On the record

Leading the fight on the multimedia, policy, and social media battlefield

In recent months, Minnesota has dominated the national news as rarely before, and American Experiment has been in the thick of that coverage. In December, the Feeding Our Future fraud and related scandals went national. This was nothing new to those who follow American Experiment, because our Bill Glahn has largely driven the coverage since January 2022.

Among other things, we have produced four webinars on the Feeding Our Future scandal alone. And our Scandal Tracker has been entered into the record in the Minnesota House of Representatives.

Last April, we obtained and publicized a tape recording of Attorney General Keith Ellison meeting with Feeding Our Future participants, pledging to help them fend off investigations. When national interest in the scandal peaked in December, we posted a link to our story about the tape recording on X.

Our post was shared by many major national X accounts, including Libs of TikTok and Elon Musk, resulting in 47 million views. When Ellison was twice called before Congressional committees to testify on the fraud scandals that erupted on his watch, that recording played a major role in his questioning.

American Experiment’s weekly podcast has become a significant part of our communications effort. The podcast itself gets thousands of listens and views, but it’s the 30- to 90-second clips that often go viral on social media. That happened when our December podcasts focused largely on the unfolding fraud scandals: Clips from our December podcasts got a total of 19 million views, the large majority in Minnesota.

Fraud promises to be the central issue in the 2026 elections in our state, and no one has done more to inform Minnesotans about these scandals than American Experiment.

In January and early February, the national news focus shifted to the Trump administration’s efforts to enforce national immigration laws in Minnesota. To their everlasting disgrace, local officials like Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey encouraged chaotic resistance to federal law enforcement. Walz mused publicly about being at war with the federal government and harkened back to Fort Sumter as a precedent for what was happening in Minnesota.

Sadly, the local press sided, almost unanimously, with Walz and Frey. American Experiment stood almost alone as a voice in favor of upholding the law and telling another side of the immigration story. Here again, our podcast played a key role. Clips from the podcast got 17 million views on social media during January alone.

One clip, for example, identified five illegal alien criminals who had been apprehended and were being deported. Our podcast hosts listed the crimes of which they had been convicted — multiple homicides, child rape, drug trafficking, and so on. That clip alone got over one million views.

And our efforts no doubt contributed to the poll data that you can read elsewhere in this issue of Thinking Minnesota: 81 percent of Minnesotans support deporting illegal aliens who are guilty of an additional crime, which was ICE’s central mission in Minnesota.

American Experiment has long been renowned for the quality of our policy research and writing, which have won a number of national awards. But in recent years, we have also ramped up our communications capability to the point where we reach more Minnesotans, more often, with more and better information, than any other organization and more impact than any newspaper, television station, or other news outlet in Minnesota.

Of that, those who support our organization should be very proud.