Here Comes the Sun

March 4, 2026 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The quest for greener, more responsible energy sources that crested with the international treaty signed in 2015 (the so-called Paris Climate Accords) continues in force today despite the current administration’s rejection of key findings on the harms of carbon-based fuels and its gutting of policies that the government has used to regulate them.

It’s difficult to impossible to stop innovation that’s both economically & environmentally beneficial once it’s gained traction, and the vast, 200-square mile solar energy project that’s moving forward in an agricultural stretch of California’s Mojave Desert is but the latest demonstration of this momentum.

Yes, the Western world is increasingly preoccupied with the costs of military build-ups (like in Europe) and strained supply chains (given the global reaction to tariffs & other trade practices). But the West’s demand for cheaper energy, it’s lingering commitment to cleaner energy & the enormous advances that China has made over the past decade in monetizing solar power have produced a change-for-the-better that simply can’t be stopped.

It’s also a story that speaks to this time of winter.

– because these weeks in late February have long reminded me of the awesome power that the sun always brings to drive the cold away. We’ve been battered here in Philadelphia by a succession of snow & ice storms that have created a continuous blanket of white over grounds that have seldom been dusted, let alone covered, in recent years. So now, in particular, I’m yearning for the warming powers of the sun.

– because brighter & more light also drives away the despondency that entrenches far too easily during our darkest months, and

– because the 24/7 sideshow of our political leaders tends to conceal (but not disrupt) the currents of progress that quietly defy their sticks & stones.

So a story about a project that includes 200-square miles of solar panels that are helping to irrigate farms & power cities from the San Joaquin Valley fits quite comfortably within the needs of this late-winter moment.

_{The photograph up top was taken by Erlend Haarberg. This picture of a girl is care of Derrick Neill.}

The project that has launched on fallow agricultural land “on the dry side” of the Valley deserves a far better name than the Valley Clean Infrastructure Plan (VCIP) because it produces a near virtuous circle of benefits. The VCIP does this by:

– providing new energy income to cover farmers’ losses from their fallow land while enabling them to continue producing crops like pistachios & tomatoes with the reduced amounts of water that the water authority will make available for the lands they’ll continue to farm;

– continuing to produce valued seasonal crops domestically for domestic markets;

– giving an economic boost to the towns and cities that dot the Valley by sharing the VCIP’s economic benefits—including funding for schools generally & for job training in the solar industry in particular—through “community benefits packages”;

– re-using farmlands that had already modified their desert ecosystems in a way that’s less likely to produce further environmental harm and which may be tailored to produce at least some restorative benefits in the future; all while also

– providing a workable model for thousands of other farms in the American West that have abandoned (or will soon be abandoning) formerly usable farmland due to declining water supplies, but that still want to afford their continued production of crops on land they’ll be able to irigate.

Here is a link to VCIP’s website trumpeting several of its wide-ranging benefits.

According to one recent story, not only will VCIP install solar panels for miles in every direction, it will throw off enough income to justify the installation of new, multi-billion dollar power lines to carry the 20,000 megawatts of electricity they’ll produce “on every sunny day at noon” (along with the rest of every day) to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. In addition, massive batteries will store the unused power that’s generated there until it’s needed most.

These days, VCIP is just one of many American projects that are drawing increasing amounts of usable energy from the sun.

In 2025, 7% of our domestic energy supplies came from solar power and usage is expected to increase by nearly 20% this year, when it will account for 51% of all newly-installed & utility-scaled power capacity. Moreover, solar power facilities are projected to produce approximately 30% of all U.S. electricity generation by 2030.

If that’s not encouraging enough, an even more optimistic future for the solar power industry is forecast by our most notorious entrepreneur (Elon Musk), largely because he’s been frustrated in recent months by constraints in the current power grid as he contemplates building new AI-data centers with their enormous energy demands. His frustrations have led him to ruminate about something I’d never heard about before, namely the Kardashev Scale.

First proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, the Kardashev Scale is a way to measure a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on the total amount of energy it can can manage to harness. The Scale categorized civilizations into three primary types: Type I (planetary), Type II (stellar) and Type III (galactic). Needless to say, Earth-bound humanity has yet to advance to even a Type I civilization, but for Musk—who actively imagines Type II & III futures along with everything else that he does—it’s only natural for him to also wonder “what kind of energy supply” can get both him and those who will consume his associated products to that civilizational milestone?

Well last September, Musk posted the following on X:

Once you understand the Kardashev scale, it becomes utterly obvious that essentially all energy generation will [one day] be solar. A relatively small corner of Texas or New Mexico can easily serve all U.S. electricity.

He goes on to tell us that he’s done the math here, before announcing how the solar collectors on his own space-based satellites will further help to provide all the power that humanity will need for millennia:

One square mile on the [earth’s] surface receives ~2.5 Gigawatts of solar energy. That’s Gigawatts with a ‘G.’ It’s ~30% higher in space. The Starlink global satellite network is entirely solar/battery powered. Factoring in solar panel efficiency (25%), packing density (80%), and usable daylight hours (~6), a reasonable rule of thumb is 3 GWh of energy per square mile per day. Easy math, but almost no one does these basic calculations.

Among other things, that easy math makes Musk confident that he can build a solar energy company out of the foundations that he’s already laid in SpaceX and in Tesla’s solar division, which currently provides rooftop solar panels to consumers along with energy storage solutions.

