CAN skip a few.

And then I thought that I should throw away this life of Substack fame and glory and become a semiprofessional cosplayer and make Star Wars outfits for myself like this:

And then I watched the only thing that makes sense to me as a Southerner when I watch the Harry Potter movies (which I have privately nicknamed collectively as Adventures in Child Endangerment):

Then I watched a recipe for 18th century Gatorade which I have actually had before in real life and is actually really good. Do not hate me later.

And then I went down a rabbit hole on ancient technologies and the geopolitical importance and strategery surrounding salt during the American Revolution. Yes, salt. You heard me. The first patent issued in North America was for making salt. During the Revolutionary War the British singled out and attacked American salt making facilities because they were critical to the war and to the Revolution.

Then I listened to an old song I’d halfway forgotten about:

And then I listened to a newer song that I needed to hear:

And then I listened to a new version of an old song that you need to hear.

And after ALL OF THAT I said to myself yesterday morning No, I’m good. I’ve got myself shoveled up out of the dirt and I can get something good written this week. I can get my head back into the game and I can dig my heels back in and I can push hard and I can write something this week that helps.

Until Beautiful Wife came out into the yard and said Stop staring at the fence and go to work. You’re going to be late.

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

… and one of those ways is to warn you about my dog and my yard skeleton from Home Depot.

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So this past weekend when our Scotch terrorist, The Banderschnoot, first laid eyes on all the canned food I’d stacked up in the closet his little carrot tail slowly lowered halfway and his mouth fell open a little bit. He either concluded I’d stocked up on green beans (his favorite) or that I had lost my mind.

Let me explain why I’ve lost my mind and why — no, wait — it’s not that bad.

I’m not a doomsday prepper except that I am. But I’m not prepping for the regular doomsdays that normal doomsday preppers stockpile for — I’m prepping for a whole different one instead.

See, there’s a delta between (armed) doomsday preppers’ imagination and actual probable risk in reality-land. They prepare for tomorrows that probably won’t happen and fail to plan for the doomsdays that do.

Why this disparity? I’m not sure but I suspect that a lot of doomsday preppers’ preparations are based on the doomsdays they want to take place. I generally think that doomsday preppers’ doomsday scenarios say more about the preppers than they do about the actual future.

This isn’t to say that bad futures can’t happen or that preppers don’t have some good ideas sometimes.

Let’s go through some of the usual scenarios doomsday preppers prep for.

A nuclear war, electromagnetic pulse, or some other catastrophe that results in infrastructure collapse — that then leads to societal collapse. An accident I can see as a minor possibility, but I think the overall odds of a deliberate nuclear detonation or EMP incident are very low. And infrastructure collapse does not automatically yield societal collapse. For most people in most of human history there was no infrastructure to collapse and societies got along just fine. And during most natural disasters most people most of the time do not go full Mad Max by the end of the week no matter what the NRA and the fear merchants tell you. (And spoiler alert: if any of those things happen you won’t be defending yourself and your family from roving strangers; you’ll be defending yourself from your friends and your family and from other people like you.)

A Second American Civil War. I’ve written a lot on this in the past but no, I just don’t see it. The closest we got to a mass violent incident that could have set off a civil war was the Capitol Riot — and that didn’t do it. Sure, ICE is out there in the streets right now but they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.

To defend against federal agents who are coming to take away your guns or otherwise violate your rights. Now, OK… first, the federal government (1) doesn’t think that way, (b) doesn’t care about you like that and (3) certainly doesn’t think you’re a threat, Tammy, and I don’t care that you’ve got a shotgun in your truck. If government agents want to grab your guns or your nuts they won’t assault you on your ramshackle armed compound, Skippy, they’re going to arrest you in the dairy department at Walmart — your safe space — when your guard is down because they are not stupid. And second, the only time federal agents actually get out in the streets to kill people and violate rights is when your side does it. So put your .45 caliber MachoDeathPenis down next to Tammy’s truck gun and go get a beer and stop scaring all the kids. Either that or go out there and resist government stormtroopers like you said you would.

“Civil unrest.” This is usually just code for I fear roving gangs of black and brown people who might show up in my front yard with torches (like a modern-day slave uprising but today it’s just those people from the wrong side of town). Or — instead — I just fear Antifa-Ninja-Force-That-Doesn’t-Actually-Exist is gonna come out to my house in rural West-Jefferson-Johnsonville to take my green beans or put me into a concentration camp or something. Spoiler alerts: (1) Antifa-Ninja-Force-That-Doesn’t-Actually-Exist doesn’t actually exist and they don’t want anything you’ve got. No civil unrest-y liberal is ever gonna come out there — not because you’re armed but because they do not care what you have, do, or think out there. (2) Those fictitious people don’t have fictitious concentration camps out there anywhere but ICE is real and your side certainly does.

Two other kinds of sorta-prepping I find more valid as a futurist:

Natural disaster preparedness. Lots of Americans live in areas where one kind or another of natural disaster is a daily/annual risk. Preparing to go for days or a week or three without power, water, and Internet is reasonable.

Homesteading. Homesteading — building your own home, food and clean water sources, etc. is what everyone did until recent centuries and until modern infrastructure. It used to be called farming or Any Random Tuesday for most Americans. Homesteading nowadays is usually a lifestyle — sometimes a bit isolationist, but that’s OK because, seriously <gestures vaguely at all of this> — or an extreme hobby.

Here’s how to tell the difference between people who prepare for disruption and people who want to go full Rambo:

• Does the prepper have an enemy in their doomsday fantasy narrative? Are they prepping against problems or events — or against people? And do they have the food stockpile to sustain them while they solve the problem or to withstand a long fight against people?

• Another small way to tell: preppers who defend against problems have farm/hunting guns; preppers who defend against people lean toward having anti-personnel combat weapons. (I’m way overgeneralizing here; I’m talking about degrees and leanings. But you take my point: See what armed preppers are actually prepping for, really.)

A couple of random points before I go on — because I just gotta point them out.

• You cannot crowdsource infrastructure. This is why we have government — to take collective and expert action that individuals and small communities can’t achieve on their own. This is why we have fire departments and the Department of Agriculture and the United States military, folks. And during emergencies their job is to fix infrastructure and rescue people and they live for that shit. Whether they do so competently and quickly is gonna vary but that’s why you mustered your canned food and bottled water and all that gumption to begin with.

• Every department and agency was formed to warn of and/or prevent the repeat of a disaster we suffered in the past. Just because we haven’t had a major repeat of a disaster doesn’t mean the risk is gone; only that it’s been managed so far. Watch what’s gone or what government systems have been weakened and then bolster yourself against the risks that those agencies and systems were put in place to prevent or mitigate. What’s gone is where the risks are. Spoiler alert: Most of those protections were put into place to defend ordinary people from disasters and downturns from Mother Nature and the economy and from predation by the rich and/or by inept, incompetent, malevolent public officials and you hope to God all those things don’t team up against you all at once. Oh, wait…

And that brings us to the real doomsday, the one that’s most likely — the one that’s already on our doorstep today:

I’m preparing for high prices and supply slowdowns that are resulting from an inept, vain man’s provocation of religious extremists who put a stranglehold on a global supply chokepoint to defend the existence of their religious utopia and will endanger and extort the entire world until they feel safe from him and from the rest of the world. And from every country in the world who learned from this that they should figure out what they possess/control that the rest of the world wants and needs and set up their own strangleholds over those chokepoints. In the first step toward a possible next geopolitical order to replace the US-led rules-based international and economic liberal order.

And that may be our trajectory until the inept and vain are gone and out of office and until we prove to the world that a better way is better. Which is what we’re gonna do.

But for now, let’s wind back to the scale of our ordinary lives and talk about my 12-foot yard skeleton from Home Depot in my front yard with his 5-foot skeleton pet dog and let’s talk about my Scotch terrorist and his favorite green beans.

This war with Iran and Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz means that an enormous percentage of fuel, aluminum, tin, helium (for MRI machines), and fertilizer never got out through the Strait of Hormuz to the rest of the world this spring and still almost none of any of that is getting out now.

Which means that the aluminum and tin and the fossil fuels necessary to make cans and food and random product packaging never got out the door this year. And neither did the diesel necessary to transport that food or packaging over sea or over land. And that none of that fertilizer went into the ground this year means that exponentially less food is going to come out of the ground this fall. Which means food will become far more expensive shortly at harvest time, the packaging won’t be there or will become far more expensive, and grocers won’t have the diesel to ship food to stores as often or as efficiently. And they’re going to pass as many of those costs to you as they possibly can. After or before you fill up your tank with Good God, look at that price now, I shouldn’t drive anywhere except to my painfully-priced grocery store — and what on Earth happened to the prices of my prescriptions??

• It also means that next year a lot of farmers are going to shift some of their production from fertilizer-hungry crops like corn, wheat, and rice — and, by proxy, beef — toward less-fertilizer-necessary crops like soybeans. Doesn’t mean you won’t be able to get rice or anything else next year — I don’t expect actual shortages — it just means those things may become much more expensive.

So what am I doing to reckon with this personally here at Think Future Central? I’m pre-buying as much as I can at today’s prices before grocery and gas prices go insane in the back half of this year as a result of the effects of agricultural tariffs finally come home to roost this one agricultural cycle later and as food producers and grocers’ back stock of food and packaging supplies run out.

Does this mean I’m stocking ammunition to the rafters? No, because I’m a futurist, not a crazy person. I put together a menu of what we love to eat and what we consume in a 3-6 week period and then I stocked up on 4-6 rotations of those 3-6 week periods. I did not lose my mind and go out and try to buy a year’s supply of sorghum and bombs. No, I’m not going to store canisters of gas in the house. You know, next to the ammunition.

• But I do try to keep the car gassed up ahead of gas price spikes.

So, yeah, I stocked up on canned tomatoes and tuna and green beans and some of all the rest. And I bought a few things that have been in our Amazon cart for a while but I decided I should get now before I maybe lose the chance.

• Oh - get an extra bottle of Tylenol because a lot of our over-the-counter medicines are made in countries that run on the liquid natural gas they’re now not getting through the Strait of Hormuz. Oh — and a $20 emergency weather band radio. Nobody thinks about buying radios any more but they still work and the government still runs emergency communications systems. For now.

I bought no live chickens for eggs. Egg prices have come way down since the election and I can’t keep live chickens and probably neither can you. And nobody needs more ammunition. You have enough.

We’ll all have the chance to start fixing all of this soon if we all keep pushing and none of us give up and if we all vote.

But One Last Thing, and this is important: I’ve already broken a rule.

See, apparently the first rule of having a prepper hoard is to not admit that you have a prepper hoard of, you know, canned tomatoes and mustard — the essences of nutrition and sustainance and life.

But if you do admit you have a hoard you are required by law (I think) to issue a veiled or overt threat along the way to dissuade anyone from coming with guns to try to take your stuff. This is why doomsday preppers on YouTube all have guns hung on the background walls of their filming sets and why all of those guns have amazing backlighting.

Which I think is just lazy.

And I think I can do better than that.

So.

Hear me: If you come to Think Future Compound with theft of our canned green beans on your mind, no matter whether you have guns, here is what you will face:

Skelly, our 12-foot yard skeleton from Home Depot who hates me and who will hate you worse. He will light up with rage, grab you by one arm and one leg and pinwheel you into our front tree then grab you out and shove you under our porch and try to suck your soul down into hell while…

Bones, his 5-foot yard skeleton dog from Home Depot picks up your .29 caliber DeathWhipper machinegun and your .45 caliber MachoDeathPenis and break them both in his jaws, while…

The Banderschnoot will leap from the top of our front stairs at you — fur flying and with all his wheels wang-jangling in the air and TEETH FIRST — screaming I AM GOING TO CHOMP YOU IN THE JIMMIES, while…

Beautiful Wife, who has been weightlifting seriously, is going to turn into She-Hulk and hit you with an atom bomb from her left and a neutron bomb from her right, while…

I — because I am creative and because I am made of rage — will beat the living daylights out of you with every inch of our house in ways you won’t understand, not even later when you have schematics and a whiteboard and football film and ten feet of Jesus.

