| American Thinker | |
| Type: | News, commentary |
| Founder: | Ed Lasky, Richard Baehr, Thomas Lifson |
| Location: | El Cerrito, California, United States |
| Key People: | Thomas Lifson, editor-in-chief Ed Lasky, news editor |
| Language: | English |
| Launch Date: | November 2003 |
| Current Status: | Active |
American Thinker is a daily online magazine dealing with American politics from a politically conservative viewpoint. It was founded in 2003 by attorney Ed Lasky, health-care consultant Richard Baehr, and sociologist Thomas Lifson, and initially became prominent in the lead-up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election for its attacks on then-candidate Barack Obama.[1] The magazine has been described as a conservative blog.[2] [3] The Southern Poverty Law Center has called the site "a not so thoughtful far-right online publication".[4]
In the aftermath of Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the American Thinker published a variety of articles that had claims of election fraud.[5] Faced with a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, Lifson acknowledged that the site had relied upon "discredited sources who have peddled debunked theories".[6] The American Thinker likewise admitted that its election claims were "completely false and have no basis in fact" and that "it was wrong for us to publish these false statements."[7]
In 2009, in the wake of the election of Barack Obama, the American Thinker joined a wave of conservative media publications discussing the possibility of a second Civil War. They forecast the possibility of "several regional republics" emerging following the "overbearing, oppressive leviathan" of Obama's presidency.[8]
A 2008 column in the American Thinker drew attention to a California plan to require programmable thermostats that could be controlled by officials in the event of power-supply difficulties. According to The New York Times, the column was "by turns populist..., free-market..., and civil libertarian".[9]
Right Wing Watch has written about American Thinker, including that the site had in 2014 published a complimentary piece on white nationalist Jared Taylor and in 2015 asserted that rainbow-colored Doritos are a "gateway snack to introduce children to the joys of homosexuality".[10] The site has also been described as sympathetic to the counter-jihad movement, having published writers such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Paul Weston.[11]
In a 2020 blog post on the site, Thomas Lifson referenced a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters to claim that sea level rise has been slow and constant, and that this rise pre-dated industrialization. This claim went viral over social media in March 2020.[12] The author of the paper describes this interpretation as factually incorrect, constituting climate misinformation.
Under threat of litigation, in January 2021 American Thinker published a retraction of unsupported stories it published asserting that Dominion Voting Systems engaged in a conspiracy to rig the 2020 presidential election against President Donald Trump, acknowledging, "These statements are completely false and have no basis in fact."[13] [14] [15]