Who am I to say whether Elon Musk (in full-on visionary mode) is right or wrong when he looks towards the sun and sees it as the only source we’ll need to power the future of our civilization.

But what I can say is that solar energy projects like VCIP and the proliferation of its kind of model throughout the increasingly-dry farmlands of the American West might very well mark the next big step in our solar-powered future—whatever distain Washington currently has about an energy source that’s cheaper & cleaner than any of the alternatives.

For me at least, that’s bringing rays of sunshine into the first week of March.

This post was adapted from my March 1, 2026 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Storytelling Our Way to a Nobler Time

February 3, 2026 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Listening to myself tell you about something that happened in 5th Grade makes me feel like it was a hundred years ago, almost lost in the mists of time.

Either the weather was bad or there was some other reason that we couldn’t go outside for recess so our teacher—Sister Dennis I think her name was—needing some way to redirect our 10- or 11-year-old restlessness, asked if we’d like to hear her read us a story.

To call our muffled response a “Yes” that day would have been generous, but that’s what she chose to hear, having no better idea about “what to do with the lot of us” under the circumstances.

The book she’d selected was “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis. and this is how it begins:

ONCE there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.

That was really all it took to settle us down & put us on our way to finding out more about this refuge from the Blitz, the furtive games of hide & seek that took place there, and how one such game found Lucy (the youngest of the 4) hiding in a wardrobe that became a portal to a another world as she pushed her way inside and started feeling snow & ever-green branches instead of simply coats and sweaters.

Us 5th Graders ended up having the whole book read to us during that season of grade school because every time we couldn’t go outside (and even some times when we could) we called out for it in something like a chorus, not being able to wait any longer to hear what happened next as those children met the White Witch, a fearsome Lion and a taking faun named Mr. Tumnus.

I mention all this because a new book came out recently about C.S. Lewis, his friend and Oxford University colleague J.R.R. Tolkien, and how both came to pen sagas about marvelous worlds that were more hopeful & noble & loyal than the worlds that had collided around them during World War II. This book is called “The War for Middle Earth,” and it begins with the fantasy world that Lewis called Narnia, a place “with endless winter and no spring,” and with an equally menacing one that Tolkien conjured out of hobbits, dwarves, humans & elves and their struggles to defeat the malevolent forces that had gathered around the Lord Of the Rings.

In “The War for Middle Earth,”author Joseph Locate’s main point is that both Lewis & Tolkien wanted to bring a broken world stories that were powerful enough to re-animate human virtues like wisdom & friendship, courage & self-sacrifice we seemed at risk of losing in our modern battles of Good versus Evil.

Both Lewis and Tolkien had fought in the Great War (1914-1918) and the experience had (in the words of one reviewer) “endowed them with a tragic sensibility and a perception of true heroism” instead of the “twin drugs of ideology and nihilism” that too many of their fellows had turned to in order to manage the pain of that barbaric conflict. Concerned that the second great war also saw too little virtue and “faith in human dignity,” Lewis came to write his Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) and Tolkien his Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-55). As this reviewer continued:

Much of Mr. Loconte’s history concerns Lewis’s and Tolkien’s efforts as scholars. Their positions in Oxford’s English department gave them authority to promote classic literature as a solution to modern discontent. Tolkien, a scholar of Old English, studied the ‘theory of courage’ found in poems such as the ancient epic ‘Beowulf,’ redeeming what he called the ‘noble northern spirit’ from the fascists who would pervert it. Lewis, meanwhile, sought to recover the ideas of love that animated medieval and Renaissance literature. Both authors admired the way that the medievals combined pagan virtues with Christian theology to sustain a culture that was simultaneously vital and humane.

Lewis & Tolkien believed that the West’s literary tradition provided the moral grounding that can enable individuals “in the face of death” to forsake their own safety in the struggle to save others from subjugation. In Loconte’s view, both hoped their imaginative stories would help to counter “many in the West” who had come to doubt and even resent our civilization’s ideals in their cynicism and retreat from what would have once been seen as necessary commitments. Arsenals like fellowship and a wider respect for human dignity would be necessary to counter new despots as they sought to spread their particular brands of tyranny.

In other words: What is still worth fighting for after all the darkness and horror they had seen?

What virtues will humanity need for its next battles?

_{“Evil has reigned for100 years.” What will we need to replace it?}

_{Legions of orcs are one face of Evil in the battle for Middle Earth.}

A couple of hundred posts ago, I wrote here about an exhibit at Oxford’s Bodieian Library of watercolors that Tolkien had painted before writing either “The Hobbit” or “The Lord of the Rings” so he could envision the world that his heroes would be fighting for. In that same newsletter, I quoted from a local philosophy professor who lamented the near-impossibility of imagining such an ideal world today—our “utopia of desire”—and what it would feel like to be returning there after the additional shocks the human race has experienced in the 80 years since Lewis & Tolkien had offered us their ways back home.

