Talk:Joseph Tommasi

January 2019: Only one inline citation

I just plastered this article with tags, because there is only one inline citation. Anyone with access to the listed sources is invited to make page citations for any books, and URL citations for any online sources. Also, there is no material about his early life right now. Thanks.--Quisqualis (talk) 18:56, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

My last edit summary

Sorry that I did not inspect this article closer and I inadvertently imputed the breath of life to this dude. The changes I reverted were, nevertheless, unsourced and unsubstantiated. Elizium23 (talk) 15:37, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

GA review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

This review is transcluded from Talk:Joseph Tommasi/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: PARAKANYAA (talk · contribs) 00:42, 10 October 2025 (UTC)

Reviewer: MCE89 (talk · contribs) 01:42, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Good Article review progress box

Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV () 3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant () Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed

Will review this! I'll aim to add some initial comments in the next day or so. MCE89 (talk) 01:42, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for taking up this review! I am going to preemptively justify my usage of two sources here:

• The Daily Trojan is a student newspaper. WP:RSSM says reputable student newspapers are reliable for their local community. Tommasi was part of the local community and would speak on their campus. Further, the Los Angeles Times piece sources from this article.
• The FBI file. This is an FBI file acquired from a FOIA request by Ernie Lazar, which is cited by a secondary source used in this article, and is only cited to minor pieces of information: the specific day and city of his birth, and what he did as a job.

PARAKANYAA (talk) 01:51, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

@PARAKANYAA All comments now added below! I didn't find any issues in the source review, apart from a couple of suggestions that are not required by the GA criteria. Your changes all look good to me. I'll let you keep working on whether there's a better way to explain the relationship between Pierce and Tommasi, but that's not a must so happy to go ahead and pass this now. MCE89 (talk) 11:59, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

Initial checks

• Images are all PD-US-no notice, appropriately captioned, and relevant to the subject
• No copyright issues apparent on Earwig. I'll do checks for close paraphrasing as part of my source spot checks
• No issues with stability

Prose review and general comments

• I've made a few minor copyedits and grammar fixes, feel free to undo any that you disagree with. Please also feel free to push back on any of the suggestions below that you don't think would be improvements
• ...resulting in media attention — This feels slightly vague and understated. It seems like it would be a fair summary of the body to change this to "contributing to a media scandal" or similar
  • went with that
• ...before it ended in 1986 — Suggest changing "ended" to "disbanded", "disestablished" or similar
  • went with disbanded
• ...interviewed by a journalist for the Daily Trojan... — I'm comfortable with your explanation for why the Daily Trojan is a usable source despite being a student newspaper, but I'm not sure we should refer to the interviewer in-text as "a journalist" without giving that context. Can we change this to "interviewed by a student journalist for the Daily Trojan" or "interviewed by a journalist for the student newspaper the Daily Trojan"?
  • yup, oversight, added
• was known to be especially contentious — I don't think "contentious" is quite the right word here if what is meant is that the organisation was filled with internal conflicts (i.e. as opposed to the organisation itself being controversial) — maybe replace this with "fractious" or "internally divided" or similar?
  • went with fractious
• It largely not spoken about openly but some individual members believed it was necessary — The grammar here is not quite right, but the sentence also seems somewhat redundant to the previous one to me
  • cut. this was part of a different thing that i cut, and was left awkwardly
• Despite their ideological similarities, Tommasi hated Pierce, and when Pierce was later kicked out of the party Tommasi sided with Koehl. In 1969, Tommasi, backed by Pierce, launched the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF) as a youth wing of the American Nazi Party — At the moment this goes straight from saying that they hated each other to saying that they worked together, which is a little jarring. Is there anything that could be added to smooth this slightly or explain what changed in their relationship? Or is it just a matter of petty internal politics that can't really be properly explained?
  • There's certainly a better way to say this but this is very contradictory in between sources. The basic gist is that they agreed on everything ideologically but hated each other as people for reasons no source specifies (my best guess: we know Pierce was widely disliked for just being cold and aloof, which Tommasi was the opposite of). There is also a source contradiction where Kaplan says that Pierce liked Tommasi, but is silent on the other way around, while Sunshine indicates that they mutually hated one another. Given Sunshine is more specific about his sources for this I am inclined to believe Sunshine. Will brainstorm a better way to say this and address the rest of your concerns tomorrow
• You've used the acronym JDL before introducing the meaning in the subsequent paragraph
  • swapped
• The protest escalated into fistfights, and the throwing of small explosives, rocks, and other objects at the Nazi headquarters.
  • fixed
• ...as they feared that he would split the vote in a 3-way race, and without him believed Wallace voters would go for Nixon — The subject referred to as "he" and "him" is grammatically unclear here. Should this instead be "it" to refer to the AIP in the previous clause of the sentence?
  • tried to fix this
• ...utilized army clothes and more casual hair — "utilized" feels like a slightly awkward verb to refer to clothing and hairstyles
  • tried to rephrase this
• claiming to firebomb their headquarters — The meaning here reads as slightly ambiguous to me. Is this saying that he claimed "to have firebombed their headquarters" or "that he would firebomb their headquarters"?
  • added a "to have"
• Tommasi was significant on the development — I think something more like "played a significant role in the development" would read more smoothly
  • did that

