Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Google Lists ‘Nazism’ As Ideology Of California Republican Party After Wikipedia Prank

With less than one week to go before the California primary, Google listed “Nazism” as the ideology of California’s Republican Party, Vice News reported.

On Thursday morning, under “ideology” the search engine listed the words “Nazism”, “Conservatism,” “Market liberalism,” “Fiscal conservatism” and “Green conservatism” when California Republican Party was searched.

One white supremacist candidate running as a Republican in the upcoming California Senate race, Patrick Little, has called for a government “free from Jews.”

Little was banned by the state party from registering for their convention and was removed by security while reportedly “kicking and dragging an Israeli flag on the ground.”

Another Republican candidate, John Fitzgerald, claimed on his website that Jews played a “prominent role” in the African slave trade.

Fitzgerald was condemned by the California GOP.

“The California Republican Party’s Board of Directors took swift and decisive action to eliminate any support for John Fitzgerald due to anti-Semitic comments he made recently — those views have no home in the Republican Party,” California Republican Party chairman Jim Brulte said in a statement.

Google took the listing down on Thursday and blamed “vandalism” at Wikipedia for the search result, Time reported. Wikipedia also deleted the “Nazism” entry.

“We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that’s what happened here,” Google said in a Thursday statement. “This would have been fixed systematically once we processed the removal from Wikipedia, but when we noticed the vandalism we worked quickly to accelerate this process to remove the erroneous information.”

Statewide elections will take place on Tuesday.

Contact Haley Cohen at [email protected]

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.