A Christmas Greeting to the Nation
Today, Barack Obama is a failed television producer and Donald Trump is America’s popularly-elected pedophile president. Meanwhile, tech barons and broligarchs continue their unchecked consolidation of power, wealth, and media manipulation. The rest of us are left swimming in the resulting unreality, manufactured to maintain the status quo, or worse. The absurdity of our era cannot be understated: it is a result of an ongoing assault against long-standing institutions and norms, perpetrated by purveyors of malign misinformation, who are actively rewiring our reality to advance their destructive cause. None of this is hidden from us — it’s all happening in the open, top down and astroturfed up. Algorithms and artificial intelligences are just two of the tools now being used to foment fear and isolation, targeting susceptible souls with constant consumption. And so, this holiday season, we must remember the cornerstones of our shared humanity: family, freedom, community, and creativity. The war, my friends, continues.
With Christmas and New Year’s greetings,
Dr. Nicholas S. Butler
Albany, NY
December 25, 2025
About the Annual Sometimes Weekly Christmas Greeting
In December 2023, I started publishing my annual Christmas Greeting to the Nation, following in the footsteps of Dr. Nicholas M. Butler (1862 – 1947) whose Christmas Greeting to the Nation was annually published by the New York Times. Dr. Butler was friends with Mark Twain, Warren Harding, and even Teddy Roosevelt, who dubbed him Nicholas Miraculous. I have no direct relation to Dr. Butler, genetically, but I am fascinated by his momentary-and-soon-forgotten place in history: Columbia University president, Vice Presidential nominee, and Nobel Peace Prize winner. I strive, similarly, to be momentarily known and soon forgotten.
My first Christmas Greeting was a year before the 2024 election, and focused on the idea of working collectively to protect American democracy. My second Christmas Greeting was published a month after the 2024 election — a month before Donald Trump’s second inauguration — and focused on the reality that we had failed, and American institutions would soon come under attack.
For my third installment, I focused on our emergent era of absurdity and the need to remain tethered to our humanity.