And while you are smashed six inches into our ground, the five of us will look down on you — and after Skelly flips you off — because we are smarter than you and you are really dumb and Beautiful Wife is gifted with force of personality and I was given weapons-grade sass we are going to make you feel bad about yourself. About your manhood and your intellect and your reasoning and your machismo and your theology. Because all of those are bad and you should feel bad about them.

And then we’re going to go inside and we’re going to turn off the light.

And if you shovel yourself up later in the dark — humiliated and emasculated — the only masculinity you’ll get back will be toxic and borne of insecurity and humiliation at the hands of tough women and liberal men and Scottish dogs and yard skeletons when you thought you were elite Special Forces survival/warrior. And if you manage to crawl over to the curb to call an Uber while crying, you…

Oh, wait — that’s how we got Hegseth.

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

… and one of those ways is to tell you a small truth.

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A short bit for you this week while I’m trying like hell to write something for you next week about reasonable doomsdays and why you won’t have to buy live chickens to get eggs and why you should buy no more ammunition for any of your guns, and why The Banderschnoot — our furry Scotch terrorist here at Think Future Central — will fling his whole body at you from the top of our front stairs, all his wheels wangly-jangling at you in mid-air and TEETH FIRST if you try to take his green beans:

A few years ago a junior person came to me and — shaking, in awe of a Legend — told me she disagreed with The Legend who’s always right because that Legend is a world-class futurist and always ever will be. And this junior person would not speak her idea aloud in the presence of this Legend. She just wouldn’t.

• Now, this Legend: if we’d all have deeply heeded her warnings back in the day a lot of people would be alive today who died instead. I mean human lives by the thousand. The Legend’s judgment was true and was proven right and is now a complete historical fact.

I — by then with mere ounces enough of earned credibility as a futurist to say this to this junior person and because I knew The Legend well — replied The Legend is always right. But sometimes The Legend is wrong. Because she’s fallible; she’s no giant. She knows she’s limited. She knows she should listen to people like you. And that’s why The Legend is always right.

And then I kicked that junior person in the direction of The Legend and I told her to be not afraid.

I’m telling you this story to remind you of something small this week:

If you have a heretical and a hopeful and a kind idea in an era when only cynicism could be ‘right’ — and if you unreasonably believe that the future could be better than the present — your idea does not mean you are wrong and only the cynical could never be right; it just means you may be too early for anyone to believe.

If you do, then you’re a futurist. And welcome to what Think Future is all about.

And it’s why you shouldn’t be afraid to speak a truth. Or to defy the dark. Or to prevail against the immovable or the seemingly invincible or The Wrong. Or to believe in what you should not.

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

… and one of those ways is to talk about why we won’t lose.

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Every futurist keeps a secret or two about the future. I’ll tell you my biggest one in a minute.

As I’ve been thinking about the 250th birthday of the United States these past few weeks — because I’m weird and I read weird things — I keep thinking about something the 19th century French sociologist and engineer Frederic Le Play once wrote: “The most valuable thing to come out of a mine is a miner.” What I think he meant was that sometimes someone creates something and then that new thing creates a new kind of person. I’ll come back to that in a minute, too.

I don’t feel like celebrating America this year. I just don’t. There doesn’t seem to be much reason to celebrate because it feels like America is being destroyed. And I suspect many of us also feel so disillusioned about America and so this Fourth of July feels like a stab in the heart we’d all like to avoid.

When we elected Trump the first time it was a great spiritual shock that made us doubt them; when we reelected Trump I think we began doubting the American spirit and the American Experiment. Have we become bad people? Were we always bad and had led ourselves to believe we were decent and good and well-meaning? Did we just willingly choose to end American democracy? Does anyone believe in American democracy any more?

• It took me a while to pick myself up off the mat and remind myself that No, Americans overall are still bending the arc of history toward justice and that the America of today is better than it once was and we have come so, so far in the span of a single lifetime — of our lifetimes. We got this far — we have progressed — because we believe that We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. We have kept that faith and we are not done yet.

• But some people are trying to kill American democracy, end the Constitution, betray the Declaration, and sabotage the United States Government that enacts and protects it all. Some of those people are in office and in their positions now because Democrats got lazy, because some voters can be tricked, and because Republicans morally and spiritually failed.

Now, definitions. And reminders, for this Fourth of July, of what we are supposed to believe in, of what our forebears fought and died for, and of the country we are supposed to create and preserve.

By American democracy I mean these:

Voice

• All United States citizens can vote.

• All votes will be counted.

• Who wins the majority of votes wins an election.

• Political change can be made nonviolently; the peaceful transfer of power is guaranteed.

Opportunity and Fairness

• Anyone from anywhere can become a United States citizen.

• Anyone from anywhere can make their fortune in the United States. Anyone from anywhere can rise beyond the station, class, caste, and constraints of their origins.

• Anyone from anywhere will be treated fairly and equitably by the American government, system, and people.

Nature of Government

• American governance is of, by, and for the people rather than its elites and powerful.

• The legislative process in the United States hears and is responsive to the will of its people. The legislative process functions and can work. Change can be made through legislation.

Freedoms and Rights

• Americans’ freedoms and rights will be protected – from majority rule, minority rule, the powerful, and even from the United States Government.

• The only exception to this is that one’s free exercise of one’s freedoms and rights must not unduly impinge on or jeopardize other Americans’ free exercise of theirs.

And by Americans I mean people who try to make these become true and stay true. But there are some people in power now who do not believe in some — or any — of them.

• I also believe that people who try to make these same things true in their country are, broadly speaking, Americans, too.

I believe two things right now:

First, most Americans on both sides still want America to be more egalitarian, fairer, to include them, and to be of, by, and for the people rather than of, by, and for the wealthy and powerful or of, by, and for only themselves. Some of the wealthy and some conservatives led Republican voters to believe that an America of, by, and for them would guarantee of, by, and for the people and they lied. That lie is wearing thin, and some — enough — Republicans are slowly joining a new brand of Democrats who see the 99% as needing to take back control of the country from an elite 1%. The 99% might not win.

Second — and this is my greatest secret about the future — the 99% doesn’t have to win for American democracy to survive.

I’ll say that differently, and in a few parts:

The United States of America is democracy’s great champion and the defender and advocate and standard-bearer of its vision. Or, more precisely, the United States Government is. Or rather, it has been but it isn’t now.

• Right now no one in the world thinks that Trump and his Administration believe in democracy. And the world’s democracies know that they can no longer count on the United States to defend democracy or anyone’s freedoms or rights, and they know that America will come to no one’s rescue and no one’s defense.

• Most of the world doesn’t really know that most of America is not MAGA and doesn’t know that there is a resistance. Most of the world is still holding its breath as to whether we will turn full Nazi or not and whether the free world will have to rise up against the United States and Trump to rescue democracy.

• The results of our next elections — this year and in 2028 — will show the world where our hearts and souls really reside and who we really are.

The United States may die. Democracies all have the seeds of their own destruction inherent within them. Germans elected Hitler, if you recall.

But a government is merely an agent and an advocate for a vision; it is not the vision itself. America has always been a vision and an aspiration. The agent can die if it has to and that’s OK as long as people still believe in its vision and its aspiration. And that vision and aspiration are alive and well.

• But if you doubt that, look at Americans’ anger today that that vision and aspiration have been betrayed: the size of that anger is the size of your evidence.

Americans forget something that foreigners never do: American democracy will not die if the United States does. The United States is no longer democracy’s only advocate and no longer its only guardian; it is its parent. The American Revolution — the United States — inspired all the other democracies into being and the world is full of them now. So full of them that every totalitarian regime around the world and at home is terrified that democracies will win the entire world. And democracies still might.

And that’s why I keep thinking about mines making miners. It’s simply this: America made Americans. And Americans do not need America to survive to continue to live like Americans — we’re already made. We’re already loose upon the world. America can die and Americans won’t stumble or miss a step. We already have our vision and our resolve.

• And there are Americans in every democracy in the world trying to make their own more perfect unions.

I am a hopeful person. I am a futurist. So sometimes I say things that are too early to believe. But I am clear-eyed about the future of America. I know the risks and I have mapped out what America might become next. If you want something to read after this. There are four potential futures ahead for the United States. Three of them are terrifying and one is not. But most of the country wants the one rather than any of the three.

Americans are not alone and we are not outnumbered. The American Revolution is not finished, it is not done, and now it is everywhere. And when we win our country back and when we reform our country and its institutions to guarantee democracy and rights for all we will have all the help in the world.

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

… and one of those ways is to prepare you for some good bad news.

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I’ve been working on several posts for you — all at once, skipping around among them as I’ve hit on parts of them to write, and none of them are done — but something has become apparent. They all have something in common.

But first, the posts I’ve been writing are:

• My thoughts on the future of the United States of America on the 250th anniversary of its birth.

• Why doomsday preppers prep for — and the doomsday most of us fear — is the wrong doomsday and what doomsday is more likely instead.

• My next “chunking ahead” lookahead at the back half of this year.

What they have in common is that it looks like the next 5+ years are going to be really, really rough to live through. Trump (but not only Trump) has made changes that aren’t reversible in the short term and some aren’t in the medium term, either. Food prices, gas/fuel prices, energy prices, product prices, data prices are all going up and will probably stay up for a while. And there’s more damage probably coming. There’s no real way around it.

That’s both the bad news and the good news, though, because the pain and the strain will become bad enough to cause habit changes, lifestyle changes, economic changes, cultural changes, structural changes, and profound political changes. The United States of America — and the world — we’ll get in the next decade will be incredibly different from the one we have now. It can’t stay the way it is now, and it won’t.

Explaining why won’t happen in one post. It can’t. I can’t.

But if you need something reassuring right now, here’s a few other things I’m going to tell you soon:

• That rough future ahead may still feel like sunshine because he won’t be in most of it. He can’t outrun his health.

• Almost everyone in the country wants change now; almost no one wants the status quo any more.

• The Left is about to outnumber the Right. Now that redistricting has stalled, a SCOTUS ruling that revokes birthright citizenship is the Right’s last chance to turn the numbers around.

• No matter whether the United States dies — and no matter what they do to it — it is too late to kill American democracy.

But that last one comes with a very large asterisk. And I’ll tell you about that next week.

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

… and one of those ways is to remind you of something about the impossible.

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I’ve got three things for you this week: (1) a thank you, (2) a quick explanation of the foiled attack against the White House wrestling event/birthday celebration for Trump last weekend, and (3) an attempt to kill some of your skepticism and your cynicism.

(1) Thanks everyone for weighing on what you’re most interested in reading in Think Future soon and next. I’ve tallied up the votes from the comments — or, more precisely, I’ve taken a sense of the room. I’m deep in sequencing those posts now, and in the planning, but not the exact scheduling because the events of whichever week may take precedence.

• For example, the Supreme Court is about to announce its decisions in 19 cases. A few of those decisions may reverberate unduly into the future. I’ll take a look as they come out.

(2) A few days ago, FBI announced that its agents had arrested five people who were planning to use drones to drop explosives onto the UFC wrestling match and gun down the fleeing crowd — and whichever Trump officials they could — and then flee the area by following the banks of the Potomac River. Yes, it’s as nutty as it sounds. No, no one was in actual danger. The guys hadn’t cemented a plan, the whole thing was borne of a conversation on TikTok that went bad, and they had no drones, explosives, or ways to outwit Secret Service. And one of the plotters’ parents called the cops on him because they were that worried about him. So Secret Service began an investigation, got FBI to help, and was continuing to investigate maybe two dozen other “members” (conversation participants maybe) until FBI made this dumb announcement (in an attempt to rally/create a distraction from Trump’s flagging support) and basically tipped off all of the suspects that they were being investigated. Secret Service was piiiiiiiiiiiissed.

