CBS talking head floats the possibility of a 'black swan event' in 2024

CBS News' "Face the Nation" held a roundtable on Christmas Eve, affording various talking heads an opportunity to make predictions for 2024. While most of the predictions were relatively banal, one among them stood out, prompting critics to puzzle over its possible significance.

Network correspondent Catherine Herridge, the wife of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, suggested that "2024 may be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security event with high impact that's very hard to predict."

Statistician and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the term "black swan event" in his 2007 book "The Black Swan."

Taleb defined the term thusly: "First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the rise of the internet, the personal computer, the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and the Pacific tsunami of December 2004 apparently qualify as black swan events. According to Taleb, the term is not, however, a catch-all term for "any bad thing that surprises us."

For instance, the statistician told the New Yorker that the COVID-19 pandemic was not a black swan event because it had been wholly predictable.

Herridge told the other CBS News panelists Sunday there were a number of concerns that factored into her "dark" prediction, including that "this sort of enduring heightened threat level that we're facing, the wars in Israel, also Ukraine, and we're so divided in this country in ways that we haven't seen before. And I think that just creates fertile ground for our adversaries like North Korea and China and Iran."

The three regimes Herridge referenced have all expressed anti-U.S. sentiment in recent months and evidenced the wherewithal to adversely impact American interests.

China, which continues to deepen its ties with Russia and seeks to displace the U.S. on the world stage by 2049, has grown increasingly antagonistic toward the United States in recent years. The communist regime has subjected Americans to intimidation and coercion campaigns on U.S. soil; aerial threats by People's Liberation Army fighter jets; bombastic threats over political visits to Taiwan; espionage and political destabilization efforts by communist agents; a deadly influx of fentanyl via its informal Mexican cartel partners; and hacking campaigns.

North Korea's communist regime threatened to pre-emptively launch a nuclear strike on rivals after conducting an intercontinental ballistic missile test earlier this month, reported the Associated Press.

Iran threatened last week to seal off the Mediterranean Sea if the U.S. and Israel continue to commit so-called "crimes" in Gaza.

Instigation of a negative impactful event by one or more of the hostile nations identified by Herridge would not be wholly unpredictable, meaning — according to Taleb's definition — such would not qualify as a black swan event.

Despite Herridge's allusions to the anti-American triad, some critics on X suggested that the CBS correspondent was simply priming the pump regarding a predictable election-year event that might preclude former President Donald Trump from possibly retaking office.

CBS News correspondent Robert Costa, also on the panel, left little up to the imagination, following Herridge's prediction with the suggestion that the GOP might face a crisis if Trump is convicted of a federal crime. Another panelist piled on by suggesting the Supreme Court "is not going to save Donald Trump from the criminal trial."

The moderator for the CBS panel, Margaret Brennan, wrapped up the roundtable conjectures by stating, "Anyone who tells you what is going to happen with this election and how it's going to play out over the next year is selling you something because there are just so many different variables that all of us are tracking, and all of us are weighing. … But it's also why none of us will sleep very much in the next few months."

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