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.[12]
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]
In late 2024 and early 2025, a series of American Thinker articles by Jim Davis explored "the biggest scandal of all time": what he described as a confluence of "(a) the cover-up of Joe Biden’s decline; (b) lawfare against Trump; (c) the cover-up of Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling; and now (d) billions wasted, by not just the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), but also by many other agencies, and being uncovered by Elon Musk’s DOGE."[16]
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