He despairingly told us:

The utopias of desire make little sense in a world overrun by cheap entertainment, unbridled consumerism and narcissistic behaviors The utopias of technology are less impressive that ever now that—after Hiroshima and Chernobyl—we are fully aware of the destructive potential of technology. Even the internet, perhaps the most recent candidate for technological optimism, turns out to have a number of potentially disastrous consequences, among them a widespread disregard for truth and objectivity, as well as an immense increase in the capacity for surveillance. The utopias of justice seem largely to have been eviscerated by 20th-century totalitarianism. After the Gulag Archipelago, the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields and the Cultural Revolution, these utopias seem both philosophically and politically dead.

That catalog of smashed ideals was compiled almost 8 years ago, before a global pandemic, growing political divisions, media’s assault on our attention spans, and the rise of artificial intelligence had defeated even more of our hopes.

So it’s fair to ask: how much more do we need collective stories—ones that affirm the best in humanity, show us how to have courage & conviction—in our current battles against nihilism & tyranny?

Such a story might begin with our visualizing what we cherish most about our lives. For Lewis & Tolkien, it was the communal life of the countryside and the heroism that everyday people could muster in challenging times. For both, it was also courageous action emboldened by faith.

In their respective writings, their challenge was to combine these elements into more compelling narratives than the fascists or communists had been telling. To that end, Lewis & Tolkien took what was best in the Western literary tradition and wove it into characters & plot lines that effectively “critiqued and opposed the point-blank threat of what was worst in our tradition,” as another reviewer has noted. These sagas “made qualities like courage and fortitude deeply attractive to an otherwise skeptical generation.”

Said Lewis himself: “When we have finished [these narratives], we return to our own life not relaxed, but fortified.”

_{The early-teen protagonists in the streaming saga “Stranger Things,” arrayed against the forces of Evil that treaten their hometown}.

By now you’ve probably gathered that I wish every unexceptional inhabitant of this troubled planet could have the benefit of new stories & sagas that could bolster the fortitude and courage they’ll need in their current struggles against cynicism, despair and resignation.

How long has it been since a story you’ve read or watched actually left you emboldened or (as C.S.Lewis put it:) “fortified” instead of merely entertained?

Late last fall, I joined the daughter of close friends who was visiting from graduate school, we got to talking about stories we’d recently enjoyed, and she strongly recommended that I watch Season 3 of “Stranger Things,” an 80’s-inspired, sci-fi/horror-saga with large doses of comic relief about a close-knit group of small-town kids who play games like Dungeons & Dragons far from the in-crowd of their middle school before mustering their talents to confront the ultimate Evil.

The recommendation came with certain demands, like watching the first 2 seasons of the show to get to know the characters and their fight against the horrors of the mirror world that exists beneath them as well as a federal government that aims to harness its potent powers. Well I took her advice, made it through the Season,1, marveled at the uptick of Season 2, and was (as promised) amply rewarded by the remarkable confrontations of Season 3.

The story profiles young heroes in impossible situations while their adolescent hormones intrude & shows their self-sacrifice and courage in genuinely terrifying circumstances, all while celebrating (in technicolor) the aspects of their town (the mall & community pool, annual fair & middle-school dance) that they love the most and rally to protect.

The Duffer Brothers behind “Stranger Things” are not C.S.Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but what they built in this multi-dimensional & deeply human saga about a more “contemporary” battle between Good & Evil is noteworthy, and their success as storytellers in the storytelling marketplace even more so.

The entire 5 season franchise has gotten more than 1.2 billion views. It has become a global cultural phenomenon for younger generations that have lived much of their lives during the Great Recession, a global pandemic, through the downsides of cellphones and social media & amidst their ever growing fears about the future. If the show’s fans were looking for heroes who embodied loyalty & bravery against impossible odds they would have found them in Season 3—several of them in fact.

So if “Stranger Things” demonstrates anything, it is the ravenous hunger that young viewers have for stories that might help them cope with the daunting array of challenges they’re facing on a daily basis.

And while the show will likely be less fortifying for anyone over 30, I found Season 3 to be a sometimes unnerving, sometimes hilarious & often heart-rending thrill ride through some of my best memories of the 1980’s, all delivered with the soundtrack, hair, clothes, cars & destinations that made it a slice of America that actually may be worth fighting & dying for.

“Stranger Things” is not quite the successor to the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, but it demonstrates our burning desire for a story that can help us prevail in what is far too often a horrifying & dismaying world,

This post was adapted from my February 1, 2026 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

What To Write About?

December 2, 2025 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

More than usual, I faced a blank screen when I sat down to write yesterday.

On the usual Saturday, I have an outline in my head, some sources down, and a bead on a compatible image or two.

Maybe, probably, it was the holiday, since I still haven’t completed everything I usually do on this day, like ruminating on those things I’m most grateful for in the past year.

When I came upon a recent list amidst the recipes, I had to laugh when I saw that I’d made note of this one: the occasional accuracy of my intuitions. Because when you put your wiriting out there, you can never even begin without some measure of confidence.

Which brings me to the related topic I landed upon today: How I decided what to write to you?

Some of it comes from the choices made by others.

Even though I’m reading fewer books, I still pour over the year-end booklists—for this reason of course, and also (I suppose) to feel guilty about not reading more tomes and chronicles that sound essential or fascinating.

As luck would have it, the “NYT’s 100 Notable Books for 2025,” “WSJ’s 2025 Guide to Holiday Gift Books,” and “The Economist’s Best Books of 2025” brought me to short reviews about John Updike’s 1989 memoir “Self Consciousness” and Susan Orlean’s 2025 memoir “Joyride.” (I ordered both “for the pile,” so my guilt can be closer at hand.)