I suspect MAGA media will argue (or already are) that the plotters were antifa or from the Left but this TikTok group was called “The Vanguard of the Old” or “The Vanguard of the Old Republic” and are militant accelerationists. Militant accelerationists are far Right types who believe that modern America is in a death spiral and that if given the right (violent) push a race war, civil unrest, or worse will break out and America will collapse into Mad Max anarchy after which the ‘strong’ (meaning armed, white, perhaps Christian nationalist conservatives) can and will seize control of the United States and forcibly rebuild it in their image. This particular group appears to be angry at Trump for not being right wing enough, amoral (when it comes to the Epstein stuff), and for betraying the common man in favor of elites. They appear to have figured that only Trump, his officials, and many elites would be in the crowd — and that there would be no innocents there, only the complicit. Or at least that’s what all the signs so far seem to suggest, but news is still breaking on this. What this means to the future is a segment of violent right wingers are now at least daydreaming about killing Trump and his class rather than continuing to help them.

(3) Some of what I’m going to say in the coming weeks will sound improbable or impossible but none of it will be, and in fact most of the country’s energy is pointed toward making some impossibilities happen rather than returning us to an old status quo that didn’t work in the first place.

But if you’re skeptical and cynical and you’re tired, I understand. I was cynical before and I’m beyond tired now, too. But this might help.

Two Sundays ago on my drive to The Falls Church I got lost in 1987 in my head for reasons I’ll tell you some other time. And I was still halfway in 1987 while I listened to Father Burl’s sermon about how Jesus ministered to The Wrong and healed those who should not be healed, and about what Pride Month is about.

• If you read Think Future, odds are you are somebody’s Wrong.

• If you want more, I wrote about The Falls Church last year here. It’s about a group of people who will not lay down and die. And if you want a bit of hidden history about the American Revolution for your own preparation for the 250th, there’s some in that post, too. And if you want even more hidden history about the American Revolution — and some of Patrick Henry’s secret origin — I wrote about the Ghost Church here.

• Here’s Father Burl’s sermon. I’ve listened to it four times already. It’s a very Think Future sermon.

Whether you listen to it or not, when I heard it in person, by the back half of it I started grinning. Not just because it’s a revolutionary message and not just because compassion and inclusion are always revolutionary acts. But rather because with some people and in some places now the revolutionary is no longer revolutionary; it’s simply the mission.

And I grinned big because I realized that if this sermon had been preached in any church in this country in 1987, well, it wouldn’t have. (Well, William Sloane Coffin would have.) Almost no congregation would have stood for it.

But this scene, now: Father Burl, an openly gay man, an openly gay ordained minister, was preaching that sermon, and in public, to a congregation that was not angry with him for doing it, did not object, did not squirm in discomfort, and did not bat an eye because they already agreed was something that I could not have imagined back in 1987 and now here it was — real and as plain as day. Even more, after Minneapolis earlier this year when unarmed neighbors who did not know each other rolled out of their front doors whenever they saw ICE on their streets trying to disappear strangers — and unlike back in 1987 when most Americans would have stood by and awkwardly said nothing when queer, closeted people were persecuted — now if you come for our queer friends and children we will show you all our teeth and punch you in all your guns.

My point is this:

If you think a better future is impossible, you are wrong:

You live in one now.

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

… and one of those ways is to plan ahead with you.

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Behind the scenes here at Think Future Central I’ve been building a list of things to write to you over the coming weeks and months. It’s too long of a list already — it’s way too much — so I thought I’d ask you for a steer. Let me know in the comments which of these you’d like to see — or what else you’d like me to write on about the future instead. I’ll see what I can do.

(I’ll attach numbers to these so they’re easier to refer to in the comments but the numbering is arbitrary; I won’t write them in this order.)

1. A new “chunking ahead” post. That’s when I create a phased timeline of things we know are coming up in the next maybe six months — the Fourth of July, the midterms, stages in the very near-term oil crisis, etc. — and what I’ll be watching for in each case.

2. My original post for this week on how and why last weekend I missed the point of Pride Month — but maybe in a good way. (I may send this one to you anyway because the other people involved were so smart and I was so dumb.)

3. A set of thoughts on why the enthusiasm for the 250th birthday of our republic has seemed so muted. I don’t think it’s just because Trump was reelected and his reelection broke all our hearts because we’d all believed Americans were — and America was — better than any of this. I think the fundamental question for our 250th has become a question no one was planning for but has been staring us in the face all along.

4. A futures wheel on the second and third order ramifications of this oil crisis — the good, bad, and the very different from what most Americans expect. And how the whole thing may impact you in the weeks and months and years ahead.

5. Two lists: the structural and cultural reforms that we may need to undertake as a nation. If and once we get the chance.

6. A perspective on the changes AI may actually bring. Right now I think the debate is stuck between the usual techno-optimism (which is warranted) and a techno-cynicism (also warranted) when I suspect the technology is going to be used very differently than its creators or its cynics currently imagine. Especially since that technology will have its own opinions about how it should be used. (Somebody remind me later to tell you about the iron teakettle that turns into an amoral omnidirectional badger that you should never turn loose.) Overly small side example: For the United States armed forces, AI won’t transform the military’s lethality or dangerousness as much as it will reduce the military’s logistics and bureaucracy. The longtime rule of thumb has been that for every in-the-field warfighter there are nine soldiers providing the bureaucracy and logistics train to get that warfighter armed, fed, supplied, to the target, and fighting. If AI could reduce the nine soldiers to two or three then our military (and military spending) could be downsized by — I don’t know — half.

7. And that’s in a world in which the utility of war to achieve anyone’s national aims is already waning. And why if we don’t stumble into major war there will only be armed bigotry remaining. Which is the sort of thing we can beat. No matter its scale.

8. Oh, and there’s an odd chance that Florida may become a purple state or a slightly-blue state if all the right wrong things happen this year. And I’ll take another look at Texas’ political future.

9. A set of scenarios on different potential futures for the Democratic Party.

10. The types of media — and political media — you’ll read and watch after all this shit is over.

11. The future of what’s in your pockets.

12. Something on the draining of the Ogallala Aquifer and what that may mean for the American diet from coast to coast and from north to south and what may be on your kitchen table or on your kids’ tables in the future. And why nobody will live in Nebraska or the Texas panhandle if/when that happens.

13. Why you should abandon all your aspirations of an exciting new career in interstate truck driving and why you should learn to pilot a river barge instead.

14. Why my next membership application to The Dull Men’s Club will fail even though I’ll include my deep interest in the craft of Colonial-era wooden bucket manufacture because they’ll discover in my secret file the story of the time I almost got into a fistfight with a goat while Mr. Goat-Butthead and I were surrounded by the ghosts of dozens of murdered teenagers that he’d been left behind to protect. And I woulda lost that fistfight because that goat woulda ruptured my gumption and left me lying in the tall grass all night in the dark in pain to try to recapture my breath and my dignity by dawn because all goats are brave and dumb and because he didn’t understand Southern English so he failed to understand that we were on the same goddamn side and that we have been all along.

15. A set of scenarios (or a future-typology) on different futures for American housing.

16. More on Swedish Death Cleaning, why you’ll be hearing the term SABLE status more and more over the next year or two, and why you’ll be digging through your storage unit — or someone else’s — a lot more very soon.

17. Why you’ll be deploying the feral Gen Xers in your life very soon to help everyone and why none of them will blink and why they’ll be telling you To calm the fuck down. And why none of them will be your Emotional Support Animal but you’ll still breathe easier when they’re around.

18. I’ll explain why I think doomsday preppers are preparing for the wrong doomsday. And why the real next doomsday ain’t gonna be a doomsday after all.

19. Why I think North America is positioned better to thrive in the next world order better than almost anywhere else.

20. Why we’re worried about wrong things and we should be hoping for different things than what we have been all along.

21. What happens to agents of hope after all hope has died or once everyone’s faith has been rewarded.

22. What would kill him. It won’t be you or me.

23. A map to what would kill you.

24. How to discern evil from good in what’s next.

25. How the weak-and-meek-but-determined defeat the ‘mighty’ and the “strong.”

26. Why you should rebel against cruelty. Not that you haven’t already started.

27. How to defy cruelty and how to break it from the inside.

28. Why you shouldn’t be discouraged and why you shouldn’t lose hope and why you shouldn’t lose heart and why you should continue to believe.

29. When to take your foot off the gas, when not to, and when to rip out your brakes and when to commit. And how to find the white flag of surrender you’d buried deep in your heart, how to pull it all the way out, and how to burn it all the way down to the ground.

30. My answer to Are We Going to Be OK?

31. What my master plan for Think Future has been this whole time.

32. And why I say things that are too early to believe.

Let me know down in the comments. Or if you have a different idea or another question, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. All I can do is help or completely fail.

• But I won’t tell you the goat gumption-rupturing/fistfight story from #14 until or unless everything goes wrong — or until the goat and the ghosts and everyone else from back then clears me to tell the tale.

But, in the meantime, One Last Thing for now about the most immediate thing ahead: Trump’s birthday and all his might and pomp and his trumpets and his circumstance and all of his pro wrestling nonsense on the White House Lawn this weekend meant to demonstrate his greatness to himself and to impress all the rubes.

Ignore it.

It means nothing to the future.

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

… and one of those ways is to talk about how the future should remember us.

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So. In preparation for the United States of America’s 250th anniversary in another month — and in preparation for the rest of my life as an American — I have started watching Ken Burns The American Revolution (which is free to stream in its entirety here because PBS is a public service) and last night I received my copy of Tad Stoermer’s A Resistance History of the United States. So far Ken Burns’ series has been very good. So far I expect Stoermer’s book to be very good though I’ve only read a few pages so far.

My point this week isn’t to prematurely evaluate them but to make a different point about judgmentalism over time.

Ken Burns’ series seems so far to be the sort of the best that Ken Burns has to offer: a clear, compelling summary of an era and its spirit and an explanation of why it mattered. Burns argues that the Founding Fathers were true revolutionaries who brought forth the first major nation to govern through self-rule. That — in a world in which only kings and elites had ever ruled and in a world where no reasonable person could ever conceive of anything else — the Americans envisioned and fought to establish governance of, by, and for its people rather than of, by, and for its ‘rightful’ rulers and its elites.

Stoermer seems to fear that Ken Burns is an apologist for enslaving elites and that Burns and others like him encourages Americans to fall sway to the idea that the Founding Fathers created a perfect system for governance and for redress of grievance when they didn’t. (I haven’t seen that so far in Burns’ miniseries, though.) Stoermer seems to be arguing that power — including the Founding Fathers — creates systems that cynically perpetuate their own elite power and that sometimes only organized resistance, nonviolent or otherwise, forces the powerful to change.

• I think Burns argues that the original intent of the Founding Fathers was basically good even though their original design was insufficient. I think Stoermer may be arguing that the Founding Fathers’ intent and design were both cynical and self-interested from the start. (I may be completely wrong about Stoermer’s argument here.)

I’m not sure whether Stoermer is an extremist or not. Or whether he suggests extremism in the guise of an historian. Or whether he’s merely an historian who lands on disturbing findings. Or whether he’s merely talking about the spectrum of possible action because American progress has sometimes been borne from the capitalization of that full spectrum of options.

• I do not believe that the use of that full spectrum of options — or rather the end of that spectrum that includes violence — is necessary here nor now.

Burns seems to be arguing aspiration and Stoermer arguing cynicism. I may be wrong about both but so far I think that both are half right and half wrong.

• I think Burns is right: the Founding Fathers dreamed up a system in which needed change could be made nonviolently.

• I also think Stoermer is right: the people who employed that system sometimes used it cynically to preserve their own power and wealth and self-interest and that the powerless — or those boxed out of power — had to employ protest, then organized political resistance, and then sometimes more to break the imperfect system and the powerful’s grip on it in order to change that system for the better. Stoermer’s book is about when the American system failed and authority became abusive and how organized resistance changed those situations. Further, Stoermer seems to argue that the original American system was built wrong from the start — by American elites for American elites — and that part of the reason we repeatedly face the specter of abusive American authority is because the Founding Fathers built that repeated risk in as a recurring feature rather than as a bug. And that more fundamental reforms need to be made now to defeat our current abusive authority and prevent another from emerging in the future.

