In February 1956, over two years before founding the
John Birch Society,
Robert W. Welch Jr. created his first publication, a monthly entitled ''One Man's Opinion
, which became known two years later as American Opinion
. Joyce Mao states that it was "perhaps best described as a stridently anticommunist Reader's Digest''", continuing on to say that "the rebranding and expansion reflected Welch's increasing confidence in his ability to speak for an entire nation, or to claim his and other right-wing voices as the only ones that were capable of proper patriotism." Additionally, in 1965, he established a John Birch Society-affiliated publication known as
The Review of the News, which was intended for a larger readership and covered news. In September 1985,
American Opinion was merged with
The Review of the News to create
The New American, with the aim of attracting a readership large enough to "make the saving of our country possible." Published bimonthly from its founding to 2025, the magazine's name was inspired by Robert Welch's "New Americanism" essay. It was first headquartered in
Belmont, Massachusetts. The version of
anticommunism espoused by the John Birch Society in
The New American has alleged that American sovereignty and freedom are threatened by a conspiracy of powerful "Insiders" who are purportedly moving toward control of a
world government in a
new world order. As described by the academic Charles J. Stewart, articles in the magazine in the 1980s and 1990s argued that the collapse of
communism in the
Eastern Bloc at the end of the
Cold War was a tactical move in the conspiracy and a "jump forward in the development of socialism". The magazine has alleged that such a conspiracy also animates the
United Nations, the
European Union, and the
North American Free Trade Agreement. In 2006,
The New American launched a mobile edition. In 2007,
The New American published a special issue devoted to opposing a purported
North American Union, and approximately 500,000 copies were distributed;
Political Research Associates and the
Southern Poverty Law Center described such descriptions of an imminent loss of American sovereignty in a merger with Canada and Mexico as a conspiracy theory. In September 2019, during the
Trump–Ukraine scandal,
Hunter Biden's
Wikipedia article included dubious claims about his business dealings in Ukraine and his father
Joe Biden's motivations for going after a Ukrainian prosecutor; the claims were sourced to
The Epoch Times and
The New American. In July 2025,
The New American converted its print edition from a bimonthly to a monthly magazine. ==Editorial stance and notable coverage==