Of couse, Updike was one of America’s pre-eminent writers during much of my lifetime. I read, but didn’t get, “Rabbit Run” in high school, part of his series of droll & insightful takes on suburban life & love. As I started living what he’d written about, I grew to appreciate his Rabbit & other novels, but even more to value the economy of his wisdom when he’d pen an essay someplace or get candid in an interview and then proceed to bowl me over.

(That’s Updike, over-coming his bad teeth, psoriasis & ever-present shyness in the picture above.)

So I was overtaken again when I came upon the following about (essentially) where he begins as a writer, describing his childhood sense “of an embowering wide world arranged for my mystification and entertainment.”

His subject matter was set out for him like a buffet, in all its “embowering” (or “embracing,” in the way that trees would) possibility, with his job to make what he could of it all, a kind of bird’s eye view one minute, more closely-observed the next, but all there for his “mystification and entertainment”—and eventually ours.

If I were so inclined (in other words), all I had to do was look at the world around me and see what’s tickling my fancy.

_{Author Susan Orlean in the middle of one of her buffets.}

Since I already knew Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief” and the non-fiction essays in the New Yorker that spawned both it and other absorbing romps, I quickly zeroed in on the review of “Joyride,” because that’s exactly what her job as a writer always felt like to me whenever she invited me along

Orlean, like Updike, confesses that she too “believe[s] the world has something to tell [her],” and her amazement at what she heard is one of the qualities that makes her writing so infectious.

For example, “The Orchid Thief” is broadly about her reporting of the 1994 arrest of an horticulturist and members of the Seminole nation for poaching rare orchids in the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in South Florida. But beyond its colorful cast & humorous asides, it is also brought Orlean, for the first time, face-to-face with true obsession, in this instance, that horticulturist’s quest to find & clone the rare ghost orchid for profit.

Demonstrating how she finds what to write about, her memoir reveals that she happened upon the seeds that became “The Orchid Thief” on an airplane, where a day-old copy of the Miami Herald had been left in her seat pocket. Buried inside was a story about an upcoming trial over some valuable plants. Within days, Orlean was in Miami, at the courthouse.

While she acknowledges that she’s always been open to the thrill of discoveries like this in her story-telling, Orlean acknowledges that there’s also a different kind of writer, namely, “those who have something they want to say to the world.” In other words, it’s not the world as your oyster (waiting for you to discover its delights or ponder its mysteries), but about some internal fire that drives this different breed of writer to tell the world what’s on her (or his) mind..

One or the other of these propensities tends to announce itself early in writers (Updike’s “childhood sense”), and likely in non-writers too. For example, I’m currently working with a physical therapist who’s so in love with the next Broadway musical, golf game or Top 10 list of horror movies that I quickly got him to admit that he’s always (“since I was a little kid”) been open to the delights his slice of the world kept offering up to him. Even more importantly, his pursuit of the next delight always seems to drive him to prescribe whatever will make David better.

As a writer, and before that, as a child, I always had that other kind of perspective, wanting to say something to the world before I ever realized that it might be listening. It was odd, because I’m hardly an extravert. But once “whatever it was” was done percolating, it always had to come out someplace, overcoming any inhibitions or stage fright that might stand in its way.

You’ve probably noticed that many of these posts are driven by that impulse. It’s why when Kyla Scanlon wrote about how a prosperous future no longer seems evident in the broken world that we see and experience every day, I wanted to shout out, “Yes, I agree with you, Kyla!” Since we’re supposedly so rich, I want my streets to be cleaner $ safer, my neighbors to be less anxious & more confident about the future instead of charting America’s prosperity in the cold comfort of data centers, AI chips & invisible wealth, as I wrote on this page last week (“Our Future Will Only Be Better When We Change It.””)

It’s why I wrote about Trump here for several weeks until I convinced myself that he’s effectively done, that are wobbly institutions are still likely to prove resilient enough to blunt his most serious damage. I also kept writing about him because I wanted at least some of you to know that you’re not alone in your alarm at seeing his unprecedented misuse of our nation’s highest office, and (I’m sure) as a kind of reassurance that we (in Susan Sontag’s words) “are not accomplices” to the damage he’s causing, even though we are witnesses to it & citizens with stakes in our governance. In all these regards, Trump is lighting fewer internal fires that I need to vent about.

Yet while many of my posts are still driven by the desire to tell the world something (or to trumpet some other writer who’s doing so), I’ve also learned that I can get tired of hearing my mountain-top voice, and at such times, I try to see the world as my oyster too, like I did recently in my journey to a local gas station framed by reflections of its spiritual past (“Is the Solution a Speed Bump?’), in this summer’s Short Stack posts (here, here and here), and when I escape into the smorgasbords of art, TV & music.

At such times, I’m both surprised & relieved by this bit of counter-programming. It’s like surfer and art critic Dave Hickey wrote in “The Perfect Wave” (another worthwhile read):

When[ever] something that is not your thing blows you away, that’s one of the best things that can happen. It means you are something other than you thought you were.

It always feels like a revelation. New doors seem to open when I’ve nothing left to say.