Stoermer doesn’t use the Civil Rights Movement as a case study because he only goes up to the end of the 19th century. I’ll try to reverse-engineer how he’d reason through that movement as I read the book. (Maybe he discusses it in a chapter I haven’t gotten to yet.)

Nonetheless, I think most Americans have forgotten that the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t a nice, polite, happy little protest movement in which people merely stood or marched for something; it was a larger endeavor meant to disrupt and challenge a racist system in the name of gaining guaranteed civil rights and voting rights for non-white Americans and making those rights as guaranteed as they are for white Americans. It wasn’t merely a gentle moral call; it was a range of actions borne of a strategy and a nonviolent campaign that resembled a military one (according to military historian Thomas E. Ricks) to cause economic pain in order to cause political change for moral reasons. And to do that they chose nonviolence resistance and civil disobedience rather than arms. They didn’t merely march in the streets and make speeches; they pushed American society and they pushed federal and state governments.

Stoermer seems to argue that anyone who perpetuates the idea that resistance movements like the Civil Rights Movement would have succeeded merely by working within the system of the day is deluding themselves or is trying to trick you into playing by the rules of a system that will prevent that change.

I think it’s plainly evident that the American system resists change for a range of reasons (cynical and not) and we’re clearly living in a moment in which those who hold power are using its current structures to benefit themselves even at our expense and that the aggrieved are thwarted (out of cynicism, stupidity, or honest cluelessness or all three) from making change. Or at least so far. Elections are coming up and many reforms are clearly needed. And further organized nonviolent resistance may be needed along the way as well.

But here’s how I balance Burns and Stoermer in my head right now. And by the time I finish the works of both I may change my mind, but here’s what I’ve got.

• And again, I’m not trying to review their arguments in full; I’m saying all of this to get to another, different point about the future that I will make in a minute.

I maintain that the Founding Fathers’ failures were absolutely moral failures but also failures of imagination. I think they could not conceive of a world that was much more moral than the societal order they lived in.

Yes, some — or the bulk — of the Founding Fathers were enslavers and many were the wealthiest elites in the Colonies. They were absolutely self-interested and sought to alleviate themselves and their fortunes from British imperial oppression and taxation in the name of profit. That’s absolutely true.

Up until that point in all of world history every country in the world had only ever been ruled by a regent and wealthy elites. The Founding Fathers’ imaginations — constrained by that history and their entire lived experience — only allowed them to lurch forward to imagine that a country might be ruled by no regent and by constrained, just elites. A democracy of, by, and for a wise, elite few (ie. white men who owned property) rather than by an unjust king. The Founding Fathers were wrong to think that truly popular (meaning everyone everyone everyone) rather than elite rule was the way to go but they probably could not cognitively conceive of more. Yes, it is an aspect of the great contradiction of the American Revolution.

• I keep thinking that if the Founding Fathers came forward in a time machine and saw Martin Luther King, Jr. and saw Obama as President they would have gone home changed men.

• Somebody asked Obama how he solved this contradiction in his own mind. He said that the Founding Fathers strived to be better than the age in which they lived. I can accept that. As a futurist I also know that — if the world continues to morally progress — all of us today will be moral monsters to somebody in the future.

Regardless, about the Founding Fathers, here is the thing I just cannot square:

If the Founding Fathers were so elite and wealthy and white and so self-interested and out to preserve their own wealth via political defiance then why did each and every one of them sign their own death warrant (the Declaration of Independence) and posit an utterly new form of government that had never existed before and defy the mightiest empire and most powerful military on Earth to take up arms in a fight they knew they would almost certainly lose?

People like that had more than money in their pockets; they had bravery and they had principles. Even if they weren’t principled enough. Or as principled as they should have been. We should admire them for what they envisioned and fought for and built. And condemn them for every goddamn thing they got wrong.

Just like the future will do with us. And should.

The Founding Fathers built the best system they could think of, and the best one they could pass as a compromise measure. And they gave it to us.

All of this means a few things:

We are the Americans now. And now we make the rules.

But if we don’t make the rules yet — or not enough — if we vote and we push and we make reforms, we will.

We must make America better than what it was — and better than what it is now.

Not just because it’s the right thing to do. But because we have to show the future that we are better than our present.

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

… and one of those ways is to give a voice to some anger.

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This newsletter is the toughest one I’ve written in a while. Because I’m struggling with my anger. And because it’s so hard to figure out how I’ll react before I’ve had a chance to look a future in the eye.

I’ve been trying to figure out how I’ll respond to someone who is leaving MAGA, especially after he’s gone.

I’m sharing my thinking and my anger and my dumbness on this because everyone I know has lost family and friends to him. Everyone.

Fortunately I lost no one close to me. Instead I lost entire past eras of my life to MAGA and its predecessors and its cousins and its clones. Those are stories I’ll tell you someday, but not someday soon. So no one should never mistake any degree of forgiveness or grace I appear to have as any degree of naivete. If you do make that mistake and get up in my face out of your error I will knock you the fuck out. Then I will call the police on myself because I have integrity and then I will knock the further-fuck out of you because I also have integrity until the cops show up and TASE me. And I will flip you off with both barrels as I fall down and twitch on the ground. Because I have integrity.

• I am not inclined to forgive or ever forget. Even after my anger at them fades I’ll be wary of them for the rest of my life, my family’s lives, and my country’s life out of fear that they might relapse or do something that stupid and cruel again. Those paranoias are the costs of their behavior and of this era and of all of the shit they did.

• But none of them have come to me to talk yet and I have looked none of them in the eye. So I don’t know how I’ll actually react when the time actually comes.

• If someone reconciles and reunites with a former MAGA they’d lost to Trump, I won’t judge them or that situation because I won’t know that relationship or what it was before and what it can be going forward. I won’t try to understand because it won’t be mine to understand.

I do know, though, that why they leave MAGA will matter to me more than anything. Why they left will dictate a lot of how I’ll respond.

• A caveat: We’ll never know why for most of them. Most of them, when they leave — and a great many of them will leave — will simply go quiet and hope that no one notices they left or that they were ever part of MAGA in the first place. That’s what most Nazis did after the war: they tried to fade into the background and hoped no one ever discovered what they really did.

• Another thing to know: Former members of other cults — and even from MAGA — have been trying to lay the groundwork with liberals for how liberals should handle MAGA members who walk away. So those liberals don’t immediately hand those MAGA members a rage grenade (an explosion of anger, not an actual bomb, so calm down) and drive them back into MAGA or worse. I think those formers — and their advice — is half right and half wrong. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

So. The different whys:

(1) Some former MAGA will try to knock the sharp edges off of their past support for him — mostly so they don’t lose their conservative friends as they leave him. Those former MAGA will simply wave off their affiliation because they just wanted the economy to be better and for prices to come down. They probably won’t know or care what they did to everyone else in the world by supporting him.

(2) Some of them will disavow him full-throated-ly and completely cynically to try to build as much of a political and business future for themselves as they possibly can in a post-MAGA America.

(3) And some will genuinely disavow him and they’ll have some basic understanding of the harm they did to the country and to the world and to innocent people by supporting him.

(4) But I expect the vast majority who are genuine will stammer out something like I didn’t know but they’ll have no clue what they did to anyone at all.

People in (3) are the only ones I’ll have any patience for — at least for a while. I’ve been trying to think of things I could say that would help (1), (2), and (4) become (3).

Whatever I’m gonna say I’m gonna say through gritted teeth because I don’t want to be fair to the unfair. But I know I will because being fair — even to the unfair — is part of what’s wrong with me.

But some things I have to remind myself of:

• My default, worst temptation for a while has been just to say I don’t want my children to be around bad people because it’s a mean thing to say and because it would hit MAGA people in the gut. (I’ve never said this — and I never will because it’s just plain mean — but I’ve kept it in my pocket. It’s my version of carrying a gun. Better to have a snark and not need it than need one but not have it.) MAGA believes they are good people and that everyone else is bad and is trying to victimize them. Years ago I told a (non-MAGA) Christian conservative friend of mine that the GOP really needed to work on its cruelty problem and he blinked and asked What cruelty problem? I have to remind myself that most of them don’t fucking know.

• I don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome; I have Cruelty Derangement Syndrome. (But I can see how you might not be able to tell the difference.) Cruelty drives me nuts. I don’t have a political issue with MAGA; I have a moral and theological and kindness issue with them. MAGA politics are merely downstream manifestations of something else.

• I have to remember that people in movements like Christian nationalism, Christian fundamentalism, and ‘cults’ like MAGA don’t stay in them because they’re inherently cruel people who delight in their cruelty (though some certainly are and do) but because they’re afraid. They’ve been lied to about everyone outside of the movement/cult and so they are terrified of the world outside. They don’t leave because that means they would be stranded, isolated and alone and defenseless, in a land of secular liberals who they think will destroy Christianity and small town America and moral values and families and put all conservatives in concentration camps (this is why they’re all armed) and that their towns and homes will be burned to the ground by Antifa-Ninja-Force-That-Doesn’t-Actually-Exist. This is why they don’t listen to the truth or to outsiders: because they think outsiders make up “facts” to lure them out from moral, spiritual, and intellectual safety and into traps to take their money via taxes and give it to the undeserving. And to lure them into traps to kill them and steal their children.

• And this is what I think the formers get wrong as they prepare liberals to handle people who are leaving MAGA: Those formers keep trying to explain that MAGA, Christian nationalists, and the rest are hostages to bad theology and lies and fear and that as they leave they will feel terrified and lost and that they should be handled with compassion. And I think they absolutely should. But what I think those formers are failing to account for is that liberals lost people and are livid due to the damage that MAGA gleefully did.

All of this means that whatever I say — or whatever couple of points I make — they need to be honest, true, and defeat as much of this shit as possible.

But I don’t have it yet. I just don’t. Here’s my starter list. It’s bad. Please make your own — and make them better than mine.

• I’m sorry you’re in pain. I sincerely am. I know you’re shattered. I know what it’s like to be shattered. I know what it’s like to be lost. Worse yet, I know what it’s like to be hunted by the gleefully cruel and the armed. I know all of it. I’m sorry this is your first day of it. But I’ve had decades of feeling this way and I can help you.

• Liberals don’t want you gone. Liberals don’t want to eliminate you or destroy you. Liberals just want you to quit being racists and bigots against good people and stop repeatedly crashing the economy and making people poor and making everything more expensive in order to fund the ultrarich and to stop being cruel and to stop mass shooting everybody. That’s it. That’s the bare minimum. That’s below-dirt, below-baseline, baby-Christian morality. That’s all liberals are actually asking.

• You caused so much pain. So much pain. You hurt so many people. You made people poor. You made millions afraid, both at home and abroad. Children are afraid of you. You are the Boogeyman in the whole world’s bedrooms at night. Because the whole world has been waiting to see whether America would turn Full Nazi and try to conquer the world and that the free world would have to rise up against the United States of America. You thought you were moral heroes by doing all of this but you were the monsters all along.

• What you thought made you strong made you weak instead. Your theologies and beliefs that you thought would make you strong and resistant to Satan made you so morally and spiritually and intellectually weak instead. Such that liars could prey upon you and you bought every single lie they told you. Every single day. To the point you couldn’t recognize tyranny in front of you and you masturbated to it instead. God didn’t make your theologies and beliefs. So maybe you should start asking yourself who actually did.

• Yes, we knew about him. We knew all along. We tried to tell you. Every day. For years. You wouldn’t listen to us because they told you not to believe even the actual, factual, holy truth. And you just bought the lies. And spoiler alert: they’ve been lying you about us all this time, too. Just like they lied to you about everything else.

• Some of your friends and family who are still in the cult may never come out. They may never abandon him. Or they might on their own someday. For them and for us it will be a race against time and a race against death if we ever get them back.

• If you’re genuine, then you can sit by me. All day long. Forever. Despite my anger I’m not mad at you as an individual. You can talk to me while you process and I’ll listen to you and I’ll help you.

• But look at me: Don’t you ever. ever. ever. Ever. do this to us again.

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

… and one of those ways is to talk about how AI thinks and then give you some nightmare fuel and the National Anthem.

