About
The American Mind is an opinion website, podcast, and newsletter produced by the reactionary Claremont Institute. A December 2021 article by Thomas Klingenstein, the institute’s chairman and a major donor, opened by arguing that the prosecution of Kenosha, Wisconsin mass shooter Kyle Rittenhouse was a sign that “the ‘woke communists’… are turning America into a totalitarian police state.”
The website Media Bias/Fact Check classifies The American Mind as having a clear bias to the Right and “mixed” in terms of fact-based reporting “due to poor sourcing and lighting promoting” conspiracy theories. The same site mentions that an essay from Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams included “hints of a white nationalist perspective.” Other articles decry the idea of “whiteness” and allege that this concept is being used to discriminate against Jews.
A March 2020 piece by Klingenstein entitled “Trump’s Virtues,” alleges that “we are still in need of the qualities of great leadership.” The site also published an editorial claiming that the white supremacist “replacement theory” is not racist.
In August 2020, after months of massive Black Lives Matter protests throughout the country, Klingenstein wrote, “We on the Right are confronting an enemy that wishes to destroy our way of life.”
January 6, 2021
- On December 1, 2020, Trump adviser and Claremont Senior Fellow John Eastman published an essay in The American Mind entitled “The Constitutional Authority of State Legislatures to Choose Electors.”
- The title of a January 5, 2022 essay asks, “Does Anyone Care About January 6?” and whitewashes the attack on the U.S. Capitol the previous year as a “supposed insurrection.”
- Eastman’s article from later that month, “Setting the Record Straight on the POTUS ‘Ask’,” attempts to whitewash Trump’s attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, including his own plan to have Vice President Mike Pence refuse to recognize the legitimate Electoral College votes from seven battleground states during the January 6 congressional proceedings.
The Big Lie
- In September 2020, The American Mind published Michael Anton’s article, “The Coming Coup,” which accuses Democrats of “openly talking about staging a coup.”
- About a week later, The American Mind’s editors published an editorial, “Stop the Coup.”
- The American Mind helped spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election including unfounded concerns about mail-in ballots by notorious voter suppression architect Hans von Spakovsky.
- The site also amplified conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems and China in the aftermath of the 2020 election.