This post was adapted from my November 30, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

More House-Cleaning, Less Judgment in Politics

November 16, 2025 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

If we’re serious about finding a unity of purpose on the direction of our country, we should step back from the moral judgments we keep making about our political opponents (“We’re good, they’re bad”) and start putting our own disheveled houses in order.

Fessing up to our own failings would make us feel less superior when it comes to everyone else’s failings and more willing to seek common goals.

This is certainly true where traditional Republicans and Democrats are concerned. For the zealots on both sides on the other hand—a relatively small number of true believers at the MAGA and Progressive extremes—that kind of modest self-awareness may not be possible.

Instead of the vast middle of American politics being endlessly roiled by the certainties of the extremes, it’s time for house-cleaning, undaunted by the fear that we’re simply enabling our foes by airing out our dirty laundry. (They already know more than we’d like to admit about our hypocrises.)

Putting our own houses in order is the only way that “the traditionals” to the right and left of Center can set aspirational agendas unburdened by the sins of the past.

+ + +

In that regard, let’s start today with some political soul-searching by a traditional Republican, Gerard Baker, who is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In his Monday post—“Trump Accelerates Our Decline into Moral Relativism”—Baker became more critical of traditional Republicans like him than I’ve heard him admit to. The headline makes his bottomline point, which is that MAGA extremism has distorted thinking and cowed bravery in the Republican Center.

Moral relativism and the ratchet effect will ensure that there is always some precedent close enough to persuade people to shrug even when confronted with some evidence of genuine turpitude on their own side.

We’ve been descending this spiral for a long time, but as with just about everything to do with the gargantuan figure of Donald Trump, his behavior has accelerated the descent.

His corrosive effect on norms of ethics, language and, for that matter, conservatism, has been amplified by the eager acquiescence of the Republican Party in the process.

The party that once liked to think of itself as committed to values and principles has become the most cynical exponent of the idea that everything is relative. A cheerleading chorus of so-called conservatives in the media eased the way. Every time they are confronted with evidence of some new infamy by their president, many on the right will choose to avoid the unrewarding path of moral consistency [with bedrock Republican principles] and opt instead for the tactics of least resistance: misdirection, “whataboutism,” or simply reaching for the blinders. All of these relativist tools have been on display in the last week. [my emphasis]

Republican Senator John Thune (the Senate’s Majority Leader) has sadly become an exemplar of these tendencies during Trump 2.0. He not only is, but also looks like a traditional Republican. But when he tries to defend the on-going government shut-down he (squeamishly) sounds and looks like a MAGA puppet. “Will the real John Thune please stand up!”

The moral relativism is abundant. As an alternative, one could say to him: “Yes, the Democrats are often hypocrites, but Republicans control not only the Presidency but also Congress (and maybe the Courts). It’s not about your “relative” purity or impurity. Just do your job, which is to keep the government up and running.”

Gerard Baker doesn’t mention Thune or the government shutdown in his op-ed, but he does highlight the dirtiest of dirty laundry in the Republican house today: their own leader’s self-dealing and his corruption of the justice system that should be ferreting it out. The stain was painfully apparent when Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance cryptocurrency exchange founder, this week. (Zhao had pled guilty to money laundering charges in 2023.) As Baker scathingly notes, this pardon came after Binance:

had been involved in a lucrative financial partnership for the president and his family that helped contribute to the $4.5 billion in wealth they have generated this year alone. Morally equivalent precedents: Hunter Biden? The Clinton Foundation? Hardly on the same scale. What we have seen this year is new levels of graft and grift. We seem to be moving rapidly toward a justice system in which the president essentially gets to decide who should be in prison. If you’re a political enemy, we’ll come up with a crime to fit your punishment. If you’re a friend, we will annul your crimes. [my emphasis]

(Helpfully, Baker also links us to a Journal article on “the recipe behind the Trump Family’s crypto riches.”)

Until other traditional Republicans like Baker come clean by signing-on to admissions of failure like this one, their attempts to improve the Republic’s health going forward will always be suspect.

What about traditional Democrats and their dirtiest laundry?

It is hard to say whether journalist Jeffery Toobin is a Democrat or not—he’s certainly been a thorn in their side for years, as in “CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin Calls Democrats ‘Weak and ‘Wimps’”—but my read on it is that he’s probably a member of their loyal opposition.

In that spirit, on Halloween Toobin wrote an op-ed in the Times that billed itself as a discussion about the use of Biden’s autopen to grant clemency in the last days of the administration, but which ended up making timely remarks about Biden’s (and indeed, any president’s) mental capacity to serve in office.

It was in no small part because of “the capacity issue” that I was heartened when Biden said in March, 2020 (while campaigning for the presidency) that he saw himself as a one-term, “bridge figure” who would quikly make way for up-and-comers in his Party. So in the wake of Biden’s disastrous presidential debate in June 2024, I (along with many others) were more than a little interested in knowing when exactly, during his term in office, his faculties had begun their precipitous decline.

For example, in the final 6 months of his presidency, Toobin is rightly “troubled” by the way “the late-stage Biden White House worked.” Was “Mr. Biden [effectively] a ventriloquist’s dummy operated by his staff”? And on the legality of his clemency decisions: “Did Mr. Biden actually authorize all the pardons that were processed by autopen?” After reading an investigative report released by Republicans in the House and considering what Biden had said in public about it, Toobin’s conclusion is that the process “was imperfect, at best… with considerable chaos [marking] Mr. Biden’s last days in office.”