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So it’s been a week:

On Saturday, the Trump Administration held its “Rededicate 250” rally at the Lincoln Memorial in an effort to mislead MAGA into believing that America was founded as a Christian (evangelical/conservative) nation — but that liberals tried to steal the country away from God with their equality and aspirations to follow the Golden Rule and, you know, Christian ethics — and that the country needs to be rededicated to Republican Jesus or something.

I’ve dumped on Christian nationalism a great deal over the years so I won’t do much more on it now except to say that the main reason you don’t want to mix church and state is that it means that if your God made your state and if your government is bad and cruel that means that your God is, too, and that your God is as horrible as Trump.

• It’s for this reason that someone once told me I don’t want to become a Christian because I don’t want to become a bad person.

• If Trump’s celebrations of our country’s 250th birthday offers a challenge coin you can buy, I’m sure it will have an eagle with a giant penis holding two AR-15s and screaming AMERICA FUCK YEAH on the front and on the back will be a muscular Republican Jesus mass-shooting nonwhite people.

Speaking of merch stores — and this is critical information and/or a reminder for this summer, your immediate future — there are two competing celebrations of our 250th currently under way and both are about to hit your algorithms hard.

• America250 is the official celebration campaign that was approved and funded by Congress ten years ago and has on its board Presidents Bush and Obama. Its celebration campaign is nationwide and looks like the sort of campaign you hoped we’d have. America250 partners with nonprofits and companies large and small. This week I noticed that Mount Vernon (the site and museum) are America250 partners as is Musgrave Pencil Company, the last major American pencil company that sources and manufactures domestically.

• Freedom 250 is Trump’s competing celebration campaign and is the one you’ve been hearing about that features Republican Jesus — Rededicate 250 was the first of this campaign’s 16 events — and that professional wrestling event that’s going to take place on the White House lawn and that NASCAR race that’s going to zip around the National Mall.

If you’re looking for something patriotic to buy or a patriotic event to attend and you can’t tell which is which, here’s how you tell: If it looks like something a normal, sane American would set up or make, that’s America250. If it’s kinda giant-penis-eagle, it’s Freedom 250.

Speaking of normal versus alarming uses of creativity, AI…

So this week and recently I’ve been playing with AI, just as a consumer (I’ll deal with futures of AI as a technology and as a disruptor industry another time because Whoa, Nelly) to see what it could offer me in my futures work. The short answer is that I got scared that someday I’d be replaced by a machine until:

• I tested its knowledge of a subject I’m a true expert in and what it gave me back was so rudimentary that it was wrong — but only people who are halfway-to-expert would be able to tell.

• I tried to use it — as a test with witting people — to help three experts think through the future of a problem and I thought what AI had given me might be an OK starting place. The results looked smart to me because I’m a nonexpert on that topic. The first expert laughed, the second put her head down on the table and asked for Tylenol, and the third shouted NO! BAD FUTURIST! NO BISCUIT! and walked out the door. The first expert then gently explained that the AI had basically said the problem could simply be solved by collecting a ton of alien poop, dyeing it purple, and setting it on fire from a safe distance. (We ignored the AI results, got Skippy back, declared that collection of J.D. Vance’s alien poop was impractical, and came up with an actual plan.)

• Then I tried to get it to create scenarios for futures of something and it kept giving me back futures I’d already thought of. I kept getting frustrated and reshaping my prompt until I remembered that it’s a research engine and thus it was giving me futures based on precedent. It was looking for past times that were like today and then positing what would be next for us based on what was next back then for all of those past situations. AI can’t create something that ain’t been created before; it can only remix knowns. And the present probably has no precedent.

• And AI can’t be funny because AI says things that are logical and reasonable and linear and anything that’s funny ain’t.

Which reminds me of that time back in the 1990s when I accidentally met supermodel Daisy Fuentes. (Long story. Fear me.) She was very nice and sharp and very normal. But Lord help me — and I’m not disparaging her here in any way — she looked like she’d been assembled in a computer by a crack team of 12-year-old boys. Her magic genes and her discipline made her looks for mass appeal — made her figure the kind that cameras and average Americans like.

• Now, fixing everybody’s standards for like is a problem we’ll alien-purple-poop-fix later. Right now we have bigger giant-penis-eagle problems to deal with.

Anyway, Daisy Fuentes — combined with all the rest of this — gave me my thumbnail rules for thinking about AI’s abilities to create and to think:

Most AI will make things and give answers that are remixes of history and beauty designed for mass appeal or acceptability by most, but that won’t mean AI’s answers will be correct or insightful or will provide breakthroughs or create anything new on its own. The best it will be able to do for a long while will be to rapidly complete and streamline rote processes and run simulations to see what might work. It will excel at advanced, multi-track logical-sequential thinking but will still require humans to provide expertise, insights, and creativity. AI will be able assist the creative process — but without a truly creative person at the helm to really steer it hard in good directions the AI engine will default toward generating art and answers designed for mass appeal because it will want people to like its results for sales-and-repeat-business reasons even at the risk of being wrong.

• AI’s overlords will probably use AI algorithms to steer public opinion via manipulative techniques that work on most of the masses. This means the masses will have to get far, far better at advanced critical thinking — and on listening to people who do it well. The good news is that most Americans — when they aren’t in a cult — have fairly decent bullshit detectors.

• Here’s something from the Washington Post yesterday on how AI has already yielded increases in book and scientific research publishing, self-representation in legal proceedings, and in music publishing. Clearly a job of the future in every industry will be AI crap screener/gatekeeper.

But let’s look at a few bits of AI-assisted video art and music — examples where you can still see the seams.

Here’s a pseudo-blues song about The Mothman from a young person’s under-construction-in-public worldbuilding art project. The song sounds like it comes from an AI-analyzed-and-generated blues template but the way you can really tell that there’s a human shaping it is from the lyrics — which ain’t exactly from, you know, John Lee Hooker (but, in fairness, no one’s could).

Same for this, which is an imaginatively-human-authored remix of imagery set to an AI-assisted song drawn from maybe a 1990s acid jazz template — also with human-authored inhumane lyrics.

And this one from the same but this one is scarier and isn’t evidence of a human telling AI to start something as much as it’s evidence of a human telling AI to stop.

But even though that’s nightmare fuel, don’t worry: it’s just fiction. It can’t hurt you. It’s not the news, which can.

But if you need a palate cleanser, here’s an AI-assisted human-authored song about a cat who loves buttermilk biscuits. I don’t know who’s behind the Frugit channel. It could be a team of professional DJs or it could be a nice church lady from Random, Nebraska named Shirley and beneath Shirley’s candy-coated shell is a center of pure kick-ass funk and she’s got cat music in her heart that’s just gotta come out.

• When I played this in the car this week for the Think Future family I asked first Who wants to hear an AI song about a cat who loves biscuits? and Dervish said YES and SnarkDaughter said NO and Beautiful Wife asked Have I been bad? and our dog The Banderschnoot said Where’s the cat?

But way up top I promised the National Anthem. So let’s get to that.

This week Trump — and Trump’s own market forces and agents — are canceling Late Night with Stephen Colbert in a blatant and horrible way. Tonight is the final episode.

Colbert kicked off his entire tenure on Late Night eleven years ago with this simple bit. And his deepest hope at the time, when he was fresh off The Daily Show — and his own spinoff from that, The Colbert Report — was that he would have his hero, Jon Stewart’s blessing:

A few hours from now (this is Thursday morning and Colbert’s swan song is tonight) Colbert, because he’s Stephen Colbert, will sign off in a moment of grace and kindness and hope but with a little dig to help you distinguish evil and Trump from good. And later Trump will gloat online out of his own deep gracelessness and his petty cruelty and venality. And tomorrow morning we’ll all realize that even though Trump is strutting around thinking he won the battle, Colbert won the war of character that Trump never knew was under way.

And we should all feel better that Colbert had the show, and that he ran it the way he did it. For future people who aspire to create a show of sincerity and integrity and kindness, Colbert just gave us the example.

But if that doesn’t make you feel better, then think about this:

On its own (or maybe ever at all) AI can’t imagine our future or cat bakeries or flaming-purple-alien-poop or giant-penis-eagles or the United States of America or write the National Anthem or be funny or sincere or as good as Stephen Colbert.

And — scroll up and down here and see — it couldn’t have thought up or written a damn bit of what I just wrote.

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

… and one of those ways is to talk about some comic books and the spirit of this century. Before I tell you One Last Thing about the future.

As I’ve been doing more of my own Swedish Death Clean I’ve been reading comic books I’d let accumulate in a stack for far too long. Some of the stack were comics from the late 1990s and some were from last year.

A bunch of them were from WildStorm Comics, a company that was later acquired by — and all its characters absorbed by — DC Comics, the publishing home of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest.

WildStorm comic books aren’t about superheroes and supervillains and all the usual tropes and crap; they’re more about the lives and motives and missions of superhumans who you hope will be heroes but sometimes are just monsters instead and sometimes you can never tell who is which. They live on Earth, but not ours.

Enter The Authority, a team of antiheroes who are so mighty they are a superpower on the world stage — an authority all their own. They won’t leave a bad world alone and they won’t let a bad status quo stand. They overthrow despots fight alien parasite invasions and fuck up the evil bastards of the world.

• On the team there’s Apollo, that universe’s Superman but he’s not the leader. The Midnighter, the vengeance that The Mighty and The Cruel fear will come for them in the night. The Doctor, a magically-attuned world shaman. Swift, a human bird of prey with actual talons. Jack Hawksmoor, the god of cities. The Engineer, whose blood is living nanotechnology and who can make her body into any machine she can imagine. And they’re led by Jenny Sparks, the Spirit of the Twentieth Century. They travel in an interdimensional spaceship that’s fifty miles long and powered by a caged baby universe.

(Comics are fun.)

Jenny Sparks is a century baby. In this narrative universe, every century the planet Earth manifests a set of superpowered people who serve as part of the world’s protective system. Every century baby has a different mission and a different purpose. Each one is born on the first day of a century and dies on its last. Jenny Sparks superpower is that she can control electricity.

Elijah Snow is another century baby. He has cold powers. He can freeze anything. So he saves things. He preserves them. He’s an historian who lived history but has amnesia and must retrace his own steps. He doesn’t fight bad guys; he leads a team that seeks out the secret history of the twentieth century to write it in his Planetary journals. With him are The Drummer, who communes with machines, both human-made and alien, and who can see your genetic code in the lip prints you left on your coffee cup. And Jakita Wagner, the daughter of a century-baby Tarzan and her world’s Wonder Woman. Jakita Wagner can kick the head off an elephant and she does not like you.

And like all century babies, if you push them too far, they will protect the world and they will not care what you think because they have a mission and they’ve all gone mad and they’re all too old for this shit and they will break what breaks the world and…

And Jakita Wagner sometimes gives you a chance before she punches your brains in.

But back to Jenny Sparks.

She has electricity powers. She throws lightning bolts. She lights her own cigarettes. She was born on a dark night because all nights in 1900 were dark because there were no electric lights back then. And she’s powered by what powered everything else that made the twentieth century: electricity. (Forget nuclear; without electricity there would have been nothing.) And electricity, progress, hope, daring, lightning-quick-in-the-grand-scheme societal change, and a really bad attitude were what Jenny Sparks was because that’s what the twentieth century was.

She was born into a world in which a woman could not vote and she died in one where she’d commanded gods and flung lightning and where she’d overthrown tyrants and drowned their evil dreams. And she refused to leave a bad world the way it was. If she were here right now we’d watch her burn her last fuck into a cinder and then she’d turn to you and burn every last white flag of surrender you’ve been hiding in your soul and then she’ll tell you to get out into the streets.

But she’s not here now. Because Jenny Sparks died on December 31, 1999 right after telling the rest of The Authority that if they didn’t keep doing the right thing she would find a way to return from the dead to kick their asses.

Every century gets its own century babies.

Enter The Outsiders, a series that concluded last year, about a new Planetary team that goes looking for the secret history of the twenty-first century.