Source review

• As mentioned above, I agree with your explanation of why the Daily Trojan and the FBI file are usable sources in this particular context. The other sources used are all reliable scholarly works and newspapers, no concerns
• The article appears to cover all major aspects of Tommasi’s life and remains focused on the subject
• I found no indications of OR or NPOV issues during my spotchecks
• I checked the following citations as of this version and all verified the article’s claims: 11a, 11f, 12c, 12f, 15a, 15b, 15c, 15d, 15h, 15j, 21, 25, 27b, 28a, 28e, 28h, 28j, 38, 39, 42c, 58
• Not a GA issue so feel free to disregard, but I did notice during my spotchecks that citation 42a seems somewhat superfluous. I think your citations in the sentence Despite being loyal to Koehl, Tommasi was abruptly ejected from the NSWPP in 1973 could be cleaned up a little, as you’re currently citing Kaplan three times in the sentence with partially overlapping page ranges
• Also not a GA requirement, but ref 24 could ideally use a page number

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. You can locate your hook here. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by TarnishedPath talk 06:13, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

(

• Comment or view
• Article history

)

• ... that a neo-Nazi was offered $5,000 dollars from Richard Nixon's election fundraising group for his participation in a scheme to help Nixon's campaign? Source: Sunshine 2024, p. 36 "Tommasi also made an unusual political deal which ended up in the papers. In November 1971, he was hired by an associate of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), Richard Nixon’s 1972 election fundraising vehicle which was implicated in the Watergate scandal. Tommasi and his followers were paid to go out and convince registered voters of George Wallace’s American Independent Party to re-register as Republicans—thereby making the small party lose state ballot status. [...] Tommasi was to be paid $5,000 but received only $1,200 [...]"

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-los-angeles-times-extremist-groups-h/172740974/ "Tommasi wouldn’t rate much notice except for this convoluted plot: He had insisted that in 1972, he was handed $1,200 from a secret Nixon reelection fund to bankroll a weird assignment. Under arcane California rules, if a party’s statewide voter registration numbers dropped below a certain threshold, that party’s candidates couldn’t be on a ballot. By 1972, then-President Nixon’s people were worried about the prospect of segregationist former Alabama governor George Wallace drawing votes from Nixon as the potential nominee of the AIP, the rightwing American Independent Party.

• • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Moreland Act

Improved to Good Article status by PARAKANYAA (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 14 past nominations.

PARAKANYAA (talk) 08:01, 24 October 2025 (UTC).

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy compliance:

• Adequate sourcing:
• Neutral:
• Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:
• Other problems:

Hook eligibility:

• Cited:
• Interesting:
• Other problems:

QPQ:

Overall: Maximilian775 (talk) 00:54, 25 October 2025 (UTC)

Same text

@Werter1995 Just a note, the reason that book isn't cited is that his chapter is just a republication of his 2001 journal article on the same topic, The Post-War Paths of Occult National Socialism: From Rockwell and Madole to Manson, which we are already citing. PARAKANYAA (talk) 19:29, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

Ok, thanks;) I just didn’t realize there was a duplicate, even though I wrote the same article in a different language version of Wikipedia. — Werter1995 (talk) 19:33, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

@Werter1995 Yeah, I saw that, great work. I made a handful of the changes you made there over here too. PARAKANYAA (talk) 20:00, 20 December 2025 (UTC)