Toobin also believes that traditional Democrats need to be as worried (if not more worried) about what was happening in the West Wing during Biden’s ENTIRE term than the administration’s opponents in Congress.

As the June debate revealed, Mr. Biden was an 81-year-old man in decline. In later months, his staff sought ways to lighten his workload and formed, according to the committee report, ‘a cocoon around [him], thereby limiting his time spent with outer circle aides and Democratic Party leaders.

Let’s assume for a minute that Progressive Democrats are constitutionally (small “c”) unable to provide as much as a glimpse of their party’s dirty laundry to their foes. But it’s fair to wonder why less ideological Democrats haven’t been more interested in “the cocoon” around Biden, when it was first being spun, and how it effected their own work in places like Congress.

Toobin doesn’t say. But it would be better for these representatives today (and for their standing with voters tomorrow) if they were more curious about Biden’s “fitness for office” at the very same time that they were implementing what they thought was his agenda (as opposed to some un-elected staffer’s agenda) throughout his tenure in office.

Toobin spends his remaining ink on the difficulties around assessments of “presidential competency” going forward, in particular the advisors who provide a similar cocoon around President Trump today.

Trump (like Biden) is an old man who’s already facing speculation about his own mental acuity. And there will be surely be future presidents who will be challenged by physical & mental incapacities while in office that are concealed from the public by protective staff members. Notes Toobin:

[I]f we are concerned that a president can be protected by a staff of sycophants, the risk now is greater than ever. No modern president has been surrounded by a more adoring staff than Donald Trump in his second term. As Mr. Trump, now 79, moves soon into his 80s, who can believe that the people around him will blow the whistle if he starts to slip?

In theory, the 25th Amendment addresses the issue of a president who is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’ But its cumbersome procedures, requiring the concurrence of the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to sideline a president, do not inspire great confidence. The amendment trusts that a president’s loyalists will put their country’s interests above their own and their patron’s; history, not just in the Biden era, suggests that it might not be the best bet.

Toobin ends on a note of resignation, that we’re all mostly “hoping for the best” on this highly consequential matter. But like traditional Democrats should be delving into its stain on Biden’s presidency (and not just letting the probe unfold as a partisan witch-hunt), tradiitional Republicans need to be (let’s call it) “attentive” to the health of their own guy or they may find themselves pilloried by voters for remaining willfully ignorant about his own incapacity.

My bottom line: traditional Democrats and Republicans alike need to be far more invested in washing their own dirty laundry than either is today. Moreover, America’s future leaders are likely to be the ones who faced their party’s liabilities squarely instead of those who did little more than spray air freshener in their direction. When it comes to the issue of a president’s ability to serve, the stakes for America could simply not be higher.

(Today’s post continues an Independent Centrist engagement argument that I’ve been trying to make since at least 2021’s “Healing Makes Listening a Cabinet-Level Priority,” (in the wake of the 2020 election) and through the summer of 2025 in pieces like “The Democrat’s Near Fatal Boys & Men Problem.” Unfortunately from then until now, most traditional members from both of our political parties have been failing us almost completely.)

_{Returning briefly to the crypto story.}

In the five or six newsletters about political humor that I’ve written this year, South Park’s current season has certainly provided it’s share of satirical material. Friday’s Halloween show was no exception, with a brilliant take on why none of us should be counting on the MAGA or Progressive or apolitical (“nihilist”) extremes to truly improve things when it comes to our politics.

The first brilliant thing the South Park creators did on Friday was to acknowledge the avalanche of negativity they’ve been receiving from Trump’s Right-wing supporters (and, indeed, from the administration itself) for attacking the President & his team so relentlessly and mercilessly. Much like Trump himself has tried to co-opt his critics—by, for example, being regularly seen wearing a crown in White House memes—one of the series characters proclaims that he hates how his town of South Park has become so political this season. Laments Stan:

How many weeks has it been not dealing with one stupid thing after another? The truth is, I think a lot of people are just afraid to admit that South Park sucks now. Everyone knows it. South Park sucks now, and it’s because of all this political shit. We’re just getting totally bogged down in it. Remember when we used to do stuff? Just us guys? Ever since all this political crap took over, it’s like, what happened to us? Like Kenny, I haven’t even heard you say anything in like four months.

But instead o proposing a solution like “laying-off on Trump” or “counter-punching his opponents,” the show’s second stroke of brilliance has Stan proposing a MAGA-style solution, namely, to launch a crypto-meme coin that simply says “South Park Sucks Now” so he can widely profile his distain while profiting mightily when his coins are sold to the simpletons he thinks agree with him.

What a hilarious “solution” for any wannabe grifter in the Trump era. And what a lesson on the difference between sincere opposition and a stunt “that’s mostly about you.”

Just like the MAGA and Progressive wings of their respective parties often seem to be about nothing more than virtue signaling to one another, South Park has Stan proposing the perfect, self-involved solution to his problem with the show’s politics while effectively co-opting many of the satire’s nay-sayers.

Just brilliant.

This post was adapted from my November 2, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Has America Decided It’s Finally Had Enough?