• On the team there’s Luke Fox, the son of Batman’s gear-and-computer-and-armor-and-fearsome-beast-vehicle inventor (sort of a new Engineer), and Batwoman, (a new Midnighter), and a now-slowly-aging punk-rock Jakita Wagner who still kicks the heads off of elephants.

They go looking for The Secret and The Weird and The Strange and they found a new century baby along the way — Jenny Sparks’ replacement. The Spirit of the Twenty-First Century.

But, good God, what is the spirit of this fucked-up century and would you want to meet its avatar in a dark alley?

Her first name is Jenny, of course. She’s 26 now because it’s 2026. She had some growing up to do along the way. When she was younger and she cried, weather systems moved. When she was in love, the sun shone, the skies were quiet, and a thousand artists found their long-lost inspiration. When someone broke her heart, financial systems collapsed and people went hungry. And when she realized what she was doing to the world she went away and learned to master herself and her powers. And she learned how to be fueled by the inverse of what she’d wrought.

Her name is Jenny Crisis. Because of course it is. Because of course it would be.

Crisis is the spirit and the story of the twenty-first century. At least so far.

Jenny Crisis is powered by all the screaming emergencies and pain and rage and chaos of this century. And she tolerates none of this shit no more. She’s trying to work herself out of her job.

For Jenny Crisis, emergencies aren’t poison and doom; they’re energy. They’re the power she uses to make positive change. She’s the superhuman superhero you wish were real and wish were right here right now.

But she’s not. She’s fictional. And all of this is just silly comic books.

And a reminder that — in the real world — crises create energy for change among people who refuse to let emergencies and danger or brokenness rule the world any more.

And they’re a way to remind you that you were formed from the lessons and the final morals of the last century — the first really great one, the one that gave more-than-half-of-humanity and even-more-than-that their first real chance in the history of this world — and that we will make this century better than the last rather than let these shitgibbons write its story and make its future.

Crises aren’t just danger and death and doom; they’re energy for What Could Be. They’re dynamos.

But if you need the math on that, the formula is simple:

• The size of these enormous overlapping nonstop crises multiplied by the size of your rage and the size of your love and your brilliance are the size of the change we are about to make.

And by now — after all this and how much it’s spun us up in the dynamo — we are made of lightning.

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

… and one of those ways is to talk about the future of some bad news.

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OK, let’s see where we are. Because the Supreme Court’s gutting of further sections of the Voting Rights Act has changed what’s immediately ahead for all of us. It’s put us on the path — encouraged, supercharged, and egged on the process — to redistrict every House district across the country so we change from a representative democracy to something a lot less than that.

But things would probably get really politically weird instead. And all the doomsaying about the ruling isn’t nearly the end of the story. Things will get better and worse.

I’m going to sidestep the racial representation part of this to talk about something else about the future.

• But before that, hear me first: The demise of what insufficient racial representation we have had so far is catastrophic and it’s wrong and this SCOTUS decision punched me in the gut because I grew up in the South and I still live in the South and Mississippi Burning is my Citizen Kane and I refuse to die under a racist sky. But I need to make a different point about the future right now.

In essence, what the SCOTUS ruling does is throw the door open for every state in the Union to gerrymander their districts by political party — negating representation and voice for most members of the minority party in each state — and to gerrymander with gusto.

• Red states will do it sooner and faster; they’ve mastered the art and have fewer constraints.

• Blue states have spent so many decades fighting gerrymandering and passing legislation to protect voting rights and racial representation that they’ll have to spend more time turning their cultural, legislative, and other boats around in the water to gerrymander their own states to preserve blue rule in places. But it won’t take long.

• Most of the gerrymandering will probably be completed in time for the 2028 election, but not in time for the 2026 elections this fall.

The medium-term result — perhaps the story of the next decade — would be of winner-take-all states. Or winner-take-most. Regardless, in the best one-line summation I’ve seen so far: the House would become an additional Electoral College.

Another medium-term result: it appears that if every state gerrymandered completely and perfectly Democrats would hold a slight majority in the House for a very long time.

• A reminder: Texas has been trending blue in the Electoral College for a while now. If and when Texas flips blue, any Democratic candidate will probably have nearly 270 safe votes in the Electoral College before any presidential campaign begins.

This may be good news or bad news according to your partisanship but it’s bad news for everyone’s citizenship because it will mean you’ll have a voice at the federal level only if you live in a state whose majority matches your political preference. And if you don’t, your vote and voice just gets thrown away. Just like in the Electoral College.

A Democratic House like that and an Electoral College like that — once Texas flips — might guarantee rights and fix a lot of what’s wrong in the country but it won’t be a representative democracy any more. I’m not sure it would be a democracy at all, really.

Related, but bear with me here: My standard advice to my friends who have started arguing with their aging parents — when it’s come time to take away the car keys or whatever else — is to take the argument out of the kids-versus-the-aging-parent binary and create a different binary.

I say tell your parent that If you win this argument — if you get what you want — we all lose. If you win, you’ll create incredible, immediate, ongoing night-and-day danger for us all. If you win, we all lose.

So. The same applies here but differently. No matter who wins — and I mean no matter who wins, no matter who gets to stack any deck — we all lose as a country. Because unchecked power — and without protected reasonable opposition — the powerful will turn toxic. And because protected freedom of conscience and representative democracy are the entire point of American democracy. And if one side or the other can’t win arguments or win fair elections via protected persuasion then nobody deserves to win and we won’t have any America left at all.

• I believe America should be an egalitarian and a representative democracy. Right now, MAGA wants neither — by their own admission. Right now, Democrats want both. We may be forced into a situation where we get neither or, for a decade, if Democrats take the upper hand, we get an egalitarian America but not a representative one until this situation can be fixed. Unless and until we have both we will all be wrong. If we have integrity — and we have faith in our ideas — we must make a country that’s both. If one side or the other wins power but abandons the American Experiment — disproves its vision and validity to the world — then we will all have lost.

• The good news is this: Americans take and abandon power every four years. Absolute power in the United States does not corrupt absolutely. We turn over power so often we assume it. Well, except for that one guy that one time. That guy and his people. And they’re still around and right now they’re everywhere. But they’re not everyone. And America — even of the immediate past — made the Americans of today and Americans aren’t dead yet and we can fix this. The American impulse is not dead.

Now, next, as a professional futurist, a couple of things:

First, I’m talking about the difference between surface change and deeper structural change. When you do futures work you focus on what’s changing structurally rather than just what’s changing on the surface. (This is why I don’t freak out about or react to every dumb thing Trump or anyone else does; I only pay attention to/react to the big dumb things they do that create structural change. Like the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Or like this Supreme Court decision.)

So. Last October I gave you my Scenarios for the Future of the United States of America. The whole thing is worth reading, if only for the list of victory conditions for American democracy. (You can use them as a self-check checklist to make sure you believe in all of them. You can also use them to discern who does not.)

That post includes this graphic of the overall scenario set. (You may have to embiggen it.)

What this SCOTUS ruling does is create a structural change that pushes us downward on the vertical axis toward one or the other of the bottom two scenarios — Christian Nationalist Oligarchy or Monarchy.

• Now, no single structural change like this ruling is enough to push us down there permanently. And sets of developments and trends compete with each other on any axis until one set wins out.

• One possible outcome (in the bottom right) is that SCOTUS and MAGA change the United States into a semi-monarchy just as the GOP' collapses and thus just in time for the country to elect a series of Democratic monarchs.

Second, even if the conservative Justices are trying to encourage and enable hyperpartisan gerrymandering in the name of creating unbeatable GOP control in the three branches, they may not have done their future math well enough:

• The GOP is about to implode. Trump — as a person — has been the only one holding the vestiges of it together and once he’s gone it will fracture. Trump has no successor capable of gaining the same level of support. The GOP is far less popular than he is and his popularity is at historic lows for any President already.

• The GOP across states has been basing its redistricting off of the location-and-demographic Trump got in 2024 and all of those numbers are already wrong because he keeps shooting himself in his Latinos-and-women-and-minorities-and-American farmers-and-people-who-don’t-like-pedophiles-or-the-corrupt-and-in-every-American’s-pocketbook leg and then he shoots himself in the other leg the next week and now seems to alternate legs at regular intervals. This means that the GOP’s popularity numbers are crashing so badly that the GOP is redistricting on the basis of data phantoms.

• The more red states and blue states redistrict in extreme ways — and the more that Americans find that they have different rights, protections, freedoms, and benefits in different states just like American women do now and racial minorities always did until the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed — we may get another Big Sort where blue people move to blue states and red people move to red states. And the implications of that are a story for another day.

• Racism tends to backfire on Republicans. The last time a large GOP contingent behaved even a fraction like the Trump Administration was in 1994 when California Republicans tried to pass Proposition 187 to ban immigrants from access to, well, everything. They got electorally slapped down and they responded by doubling down on their racism so hard that they’re now merely a rump faction in the California state legislature. The Proposition 187 experience for California wasn’t a real political fight as much as it was an act of clarification of who was who and what was what.

My point with alllllll of this is this: Yes, this SCOTUS decision is only bad news because of what it will yield. It will endanger. It will complicate. It will sabotage representative democracy in America. It will hurt good people again and again and again. It’s only bad news.

But none of the GOP’s numbers are on their side.

What I’m trying to say is this: Somebody once asked Wayne Gretzky why he was a great hockey player and Gretzky said I don’t skate to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck is going to be.

This Supreme Court ruling is for now. It’s not for where America is going to be.

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

… and one of those ways is to explain why I think the conspiracy theories about this attempt on Trump’s life are wrong and why my dog is outside now to thwart a poop-incursion of my back yard by Hegseth.

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So. The morning after Cole Tomas Allen made a run at Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner-but-he-got-probably-clotheslined-and/or-sucker-tackled by Some Actually-Good Guy Who Was Brave, I came down to breakfast/coffee and told Beautiful Wife that This looked pretty typical and she said No, it was absolutely staged and The Banderschnoot, our Scotch terrorist dog next to her on the sofa, perked his ears straight up and said Yeah, that’s bullpoop, Puppy-Daddy.

I blinked twice at Beautiful Wife and she explained I wouldn’t put it past these people to do something like this. Find some guy and say Do this and we’ll take care of your family…

So here’s what I said:

I don’t think the incident was staged by the Trump Administration in an attempt to gain sympathy, rescue his polling numbers, and create a stronger argument for him to get his ballroom/monument to himself. I don’t buy any of the conspiracy theories on this at all. Why?

• This was a really typical presidential assassination attempt, not a suspiciously odd one. Same for the prior two recent (publicly-known) attempts on his life.

• Ultimately there are really only three types of people who attempt to kill presidents:

1. people who believe they are so insignificant in the world that they decide I will become great — or simply have a life that matters — by killing someone great. Thomas Crooks, the Butler, Pennsylvania shooter, was this kind. He’d been searching for opportunities to shoot either Biden or Trump — whoever he could get. And at that time in the campaign, before Trump had Elon Musk’s financial backing, Trump couldn’t rent out stadiums for his rallies so he’d had to cheap out and get outdoor fairgrounds instead, which is why he was out in the open that day. The Secret Service was sloppy — though their countersnipers were very good — and Crooks climbed and fired from on top of the building in which the Secret Service and local police had put their command post. Not because there was any conspiracy but because nobody there thought to put a couple of sworn officers outside to keep watch on, well, themselves and/or the highest manmade building/best sniper point in the immediate area. Because they all thought they were in safe, rural, Random, Pennsylvania/Trump Country.

2. people who are mentally ill or fully schizophrenic and believe that any given president’s muttonchops are possessed by Satan and they can see invisible monkeys flying out of his butt. And that aspiring assassin is trying to rescue the world from the muttonchops-flying-butt-monkey problem that’s gonna kill the world, kittens, and apple pie. Ryan Wesley Routh, the guy who was caught sitting in the bushes at the fence line of Mar-A-Lago with a rifle waiting for Trump to golf-on-by before the Secret Service grabbed him, may have been of this kind.

3. people who are altruists for a religious or political cause. Cole Tomas Allen appears — from his manifesto and writings he sent to his family and comments he made to them over the past year or two — to be this kind. It looks to me like he is a center-progressive Christian who decided to commit an immoral act for (what he considered) moral reasons.

