🔔 Freedom Christmas 🔔

My American friends,

There comes a moment in the life of a nation when ordinary people must do what their government cannot—or will not—do. We stand at such a moment now.

I write to you not as someone with answers to all our problems, but as a fellow citizen who sees what you see: families struggling, farmers crushed by policies beyond their control, food banks stretched thin, and local businesses—the heart of our towns—fighting to survive while distant corporations grow fat on our spending.

President Franklin Roosevelt once spoke of a world founded on four essential freedoms. Among them was freedom from "want"—"economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants." My brothers and sisters in freedom, we do not live in that world today. Fear stalks our grocery aisles. It sits at kitchen tables where families calculate whether they can afford both heat and food. It lives in the eyes of farmers who worked the land their grandparents worked, now wondering if this will be their last season.

When government fails to secure our economic wellbeing, when the normal channels of redress seem closed to ordinary voices, Americans have always found another way. We have always taken care of each other.

The Pattern of Our History

Our nation was born from an act of economic resistance. When our ancestors gathered in Boston Harbor on that December night in 1773, they weren't just protesting a tax. They were declaring that when power becomes consolidated in distant hands, when grievances go unheard, the people retain the right—and the responsibility—to act.

They didn't ask permission. They acted together.

The Declaration of Independence itself is a document about exhausted patience. Our founders listed grievance after grievance, showing how they had tried every proper channel, every petition, every plea for relief. Only when all normal avenues failed did they assert their right to withdraw consent.

We are not at that place today—God willing, we never will be again. But we stand in that same tradition: When the powerful stop listening, when policies harm the many to benefit the few, when hunger spreads while corporate profits soar, we the people must act.

Not with violence. Not with destruction. But with the most powerful tool we possess: our economic choices, made in solidarity with one another.

The Situation Before Us

Let me speak plainly about what we all see:

Our farmers are suffering. Tariff policies, whatever their intention, have devastated American agricultural communities. These are not statistics on a chart. These are families who have fed us for generations, now struggling to feed themselves.

Our food banks are overwhelmed. The gap between what families need and what government provides grows wider each month. Real Americans—your neighbors, perhaps you yourself—face genuine food insecurity in the richest nation on earth.

Our local businesses are dying. Every time we click "add to cart" on a website owned by the wealthiest corporations in human history, we drain life from the shop on Main Street, the restaurant on the corner, the craft store where we know the owner's name.

Our communities are fragmenting. When commerce becomes faceless, when we never see the person who benefits from our purchase, when a computer algorithm decides what we need—we lose something essential to our humanity.

Government has not solved these problems. Perhaps it cannot. Perhaps it will not. But we can.

Freedom Christmas: Our Plan

I am asking you—humbly but urgently—to join a movement this holiday season. We are calling it Freedom Christmas, and it is both simple and profound.

Here is what we're asking:

First: For the 2025 holiday season, boycott the major online retailers. Not forever. Just this season. Skip Amazon. Skip the big corporate websites. Let them see what happens when Americans decide together that enough is enough.

Second: Reduce your holiday spending by a third, by half, by whatever you can manage. Give fewer gifts. Make them more meaningful. Remember that the people you love need your presence more than your presents.

Third: Take the money you save—that money you would have spent on things nobody really needed—and give it to your local food bank, your church, your community organization. Give it with the instruction that it should support American farmers and feed hungry Americans.

Fourth: What you must buy, buy locally. Walk into the store where you can shake a hand. Eat at the restaurant where you know the owner's name. Support the craftspeople in your community. Help them survive this season.

Fifth: Invite everyone—whatever their faith, whatever their tradition—into this movement. Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or no religious celebration at all—we are all Americans, and we all have neighbors who need us.

Why This Will Work

My brothers and sisters in freedom, we have power we have forgotten we possess.

American consumers spend over $900 billion during the holiday season. Nearly a trillion dollars. If even a fraction of us redirect that spending—away from distant corporations and toward our neighbors, our farmers, our hungry—we will change lives. We will save farms. We will keep businesses open. We will feed families.

This is not symbolic. This is material. This is real.

But more than the money, this is about remembering who we are. Americans have always been people who sacrifice for each other. In every crisis, we have found our better nature. We have barns to raise, neighbors to feed, communities to defend.

The powerful have always underestimated us. They see us as consumers, not citizens. They think we are too divided, too distracted, too comfortable to act in concert.

Let us prove them wrong.

A Humble Request

I am not asking you to trust me. I am not selling you anything. I am not building a movement for my own gain.

I am asking you to trust yourself, and to trust your neighbors.

I am asking you to remember that throughout American history—from the Revolution to the abolition movement, from the labor struggles to the civil rights movement—ordinary people have done extraordinary things when they stood together.

I am asking you to make a sacrifice. A small one, in the grand scheme. Skip the convenience of online shopping for one season. Give more than you planned to those who have less. Choose the harder path of walking into a local store.

In exchange, you will be part of something larger than yourself. You will help feed a family. You will help save a farm. You will help keep a business alive. You will send a message that power still resides with the people, not with algorithms and distant shareholders.

All Americans, Everywhere, and for All Time

Roosevelt spoke of a world where people everywhere could live without fear. We are not there yet. We may never fully arrive. But we can take one step in that direction.

This holiday season, we can create our own freedom from fear—the freedom that comes from knowing our neighbors have our backs, that our communities are strong, that we are not alone.

We can show that when government fails, we don't despair. We act.

We can prove that the American spirit—that impulse to care for each other, to sacrifice for the common good, to stand together against consolidated power—still lives.

My American friends, my brothers and sisters in freedom, I am asking you to join this movement. Not because I have all the answers. Not because this will solve everything. But because it is right, because it will help real people, and because together we are stronger than we have allowed ourselves to believe.

Visit FreedomChristmas.org to take the pledge. Share this with everyone you know. Talk about it in your church, your synagogue, your mosque, your community center. Organize in your town. Make this season the moment we remembered who we are.

For all Americans, everywhere, and for all time, we have this responsibility: to care for each other when power won't. To act when action is needed. To be the country we were meant to be.

This holiday season, let's give the gift that matters most: the gift of solidarity, of sacrifice, of community, of hope.

Let's give freedom.

Will you join us?