October 2, 2025 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

In a short exchange with a reader about the incitement-to-violence standard, I got to talking about our jury system. I told him I’d witnessed it in action dozens of times (as a law clerk for a trial judge, as an occasional trial attorney, and finally as a member of 3 or 4 Philadelphia juries).

The vast majority of times, I watched in fascination as an assemblage of 8 or 12 people got both the “facts” and the “law” almost exactly right by bringing their randomly-chosen perspectives along with their common-sense and community-based morality (what we can tolerate as a group, and what we can’t) to the matter of guilt or innocence. These men and women would disagree, even argue or pout at one another, but after one day or several would reach consensus and a result that invariably felt right under the circumstances..

Then I realized: the vast American public determines what is acceptable and unacceptable in our poliics much like the jury system.

It’s not always paying attention to our leaders or “the state of our nation” because it’s busy raising families, going to work, shopping, being entertained or just distracted. But when the American public starts to focus on its job of giving or withholding its consent from its representatives—because it simply can’t ignore what’s happening any longer—it can be both quick and true in its judgments. As in: Maybe I can tolerate this, but I won’t tolerate that.

After hearing the sucking sound of consent being withdrawn, the exhale of opposition can often be heard next. When tens or hundreds or millions of Americans raise their voices to say, “Hey, wait a minute,” the political consequences can be swift, harsh & certain, saying in effect: “This is the America that I’m a part of, but where we’re headed is not.”

The causes of shifts like this and when have they happened before are not just for historians to consider.

Was the moment Americans turned against the Vietnam War when we saw (and absorbed the impact of) that photograph of the naked, crying girl with napalm burns in June, 1972, or did the change of heart come somewhat earlier? When did our nation go from being against same-sex marriage to being for it? (Was it one big thing that changed our minds or a build-up of several smaller ones?) Didn’t the American public turn-as-one against Joe Biden on June 28, 2024, the day after his fateful, pre-election debate with Trump? Sometimes we know exactly when the shift occurred. Other times, our acceptance or rejection just seemed to materialize out of the ether.

I have never watched Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, but know that his stand-up routines have skewered both Trump and our politics over the years, and how broad & deep “the comedic bond” with the American audience can be—because all of us want to be free to laugh at our leaders when they deserve it. So Trump’s and FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s ham-handed attempt to cancel Kimmel’s comedy a little over a week ago FELT (at least to me) like a turning point. As in, it feels like the American tide is turning against Donald Trump in real time. I could almost hear the whoosh of it.

But then I remembered that I’d had dreams like this before, such as after the Washington Post’s release of that infamous grabbing-women-by-their-privates tape in October 2016; while the J6 insurrection was unfolding at the Capitol in 2021; after Trump’s felony conviction in a New York Court in May of 2024. None had individually (or even as they compounded) changed our collective mind, so why would his attempt to cancel Kimmel be any different?

It’s because a week or so ago, Trump messed with American’s funny bones (and their First Amendment/free speech backstory) at a time where “cancel-culture” may be our worst damnation—due in-no-small-part to Trump himself. But despite the hypocrisy, he used the government’s coercive power to pull Kimmel off-the-air because he couldn’t take this (or maybe any) comic’s point of view. Was censoring political comedy, at long last, Trump’s “bridge too far” in the public’s mind?

Well a couple of prominent observer/commentators thought the public finally changed its mind too. Moreover, the same shift in the American mood seems to have registered as more than a blip in national polls. Is it all just wishful thinking? Here’s what they’ve been saying over the past week.

Robert Reich worked in Washington for the Ford, Carter and Clinton administrations (in other words, he’s experienced a lot of government over the years.) After leaving public service, he’s been a professor, author and commentator on American politics. Reich is also very smart in my opinion, an intelligence that’s leavened by a marvelous sense of humor. For example, being short of stature (4’ 11”) due to a genetic disorder, he called his most recent book, “Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America.”

Well Reich was at it again this week in a Substack that he sent out on Tuesday called “The Sleeping Giant is Awakening: after a week of authoritarian excess, the nation is turning on Trump.” This is how he begins his post:

Friends,

I can’t tell you exactly how I know, but after 60 years in and around politics I’ve developed a sixth sense, and my sixth sense tells me the tide is now turning on Trump.

This past week did it.

He then proceeds to list an example-a-day for the week of September 15, including Trump’s: suing the Times in a lawsuit that included “page after page of gushing praise for the president;” accusing a national reporter of “hate speech” and threatening him with consequences from Pam Bondi; having the FCC pressure broadcasters to cancel Jimmy Kimmel now, and other comic late show hosts, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, later; threatening to prosecute political rivals (James Comey, Letia James and Adam Schiff) “even though grand juries and federal prosecutors couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing;” and saying at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service that he “hates his opponents” and doesn’t “want what’s best for them.”

Reich wrote: “You could almost feel the great sleeping giant of America open an eye and frown, then blink both eyes and sit up and stretch, and then roar, ‘What the hell is going on here?’”

He went on to note protests and “boycotts” by Kimmel viewers and Disney customers, how Republican Ted Cruz spoke out against the censorship, and Disney’s bowing to the public outcry by returning Kimmel to the air. Reich recalled how the American public turned on Communist-witch-hunter Joe McCarthy’s cruelty in the 1950s, on the “white supremacists” who clobbered civil rights marchers in the 1960s, and on Richard Nixon’s mendacity during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s.