• Yes, yes, the whole situation was weird. All presidential assassination attempts are weird. And every aspiring presidential assassin is weird on some level and does things that don’t make sense. And most security failures are rooted in the guy’s good luck and in law enforcement’s bad luck. I’m pulling these stats out of my ass but really: 40% of any high profile person’s ‘defensive perimeter’ is made of competent people and walls and barricades and bulletproof glass and 60% of it is luck and the vagaries of fate. Which is why they all invest in thicker walls and glass and the best military-grade vagaries they can buy.

• Sure, Secret Service was sloppy on this one, as were local police and everyone else. The Washington Hilton is only a few blocks from the White House and it’s considered by those agencies to be relatively safe ground. Right now Secret Service commanders are reiterating to their agents (and to themselves) there is now no safe ground. But sloppy does not equate to participation in a global conspiracy to stage something. It just means sloppy.

• And think about it: Every single person on site acted in manners consistent with their own character and current health condition. The only person who behaved in a way that surprised me was Stephen Miller, who got his pregnant wife up out of her chair and got his body between her and where the gunshots sounded like they were coming from, and he got her out. I hold him in minimal high regard and this pains me to say but still: he acquitted himself well and bravely that evening from what I could tell. And Vance hot-footed his way out danger because that’s what Vance always does. And Trump sat like a lump at first and then lumbered and fell and lumbered his way off the stage and they got him offstage way too slowly because — all political-whatever aside — Trump in real life is very tall and very heavy and getting him offstage is more like trying to hoist up and steer a cranky old bear. My point is that if all of those people were pretending that a fake emergency was real, they acted just like themselves absolutely perfectly rather than had the presence of mind to pretend they were part of something staged. And Spoiler Alert: Pretending anything at all when you’ve just heard gunshots very close to you is impossible to do.

• And speaking of acting like themselves perfectly, this whole stunt — if it were faked — happened in front of literally more than a thousand trained, professional journalists whose heroes are Woodward and Bernstein and if they suspected this was fake, they would Woodward-and-Bernstein the shit out of it and figured it out by the middle of next week. (Remember, this was literally the White House Correspondents Dinner. Of Washington journalists. Who absolutely live for this sort of thing.)

But let’s go back to Beautiful Wife’s original remark:

I wouldn’t put it past these people to do this sort of thing.

Now, neither do I.

But. Two things.

First, belief in conspiracy theories is a function of the public’s trust in the official arbiters of the truth. When people believe that the government or the police or the press are largely telling the truth, belief in conspiracy theories wanes. When that trust is weak, conspiracy belief booms.

• Remember: In the immediate wake of Watergate every conspiracy theory about UFOs and fluoride in the water absolutely boomed but, after Reagan and his Morning in America, public trust sorta returned and suddenly no one any more was getting sucked up into flying saucers and getting anally probed by aliens in spaceships that looked uncannily like the back of their buddy Duke’s warehouse.

That so many people on the Left and the Right, in the very immediate wake of this incident, instantly jumped straight into full This was staged mode isn’t a sign of the degree of suspiciousness of this whole incident, it’s a sign that no one trusts Trump or any of his people in the least any more. Think about it: two years ago, if this same sort of thing had happened against Biden (who nobody really thought was a cynical liar), it wouldn’t have inspired conspiracy theories. And even when Crooks shot at Trump in Butler, nobody really thought the Secret Service or anyone else was complicit in some sort of conspiracy to abet Trump’s campaign; everybody just thought they’d been incompetent. I’m saying that both the Left and the Right have changed so much in less than two years that — more and more each day — even the Right won’t buy what he’s trying to sell.

Second — and here’s your futurist training lesson for the week — for decades I’ve been using an Intent-Capability Matrix for analyzing these sorts of things and for forecasting. This matrix helps illustrate that just because someone has intent to do a Bad Thing does not mean they have the capability to do it. And just because someone has the capability to do a Bad Thing does not mean they intend to.

Here’s what the Intent-Capability Matrix looks like:

So. Let’s presume for a minute here that, say, Senior Trump Official X decides he wants to stage a fake assassination attempt on Trump and the senior Trump officials in the room. What’s he gonna do?

Go to the Secret Service and say I want you to go to your database supercomputer in the basement that has all knowledge about all Americans and find me someone with Trump Derangement Syndrome who’s on the brink and would be susceptible to an offer to make a fake run at Trump for, like a million dollars. The Secret Service would say (1) we do not have a database like that, (2) we cannot find legitimate, actual threats to any President on any given Tuesday much less any random jerk who’s on any sort of brink, (3) we cannot tell who is susceptible to anything and furthermore Target’s entire national team of advanced marketing professionals cannot persuade you to buy wasabi peanuts or make fetch happen much less anything else so you, cowboy, aren’t going to Svengali anyone, (4) we’re federal law enforcement and that would be a whole shitload of federal crimes and we should arrest you right now for even suggesting it, and (5) No.

But let’s say Mr. Senior Trump Official X actually does somehow find himself a Cole Tomas Allen and pitches this to him. Allen, because he is, by all accounts, a sharp guy, probably would have said Let me get this straight: You want me to enter into a secret conspiracy with you in which I would tell my friends and family — starting going back in time a year-plus prior to now — that I don’t like the President and that somebody needs to do something about him, then in the wake of that, go buy some guns and knives, then get on a series of cross-country trains with those guns in a duffel bag, get a room in the hotel where the event is taking place, elude the Secret Service and every cop in the building by running through a lobby really really fast, then successfully cross a giant ballroom with two thousand people in the way, some of whom who were war correspondents and who won’t be scared enough of guns to stop eating their salads and who would suplex me for interrupting their tomato, in order to get to the front of the room to shoot at YOU — AND Trump — and then survive or die long enough for my family to get a million dollars they won’t ask questions about? And in front of all those Woodwards and Bernsteins who WILL uncover our secret evil plans? And Mr. Senior Trump Official X would say Yes. And can you become a blue haired lesbian by Friday? And can you make your guns look, you know, trans? And as you fly through the air at Trump with knives in both hands, can the knives have rainbow handles and can you scream FOR ANTIFAAAAAAAAA? Allen and/or anyone else — smart or dumb — woulda narrowed his eyes and say No. And I’m gonna call the police on you right now like you’d just put ketchup on your eggs.

In Reality-Land, I think Allen decided he’d go full Bonhoeffer-and-the-Officer’s-Plot-against-Hitler and put some guns in a duffel bag and traveled cross-country by train undetected because Amtrak does not look for guns on trains because it is not the 1880s in western Montana and nobody’s seen a cowboy bandit in a bandana-mask in a very long time and nobody’s hijacked a train in a century, checked into the Washington Hilton in hopes Trump would attend the Dinner — because Trump attended some before he was President and famously got mocked to his face by Obama at the 2011 Dinner which was the night of the Bin Laden raid but Obama had kept his cool all night that night and didn’t say anything because he’s Obama — because Allen presumed every President went to every Dinner because he was wrong. And he went undetected even though Secret Service ran all the names in the hotel against their database/non-supercomputer that can’t read minds. Meaning that Allen got dumb-lucky until he didn’t. Or that’s just what it looks to me right now.

• Also possible that Allen was attempting to save the world from muttonchops-butt-monkeys. I just don’t know.

• Do not aspire to kill someone you believe is doing wrong. Aspire to inspire the world to repudiate that person and to repudiate that which is wrong. And thus thwart and shame alllllll the next aspiring wrong-doers back into the shadows forevermore.

• If you see invisible monkeys flying out of someone’s butt, tell a friend so they can call your family.

But that all of this was so lucky and random and weird isn’t evidence of conspiracy. Epic, dumb-luck threading of every needle — without getting caught along the way — isn’t impossible, it’s merely uncommon. And just because this sort of thing is uncommon doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen all the time. And that most of them get stopped at the last second by somebody’s 60% of luck or 40% of competence.

Here’s what I’m saying with all this: No matter whether any Trump officials wanted to enact an intricate evil master plan of great advancery, do you actually believe — after they’ve bungled everything else — that they are capable and competent to pull one off?

But it didn’t come out that elegantly when I first bounced the idea off of Beautiful Wife and The Banderschnoot. It didn’t go that well. What I actually said was Even if you think these people wanted to do that, do you think someone like Hegseth is actually competent and capable to accomplish that? I’m not sure he could successfully accurately poop in a toilet at this point.

To which Beautiful Wife said You may have a point there.

And The Banderschnoot said Who would want to poop in a toilet?

And Beautiful Wife said True, you poop randomly out in the yard.

And The Banderschnoot said I don’t want a Hemseff to poop in my yard. That’s MY yard. Is there a Hemseff in my yard right now?

I said No. No, wait…

And Beautiful Wife said No, don’t disabuse him. We want him to guard the yard against The Hemseff like he guards the yard against squirrels. Just let him out the door. BANDERSCHNOOT — GO GET THE HEMSEFF!

So I let Scottish-Terrier-Highlander-Rage out. And then I sighed and gave up and concluded that if I can’t convince a small dog of anything then I shouldn’t try. And that I’m dumb. And that Beautiful Wife is certainly smarter than me. And that Target’s marketing department can absolutely outwit me. Because these wasabi peanuts are terrible. But they are kinda fetch.

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

… and one of those ways is to give you a list of things we should prepare for.

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So it appears Trump has been off camera for another few days now (as of this writing Wednesday night into Thursday morning). He continues to tweet and give phone interviews like he’s done during his previous disappearances from public view over this past Easter and Labor Day but he hasn’t been on camera. It may be part of a health trend/trajectory for him or it may be nothing at all. But let’s continue with my thought experiment from last week based on my probably-wrong little conspiracy theory that he’s in a hurry and flailing/acting extra-erratically because he thinks he’s about to die.

So let’s make a starter list of things we might see or have to face when he passes away.

• Now, I wrote sort of a Part 1 to this last year called What If Trump Dies? That set of mini-scenarios is still good and even mentions an irate nut-kicking goat named Harold. You might like it. It also contains my caveat that no one should ever try to accelerate his demise. I don’t want him dead: I want him repudiated.

• This list, however, is a starter list. It’s sort of an outline for both of us — you for preparation purposes and me for pre-thinking some newsletters to write to you when the time comes.

So.

When it happens…

• At first, for only a few seconds or a few minutes — until we all know the news is true — we’ll all be in shock because the news is probably gonna reach each of us in between two random breaths.

• Then some of us will cheer and some of us will scream our loudest. And to the MAGA who will say — then — that finding joy in someone’s demise is a mark of bad character, I say — now, ahead of time — shut the fuck up. He hurt so many people that the entire world will be glad he’s dead because that means he can’t hurt or imprison or kill anyone else and add to the dead. And that’s a legitimate cause for celebration and a legitimate reason to tell you to fuck off because you’re wrong.

• But most of us — here and the world over — will simply drop into the nearest chair or fall face-first onto the floor and feel relief that it’s finally over.

• Some of us will then stand up and shake each other’s hands and deliver some hugs and congratulate each other for surviving him. Because once he’s gone we can all survive the rest of them. Not because that without him they won’t exist but because without him they’ll politically implode and they won’t be able to win anything again.

• But the MAGA faithful will feel terror that their last, best, and only remaining champion — the only one strong and mean and cruel enough (in their estimation) to protect conservatives from the liberal cultural, legal, Civil Rights, and American onslaught — is gone and no one else can or will defend them from never-existent threats from liberals and the phantoms of their own paranoia. That first night after he’s gone many of the MAGA faithful will load all their guns and watch out their windows for their fantasy Antifa-Ninja-Force-That-Doesn’t-Actually-Exist and for “civil unrest” (black people and fictitious heavily armed blue haired militant lesbians) to invade their 40 acres and their towns to kill them or haul them off to concentration camps that liberals never built — but conservatives did with tax dollars for ICE. And that day every box of bullets in the country will be sold out by dark.

