Overview
The White House added Border Hawk News to its press pool on September 17.
Border Hawk News’s editor-in-chief has publicly endorsed the great replacement conspiracy theory, has written for Infowars Europe and maintains relationships with white nationalist group VDARE.
Border Hawk was founded inside the funding network built by John Tanton, the architect of the modern American anti-immigration movement.
On September 17, the White House announced that Border Hawk News, a small anti-immigrant media outlet, would join the press pool. The announcement came the day before President Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds. “Wow this editor-in-chief of @borderhawknews sounds incredibly based and funny!” Dan Lyman, Border Hawk’s president and editor-in-chief, wrote of himself in an X reply to an article criticizing the outlet’s selection for the pool. “Totally going to make a tax-deductible donation to his White House-credentialed immigration news outlet.”
Lyman was a regular contributor to Infowars, the fake news website founded and formerly run by notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Lyman frequently parades his xenophobic views. On X, he’s repeatedly called Somali immigrants “parasites,” frequently used the slur “pajeet” to describe individuals of Indian descent and called for the “removal of all Muslims” and a ban on Islam, because “anything less is civilizational suicide.”
Phil Williams, author of the Substack page Confront the Hate, documented the extent of Lyman’s racism and dehumanization on X. These posts are not stray provocations. He has spent years publicly advocating a specific white nationalist ideology by name.
Lyman & The Great Replacement
On October 8, 2023, Lyman appeared on the podcast Macroaggressions, hosted by conspiracy theorist Charlie Robinson. The episode, titled “Barbarians at the Gate,” centers on what they view as a migration crisis destroying Western civilization. “This is the great replacement unfolding in front of our eyes,” said Lyman.
The “great replacement” is a white supremacist conspiracy theory based on the belief that a secret and all-powerful cabal, often composed of Jewish people, actively facilitates the replacement of “native” white populations in the United States and Europe. On Macroaggressions, Lyman’s worldview found a receptive host. In 2017, Robinson authored “The Octopus of Global Control,” which describes eight “tentacles” through which a purportedly hidden elite controls humanity. Both men adhere to beliefs that shadowy figures are executing a grand, hidden plot designed to disempower and supplant a native population.
The “great replacement” is the ideological linchpin of Border Hawk Media. Border Hawk’s own website asserts: “The Great Replacement is real…This unprecedented migration apocalypse has led to a high interest in trustworthy immigration news content, and Border Hawk is filling a niche as the ONLY media outlet with a hyperfocus on immigration and border news.”
Lyman’s investment in the “great replacement” did not start with his role at Border Hawk. Between 2017 and Infowars’s shuttering in 2026, he authored articles for the now-defunct Infowars Europe website almost exclusively about immigration and related crime. Many of these were also cross-posted to Border Hawk News. Examples include stories about an African migrant wielding a knife and “terrorizing” passengers on a Swiss train, a 12-year-old boy robbed by “migrant teens” at a bus stop in Germany and Egyptian migrants assaulting underage girls at an immigration center in Sicily. Ultimately, Lyman’s articles seem poised to evoke anger, distrust and fear against immigrants.
On Macroaggressions, Lyman looked back on the Infowars Europe work of which he seemed proudest. He claimed that in 2018, Infowars Europe was the “first English language news outlet” to report on an alleged scheme by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the European Union, Mastercard and George Soros to provide migrants with pre-loaded debit cards to defray travel expenses and facilitate their migration into Europe. Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist and Holocaust survivor, is among the most frequent targets of the great replacement theory, as he is often cast as the financier orchestrating the migration the theory describes.
Lyman’s reporting primarily consisted of translating a Slovenian news article about the EU supplying refugees with bank cards and offered little additional substance to support the Soros connection. He pointed to Humanity Ventures — a partnership program that started in 2017 between Soros and Mastercard to explore commercial approaches to social problems — as evidence of Soros’s involvement. A year prior, Mastercard announced it had partnered with Mercy Corps and the Serbian government to distribute prepaid cards to refugees for food and housing, and the UNHCR had been running comparable programs since 2014. However, Humanity Ventures did not distribute cards to anyone. The program Lyman attributed to Soros predated the venture he cited as its source. PolitiFact rated a similar story published by the People’s Voice as “false.”
The bank card story is not a singular, isolated claim. Lyman repeatedly returns to the premise that migration is facilitated and bankrolled by hidden forces seeking to destroy Western civilization. For example, in a March 2024 interview, Peter Brimelow, founder of the white nationalist website VDARE, asked why the Biden administration was not protecting southern border states. The motive, Lyman said, was “deeper and darker than just Democrat votes.” He continued: “I think that it is the destruction of the country, the destruction of white Americans, who will be basically subsumed by the Third World.”
A month later, Lyman spoke at VDARE’s spring conference, where he again advanced the notion that Western civilization was under invasion: “ We are victims of one of the gravest injustices, one of the greatest crimes in the history of mankind. It’s enraging to encounter story after story of American lives being destroyed by foreign criminals, especially those of children. We witnessed the red carpet being rolled out for invaders while our people, American citizens, veterans, suffer, and are forced to foot the bill at the same time. We see the condition of our small towns and big cities across the country that are being overwhelmed and trashed by invaders from across the globe.”
The Network Behind Border Hawk
Border Hawk first launched under the umbrella of US Inc., an organization created by John Tanton, who passed away in 2019. Tanton was an ophthalmologist from Petoskey, Michigan, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has called “the architect of the modern-day anti-immigration movement.” Since 1979, Tanton has founded or funded multiple major anti-immigration entities in the United States, including both the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). In a 1980s memo, Tanton wrote: “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion? Why don’t non-Hispanic Whites have a group identity, as do Blacks, Jews, Hispanics?”
In addition to his anti-immigration activism, Tanton translated French author Jean Raspail’s novel “The Camp of the Saints” into English in 1995. The novel follows thousands of impoverished Indian farmers as they “overrun” France and outnumber the white population. The book helped popularize the great replacement theory in far-right discourse.
In 2022, Border Hawk incorporated as its own nonprofit and received a $160,000 donation from US Inc., according to the 990 for fiscal year 2022. Dan Lyman’s mother, Isabel “Izzy” Lyman, served as the executive director of US Inc. in 2019, according to programming from another arm of Tanton’s network, the Social Contract Press. She is also listed as the organization’s principal officer from 2019 to 2021. Izzy currently serves as a semi-regular contributor to Border Hawk News and Alexjoneslive.com.
In an August 2026 article posted on Alex Jones’s website, Izzy paid homage to the founder of this expansive movement: “Tanton’s lengthy, bold accomplishments on behalf of sane immigration policies could fill a book. But would anyone read it? Nevertheless, his legacy lives on. BorderHawk.news was also birthed in northern Michigan in the office John Tanton used to occupy. His herculean cause — to save a nation — lives on regardless of the dolts who run the city of Petoskey or Washington, D.C.”
Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.