American Thinker
American Thinker is a daily online magazine dealing with American politics from a conservative viewpoint.[1][2] It was founded in 2003 by Ed Lasky, a Northbrook lawyer, Richard Baehr, a Chicago health-care consultant, and Thomas Lifson, a Berkeley, California sociologist and business adviser.[3]
 | |
| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
Type of site | News, commentary |
| Available in | English |
| Founded | March 2005 |
| Headquarters | El Cerrito, California, United States |
| Founder(s) | Ed Lasky, Richard Baehr, Thomas Lifson |
| Key people | Thomas Lifson, Editor-in-Chief Ed Lasky, News Editor |
| URL | americanthinker |
| Launched | November 2003 |
| Current status | Active |
The magazine has been described as a conservative blog.[4][5] The Southern Poverty Law Center has called the site "a not so thoughtful far-right online publication."[6]
Contributors
One of the American Thinker's most prolific contributors, Raymond Ibrahim, has written over 100 articles extremely critical of Islam.[7] Another, David Solway, in the months following the 2020 presidential election, contributed seven articles perpetuating the myth of a stolen election based on evidence such as "Biden’s rallies routinely featured twenty or so vehicles in a car park. That alone tells us that Biden was never in the game."[8][9]
Coverage
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.[10]
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".[11]
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".[12] 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.[13] This claim went viral over social media in March 2020.[14] The author of the paper describes this interpretation as factually incorrect, constituting climate misinformation.[14]
Under threat of litigation, in January 2021 American Thinker published a retraction of false, unsupported, and debunked 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."[15][16][17]
References
- "American Thinker: About Us". American Thinker. Archived from the original on 23 June 2010. Retrieved 2010-06-22.
- Groner, Danny (December 30, 2010). "The Politics of Mayor Bloomberg's Snow Removal Response". The Huffington Post.
- Libit, Daniel (18 Feb 2010). "For the Tea Party Movement, Sturdy Roots in the Chicago Area". nytimes.com. The New York Times. Retrieved 20 November 2017.
- "Still Crusading, but Now on the Inside". Retrieved 24 June 2019.
- McKinley, Jesse (2007-09-13). "University Fences In a Berkeley Protest, and a New One Arises". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
- https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2014/04/23/american-thinker-needs-start-thinking
- https://www.americanthinker.com/author/raymond_ibrahim/
- https://www.americanthinker.com/author/david_solway/
- https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/donald_trump_is_the_only_legitimate_presidentelect.html
- Avlon, John P. (2014). Wingnuts : extremism in the age of Obama (2nd ed.). New York. pp. 224–227. ISBN 9780991247608.
- Barringer, Felicity (2008-01-11). "California Seeks Thermostat Control". The New York Times. Archived from the original on May 13, 2012. Retrieved 2008-10-13.
- "All Posts About American Thinker".
- "New study shows sea level rise has been slow and a constant, pre-dating industrialization". American Thinker. 2020-03-07.
- "Sea levels rose faster in the past century than in previous time periods". Climate Feedback. 2020-03-12. Retrieved 2020-03-13.
- Corasaniti, Nick (January 25, 2021). "Rudy Giuliani Sued by Dominion Voting Systems Over False Election Claims". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on January 25, 2021. Retrieved January 25, 2021.
- Lifson, Thomas (January 15, 2021). "Statement". American Thinker. Retrieved 2021-01-15.
- Evon, Dan (15 January 2021). "Did a Conservative News Site Admit Its Voter-Fraud Claims Were False?". Snopes. Snopes Media Group Inc. Retrieved 20 January 2021.