• The “Donald Trump and fascism” Wikipedia page was created on September 21, 2024, the same day The Guardian published a 4,000 word essay titled, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” — and which is cited as a source in the Wikipedia article

• Contributions from just two editors comprise 91.2% of the “Donald Trump and Fascism” article’s content, suggesting a tightly coordinated effort to control the narrative

• While the “Trumpism” Wikipedia page argues that Trumpism “has significant authoritarian leanings,” describing it as “far-right,” “national-populist,” and “neo-nationalist,” it relies on a source that argues exactly the opposite

• One of the next major citations to the “Trumpism” article that claims that the movement displays “significant authoritarian leaning” is sourced to sociologist Richard Hanmann who was eulogized in 2021 as “a committed leftist, an anti-imperialist, and a true activist-scholar”

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The October surprise of this year’s election cycle has, at least so far, appeared in the form of a talking point: Donald Trump is a fascist. This idea has been blasted out by Kamala Harris, the DNC — which recently projected “Trump Praised Hitler” on the wall of Madison Square Garden during the MAGA rally — and Hillary Clinton.

But for months the idea that Trump is a fascist has been quietly seeded on Wikipedia, lending it credence in the face of deep skepticism from the public. This includes an article on “Trumpism,” which mentions some variation of “fascism” 31 times, the article on “Donald Trump and Fascism,” an article on “Fascism in North America” that includes a dedicated section on “Donald Trump and Fascism,” and an article on the “Racial views of Donald Trump” that includes a comparison to Hitler.

As I’ve documented in previous reporting for Pirate Wires, radical ideologies are laundered by Wikipedia into the mainstream. The key to this is Google, which boosts Wikipedia articles to the top of search results, and often includes a knowledge panel that gives the appearance they’ve been vetted by the search giant, even though they aren’t.

In this case, if you Google “Trump and fascism,” one of the top results will be the article on “Trumpism,” which mentions some variation of the term “fascist” 92 times. In its lead summary, the article states: “Trumpism has significant authoritarian leanings, and is strongly associated with the belief that the President is above the rule of law. It has been referred to as an American political variant of the far-right and the national-populist and neo-nationalist sentiment seen in multiple nations worldwide from the late 2010s to the early 2020s.”

The first source in the article (for the claim Trumpism is a political movement) is a 2016 article in Scientific American by psychology professors Stephen Reicher and Alexander Haslam. In their article, Reicher and Haslam reference the work of sociologist Theodor Abel, who studied the rise of the Nazis. But what Reicher and Haslam actually wrote in their article makes no comparison between Trump and fascism or Hitler whatsoever. In fact, the source article explicitly states the opposite: “We are not comparing Trump, his supporters or their arguments to the Nazis in any way. Instead, our goal is to expose some problems in the ways that commentators analyze and explain behaviors of which we disapprove.”

Reicher and Haslan’s critique was not of “Trumpism,” but of the media and commentators (and ostensibly, Wikipedia editors) who contort the discourse — particularly by demonizing constituencies — to advance political agendas. The authors of the paper cited a Salon.com headline smearing Trump’s supporters as “hideous, disgusting racists,” as an example of how the media does this, in part by making hyperbolic distortions. The very title of their article — “The Politics of Hope: Donald Trump as an Entrepreneur of Identity” — made their position clear. Yet their piece was used by editors of the Wikipedia article to buttress claims that Trumpism is a form of authoritarianism.

One of the next major citations, this one for the claim that the movement displays “significant authoritarian leaning,” is sourced to sociologist Richard Hanmann who was eulogized in 2021 (by the “Marxist sociology blog”) as “a committed leftist, an anti-imperialist, and a true activist-scholar.” This is a pattern across the Wikipedia articles drawing comparisons between Trump and fascism — the citations are often radical leftist or Marxist academics.

One of the most egregious instances of editors laundering far-left sources comes in the Trumpism article, which attempts to re-position the populism associated with Trump as neo-fascism, claiming, “Some commentators have rejected the populist designation for Trumpism and view it instead as part of a trend towards a new form of fascism or neo-fascism.”

The main source for this claim is a 2017 essay by Marxist ecologist John Bellamy Foster — billed as “one of the world’s outstanding radical scholars” (by his own magazine and his personal website) — in the socialist journal he edits, Monthly Review. To publicize the essay, Monthly Review included a blurb by a Marxian economist who argued revealingly that, “By rejecting the term ‘populism' that is widely used to describe the Trump phenomenon and other similar ones around the globe at present, and using the term ‘neo-fascism’ instead, John Bellamy Foster has done a great theoretical service to the Left.”

The majority of the content on the “Trumpism” page (50.5%) was contributed by a single editor, J JMesserly, who was the editor responsible for arguing that fascism, not populism, is the correct characterization of the Trump movement. To implement this, J JMesserly removed another editor’s contribution that stated, "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.” In its place, J JMesserly added the very opposite claim, citing radical scholars to make the point: “Some commentators have rejected the populist designation for Trumpism and instead view it as a new form of fascism, such as Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Juan Cole, Henry Giroux, Paul Street, Enzo Traverso, Davide Tarizzo and Cornel West.”

The Trumpism article links to a separate article called “Donald Trump and fascism,” which extensively compares Trump to Hitler. “Trump's embrace of far-right extremism and several statements and actions have been accused of echoing fascism, Nazi rhetoric, far-right ideology, antisemitism, and white supremacy," one section of the article asserts, citing the Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and Washington Post as sources for these claims. The article prominently features a painting by an otherwise obscure Dutch artist that merges the faces of Trump and Hitler.

The “Donald Trump and Fascism” article was created in last month — in the thick of the presidential campaign — by a user called Di (they-them). The contributions of Di (they-them) and another user, BootsED, comprise 91.2% of the article’s content. Curiously, the article was created on September 21, 2024, the same day UK leftwing newspaper The Guardian published a 4,000 word essay titled, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” — and which is cited as a source in the “Donald Trump and Fascism” Wikipedia article. The Guardian essay hits many of the same points made in its Wikipedia counterpart, and while it hedged by averring that Trump is not literally a fascist, it concludes that he could be “a cause of 21st-century fascism” who “could yet be one of its enablers.”

As the Trump fascism rhetoric continues to rage in advance of the election, it’s likely that more voters will turn to Wikipedia to clarify the matter. And while the seemingly dispassionate statements of alleged fact found in the Wikipedia articles might sway them, what voters will not see are the edit wars waged to get these points on the site — or the radical and Marxist scholarship used to justify them.

— Ashley Rindsberg