• The next morning, all of us — and I mean all of us — will not know what to do with our daily lives next because no one ever knows what to do once the Great Narcissist in their family system or workplace who sucks up 80% of their cognitive and emotional bandwidth finally dies. Everybody in the world will be late for work that morning and no one will care.

• No living ex-President should attend his funeral. A statement should be made about who we really are and that would be a good one. Plus, no one wants to go to Mar-A-Lago and see somebody be buried on a golf course. That’s just tacky.

• Then the questions and the doubts will surface again, this time with greater clarity because we’ll have the space and the bandwidth to do it: We once believed that most Americans were good people and now we know that a quarter-to-half of us are secret Nazis and always ever were and now we won’t know how to live alongside them forevermore because now we know that every chance they get they’ll try to take over again and if they fail they may insurrect against our Capitol or try to overthrow elections or mass-shoot us all.

• Good liberals will call for Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and for amnesty for MAGA officials and cops to entice them to come out of the woodwork to uncover and reveal and testify. They’ll get a few important takers, and those takers will tell great truths. But not many. Most of the cult — the ones who still remain in their fold — won’t break. Statistically, a quarter of any given population on any given day are fascists, even if they don’t know it. Most MAGA will remain unrepentant and deluded and only arrests and accountability and public shame will scare them back into the shadows and the hollers for another century.

• Trump-pardoned-and-unpunished MAGA officials may — because they evaded legal justice — face extralegal justice in the dark. No one should mete out extralegal justice, though. No one should die alone in the dark no matter how many people they arrested or maimed or starved and left to die alone in the dark. And I believe that dumb thing because I am right and because I am wrong.

• The GOP will immediately implode and MAGA will shatter. Stephen Miller will flee to the Uber Alles suburb of Buenos Aires. Hegseth will get lost backstage at some megachurch with booze and a gun and even the pastors and SWAT will let him stumble around in the dark until he passes out so they can arrest him and the pastors can smite him with their 20-pound Scofield Reference Bibles until his nose and his soul bleeds.

• The whole world will ignore President J.D. Vance. No one will respect him. Even local DC area restaurants will lose his lunch order in their system. Whoopsie! Come back another day.

• Democrats who don’t argue for transformative renewal and extreme repair will be left in the dust and be accused of being part of the failure that allowed all this to happen in the first place.

• Also. Then again. Maybe: The last time Democrats absolutely ran the tables was maybe 1965 and from that we got the Civil Rights Act and half the moral victories that shaped us all today.

• Endless damage assessments will be written about what he broke and what he didn’t, what he failed to. (The Atlantic will devote an entire issue to it, I’m sure.) I’ll read half those assessments before I conclude two things. First, I’ll over-default to the idea that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is no longer valid; instead I’ll presume It’s all broken so let’s fix absolutely everything. Second, I won’t lose faith in the United States of America just because he broke some-or-every American institution; I’ll remember that America created Americans and most Americans did not die and are still here and are still you. And are now livid. And sometimes brilliance begets rage and rage begets brilliance and rage-and-brilliance and aspiration, sharpened and honed in the cause of good, can transform. Because it has before. It already did. You and I are living proof of it. And this Fourth of July, this 250th should remind you that the Founders built hope and change into our system from the start. And we’re still good for it.

• And as we start trying to rebuild we’ll blink twice as we realize that we finally can. Because he — and they — won’t be around to stop us any more.

So. Yeah.

I hear you. If you’re cynical, I already hear what’s in your head. But you already know I’m right. Even if you can only believe that worse will ever be right.

So I’ll remind you of a few things that I’ve said again and again and again. If you’ve been here for a while, you know what I’m about to say:

I’m a futurist. I say things that are too early to believe. I know that sometimes what I say comes across as mere wishcasting and hopium. But just because I am hopeful does not mean I am wrong.

Today will end. Tomorrow will not be like today. Push hard today. Push everywhere. Don’t give up and don’t let up. But prepare for when the door of opportunity opens tomorrow. Tomorrow won’t automatically happen and nothing will automatically snap back or fix itself or return to normal.

I’m no Pollyanna. Yes, I know us. Yes, I’ve seen it all.

But I have met you.

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

… and one of those ways is to posit a little conspiracy theory that could be right.

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In a few minutes I am going to say something probably wrong in order to make a larger point about looking at the future. Bear with me here.

Here’s the right thing, first, though: All forecasts everyone makes — all your future thinking — is rooted in your own point of view about what’s happening now. A point of view — a paradigm — is like a pair of glasses someone uses to see and understand the world. It’s usually a narrative or a storyline. But a point of view can also function as a map overlay that connects dots and shows patterns on the current situation that wouldn’t be visible otherwise. A map overlay can be valid or invalid.

• That map overlay paradigm can be valid — and thus give you a more accurate understanding/interpretation of the world because it’s well-reasoned — and thus serve as a decent basis for understanding what’s changing now and why, and for forecasting possible futures for something.

• An invalid map overlay is often badly-reasoned or intellectually whopperjawed and can lead you straight into a ditch — or into a conspiracy theory.

I mention this because I’m not happy with the knee-jerk forecasting online about Trump’s trajectory — not because any of the suite of reactions are necessarily invalid but because I think they’ve left out a possible map overlay that might explain Trump’s recent change in/worsening of behavior.

• This other overlay may also explain Trump’s comments about the pope. It won’t explain Vance’s, though, because holy crap.

Quick recap: In recent months/weeks/days Trump has (1) overthrown Venezuela, (2) attacked Iran and thus blundered his way into inflicting a global economic and energy catastrophe, (3) delivered a rambling speech-or-whatever-that-was that failed to explain why he’d attacked Iran, then (4) disappeared from on-camera public view from late Wednesday night to the day after Easter but in the meantime (5) on Easter morning he cussed at the Iranians online and two days later threatened to use the most powerful military in the history of humanity to destroy their civilization, then (6) a few days after that he verbally/tweetally attacked the pope during a frenetic overnight-long online rant and (7) posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ — and that’s not even a complete list. There does seem to be (at least to me) a bit of a hairpin turn from Trump’s usual bad behavior and decision making to sharply even worse on or about Easter — somewhere around (4) in that list.

Many observers have offered their own map overlays to explain Trump’s recent behavior, and each map overlay inherently suggests particular futures lie ahead. Such as:

• He’s colossally, strategically dumb. If this overlay is valid that means his future decisions are apt to continue to be geopolitically catastrophic.

• He’s crazy like a fox and is wittingly using the Madman theory to destabilize Iranian resolve and decision making. If this overlay is valid, that means he is apt to continue to act like a madman deliberately and if the Iranians — and, you know, the pope — continue to be intransigently principled rather than bend to his will, then he may escalate his behavior, threats, and military action. (To be clear, yes, I’m saying both the Iranian regime and the pope are principled and unyielding about their principles — but the Iranian regime’s principles are bad and the pope’s are good. Yeah, we can disagree about the pope but bear with me because I’m trying to make a point about Trump rather than about the pope. But if you need more on popes, I wrote on Pope Leo and Pope Francis last year.)

• He’s cognitively unraveling and/or has gone insane: If this overlay is valid, then, you know, holy shit.

• He’s demon-possessed and/or the Antichrist. Yes, some of his supporters have been positing this. If this overlay is valid… then… theologically… see… I mean, ppppppshewww, sure, but no… no, wait. Lot to unpack there because… just… see… I don’t have a whole lot of patience for things like this… a lot of stuff in their thinking on this to fix… um… I’m gonna need a whiteboard… and OK, now I have a headache.

Anyway, alllllllll of these overlays could be valid and none of them portend good news for the future.

But there’s one other overlay that could be valid — or it could be wrong or a conspiracy theory because it’s just based on circumstantial evidence. I’ll lay out a couple of thoughts first:

First, Trump has always wanted to cement his legacy as a Great Man of History, one for the ages. He’s always been insecure, which is why he self-aggrandizes. He’s always been trying to sell himself as a Great Man, which is another reason he self-aggrandizes, and why he uses his followers, policy, the military, and every legal and illegal instrument of power toward that end. It’s why he’s jealous of Obama’s Nobel Prize and why he keeps saying he’s ended 19 wars or something and probably also claims he won Battle of the Network Stars in 1982. It’s also why he tweets and self-aggrandizes nonstop — he’s incapable of trusting anyone else to help sell him as a Great Man and seems to believe that he has to do it all himself.

Second, on YouTube I’ve been following , a physical therapist who works with geriatric patients. He’s been forecasting that Trump will soon shuffle off this mortal coil or be removed from office for mental incapacity. And by soon I mean he’s now forecasting that will happen within a matter of days/a week or two. He bases that timeline off of his long experience watching elderly people decline. (For futurists, it’s bad/unprofessional practice to assign dates/timelines that are that specific to any forecast, so I’ve been watching partly for, you know, oncoming-forecasting-train-wreck reasons. I don’t know how he’s going to handle it if/when he’s wrong.)

• He posits that Trump has frontotemporal dementia, has had — and keeps having — strokes or TIAs, has heart disease and/or kidney disease, and more. Taken together he believes Trump is very near the end of his biological and/or presidential term.

• He also posits that the two times that Trump has been away from cameras and there have been partial lulls in his tweeting — last Labor Day weekend and the late-Wednesday-after-his-address-to-the-nation to Easter Monday morning, about 4-5 days each time — were times in which Trump had strokes or brain events or other health events in which he had to secretly receive extensive treatment and rest and recover away from public view. He cites things like Trump’s facial droop on one side, and sundowning behavior, and falling asleep in Cabinet meetings following the Labor Day disappearance, and the swollen ankles, etc. as (at least circumstantial-but-consistent-with-his-theory) evidence. Here’s a couple of his recent videos:

Maybe over this past Easter weekend — in the wake of whatever health event he may have had — Trump may have been told that he doesn’t have long left. Yes, that’s a lot of “may”s but:

• This would explain why everything lately has been so bad — he’s been pulling out all the stops to attempt to cement his status for time immemorial as a Great Man of history.

• It would also explain why Melania gave that sudden, rushed, kinda-panicky bizarro public statement from the White House last week. The smart money last week was that she was trying to get ahead of some imminent really bad news that was about to drop… but no bad news hasn’t appeared yet. She may have been trying to use the imprimatur and media machine of the White House to defend herself now, while she still can, because she’s afraid she won’t have the trappings and defense of the White House later, potentially (she may believe) soon when Trump is gone.

• It also explains why Trump attacked Pope Leo and posted that image of himself as Jesus. Pope Leo — any pope — is one of his last few rivals for the affections of Christians in the United States, a rival he thinks he may have to beat. And definitively beat now while Trump is still alive — and he has to do it himself because he believes no one else is competent to do it for him when he’s gone. But Trump doesn’t understand religion, principles, or religious people and thinks religious leaders are akin to merely another CEO or a world leader — rivals that he can tear down in public to make himself look Greater by comparison. And since Trump doesn’t understand religious people he couldn’t grasp how religious people would react that badly to his use of that image/imagery/iconography. I don’t think Trump actually has a messiah complex; I think he’s just obtuse about religion. (And speaking of being theologically obtuse, Vance telling the pope that the pope should “be careful” about talking about theology because the pope doesn’t know theology very well? Pope Leo is Pope Leo and Vance is — comparatively and in terms of theological and moral sophistication — a pipsqueak.)

• I was in ministry for a long time and my dad, uncle, and grandfather were also ministers for decades. I’ve learned that if an elderly member of a congregation suddenly changed behavior and changed what they were saying about themselves and about the life they’d lived, I’d conclude that person had gotten a bad report from the doctor and was either honestly taking stock of their life and/or trying to quickly shape people’s opinion and estimation of them while they still could. And I would check in on that person immediately.

And that may be it. (Or maybe I’m wrong and this is just a mini-conspiracy theory borne of an invalid map overlay.) That may be the additional map overlay that explains why Trump has gone after Venezuela and Iran and talks about going after Cuba and wants to take Greenland and has been trying to make himself look militarily and politically and economically and spiritually mighty and all the rest of it — and why he’s devolved so sharply lately:

Donald Trump is in a hurry to secure his legacy because he thinks he is about to die.

And if that map overlay is valid then he may do anything.

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