[The sleeping giant that’s the American public] is starting to roar again now — at the sociopathic occupant of the Oval Office who won’t tolerate criticism, who in one wild week revealed his utter contempt for the freedom of Americans to criticize him, to write or speak negatively about him, even to joke about him.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I’ve seen a lot. I know the signs. The sleeping giant always remains asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some action so disrespectful of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he has no choice but to awaken.

And when he does, the good sense of the American people causes [the giant] to put an end to whatever it was that awakened him.

Ann Cox Richardson, an American historian with a pod-cast and Substack that’s followed by millions, said on YouTube in a posting called “The Tide Turned this Week” that she feels the same as Reich, while providing additional reasons. For example, she says more Americans have begun to realize: that it’s not just “the worst of the worst” who are being targeted by ICE but also valued community members; that RFK Jr. is threatening our health with this attacks on science and the medical community; that there may be more to the Epstein files as his victims begin to speak out; that the American farmers who have long supported Trump are being devastated by tariffs and the loss of both documented and undocumented workers; and that the claw-back of federal funds has disproportionately affected rural districts making its largely Republican legislators reluctant to face their voters in town meetings.

Cox believes that more Republicans as well as business owners are realizing that the best way to retain power or remain profitable is to stop siding with Trump’s MAGA agenda and that further cracks in his coalition will begin to show during the impeding government shut-down. But this is still a fairly small group; is enough of the American public really starting to rebel?

This is where Nate Silver steps in. Silver has made a name for himself by “averaging” new national polls that (among other things) attempt to assess Trump’s public approval and disapproval. After the Kimmel brouhaha, Silver’s Trump approval averages dipped down fairly sharply, while his disapproval rating ticked up in the same degree.

So have we finally reached that moment where our views of everything-Trump have changed?

Reich argues that authoritarian over-reach has brought Trump to the point of no return.

Richardson piles health, economic and community concerns onto this conclusion.

Silver’s polling data suggests that some or all of these factors have begun to move the dispproval needle.

From where I sit, I’d argue that more than any other thing it’s Trump’s failed attempt to cancel political comedy (and its free speech implications) that’s finally changed the public’s mind.

It’s been commonly argued that Social Security is the third rail for the American public, placing in jeopardy anyone who dares to touch it.

Well I think messing with political comedy is even more consequential in our snarky and cynical age.

Because Trump can make fun of others but not himself, his long slide into powerlessness his finally begun–and it will only be hastened by the return of South Park–which provided a 20-minute capstone in these fateful days-after.

_{As in: “Will Kyle [Broflovski’s Jewish] Mom Strike Gaza and Destroy a Palestinian Hospital?”}

As I’ve tried to demonstrate above, the comedy that’s aimed at our politics today is off-limits to government censorship.

So thank God the South Park guys took all the time they needed—when many feared they’d been cancelled too—to create another, near-perfect episode in what’s become this season’s favorite opera-buffa.

The episode’s themes included (but were not limited to):

1. turning nearly everything in our play-oriented society into a gambling bet;

2. throwing “anti-semitism” around in an irresponsible manner to juice the gamblers’ emotions (all while the Jewish holidays are on-going, no less);

3. Trump’s attempts to abort his “butt-baby” with Satan because (as JD Vance reminds him) having a baby around will be an intrusion on fun times at Mar-A-Lago, MAGA rallies, and sporting events;

4. how the FCC’s chair (and Kimmel nemesis) Brendan Carr comes to suffer his own form of intestinal vengeance; and last but hardly least:

5. how the wily J.D. is methodically scheming to keep his place in The Grand MAGA Succession.

It was a lot of comic ground to cover in what was, after all, just a third of an hour. But man-o-man, was I grateful to see it in a week that seemed to have more than the usual cavalcade of horrors from Trump world.

In this week’s Carr-Vance storyline, here is the innocent-seeming JD entering Carr’s hospital room after Carr is mistakenly stricken with a cat-borne, brain-eating disease called “Toxoplasmosis”—funny in its own right given the way the administration treats health risks—after Carr gets caught up in one of Trump’s failed attempts to induce the abortion of his misbegotten child.

This is FCC Chairman Carr siting in his own revenge while giving a frozen “Heil” as his little visitor approaches.

And finally this is JD, his expression transformed as he mutters to Carr the now infamous words that were also spoken to Kimmel’s broadcasters Disney, Nextar & Sinclair:

Mr Carr, why do you keep melding in my plans? I have been trying to convince the boss to get rid of this baby. I am next in line to be president. This baby cannot be born. If you continue to interfere, I will make things very difficult for you.

We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.

JD probably won’t be bragging about the pro-Choice stance he takes here, unlike like his lame attempt to neutralize his first appearance on South Park a few weeks ago. For that matter, it’s unlikely that Carr, Trump, “special advisor” Don Jr., or Benjamin Netanyahu will be bragging about their well-deserved man-handlings either.

And last but hardly least: thank you South Park for your powerful & long-overdue shout-out to Jewish mothers everywhere as Kyle’s mom confronts Israel’s leader about his mishigas and the impacts it’s had on her.

More evidence (if we needed it) that things actually are taking a turn for the better.

This post was adapted from my September 28, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.