Tesla CEO Elon Musk called Wikipedia “broken” after one of the site’s pages was revived defining former President Donald Trump as a “fascist.”
Ashley Rindsberg of Pirate Wires published a report on Tuesday detailing the circumstances under which the Wikipedia article “Donald Trump and Fascism,” since changed to “Comparisons between Donald Trump and fascism,” was recreated. The page, which effectively labeled Trump a fascist, was mainly written by just two editors, Di (they-them) and BootsED, who comprised 91.2% of all edits, an unusual pattern on a website featuring over 48 million editors in the English edition alone. The report caught the attention of Musk.
“Wikipedia is broken,” he said, quoting the article.
The “Comparisons between Donald Trump and fascism,” page primarily sourced left-wing academics and included an entire section comparing the Jan. 6 riot to Adolf Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch.
Rindsberg noted that the page was created on Sept. 21, 2024, the same day the U.K.-based newspaper the Guardian published an essay titled, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?”
The Pirate Wires article also featured the Wikipedia page of “Trumpism,” the ideology and movement associated with Trump, which is described in hostile terms.
“Trumpism has been described as authoritarian and neo-fascist. Trumpist rhetoric features anti-immigrant, xenophobic, nativist, and racist attacks against minority groups. Identified aspects include conspiracist, isolationist, Christian nationalist, evangelical Christian, protectionist, anti-feminist, and anti-LGBT beliefs,” the page read.
Rindsberg found that the “Trumpism” page included several sources that contradicted what was being written.
A 2016 article in Scientific American by psychology professors Stephen Reicher and Alexander Haslam was cited in the article as supporting the claim that Trumpism is a political movement, though the article itself was primarily criticizing media commentators who portrayed Trump supporters as Nazis, racists, and fascists.
The discussion page on the “Trumpism” article contained a slew of complaints from fellow editors.
“All 5 of the sources backing the use of ‘authoritarianism’ in the intro are opinion pieces that fail to draw a clear correlation between Trump’s policies or supporters and authoritarianism,” one wrote. “I think the editors are playing a bit fast and loose here. Do we really want to claim here on Wikipedia that the ideology of Donald Trump and his supporters is authoritarian? That just seems so removed from reality and I’m wondering if we’re not saying this in bad faith here.”
“This is incredibly misleading and does not represent at all what Trumpism is. For example, Trump supporters favor LEGAL immigration. That does not make them ‘anti-immigration,’” another editor wrote. How [in] any way shape or form is he authoritarian? Trump supporters fully support the constitution- it is a flat out [lie],” another editor wrote.
“This article is just false. There is no other way to put it. It is not what Trump supporters believe. It is what the far-left labels Trump supporters. Wow – never seen such misinformation,” they continued.
On the “Trumpism” page, one editor who made up over half the edits removed the contributions of other editors who cast a more neutral angle, Rindsberg found.
The contribution, “Some historians have argued that [characterizing Trump as fascist] is an inaccurate use of the term, pointing out that while there are parallels there are also important dissimilarities,” was replaced by a sentence saying that many scholars reject the “populist” label to instead view Trumpism “as a new form of fascism,” citing far-left academics such as Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, and Cornel West.
While anyone with an account can edit Wikipedia, some high-interest articles are locked to prevent “vandalism.”
Though commonly used interchangeably, Nazism and fascism were two different phenomena. (Fascists and Nazis went so far as to fight a civil war in Austria in 1934.) Fascism, though notoriously difficult to define, is characterized primarily by a totalitarian government, the military mobilization of the entirety of society, the organization of the economy into state-managed “corporations,” and ultranationalism. While it is largely cited as having begun in Italy under Benito Mussolini, fascist governments also formed in Slovakia, Hungary, Vichy France, Greece, Belgium, and Austria throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The last clearly fascist government collapsed in 1945, and the ideology has failed to significantly take root anywhere since.
Following World War II, it has primarily been used as an insult. Author George Orwell noted the phenomenon in a 1944 essay titled “What is Fascism?”
“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless,” he wrote. “In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
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In the final weeks of the 2024 election cycle, the Harris campaign and Democrats have explicitly sought to portray Trump as a fascist, drawing comparisons with the former president and Hitler.
Republicans and some Democrats have decried the rhetoric as a possible incitement to violence following the two assassination attempts against Trump.
