Like many of his colleagues, historian Peter Shulman has cautioned against the excessive use of Nazi comparisons in assessing our present-day political scene, arguing that those in search of historical antecedents should study our very own homegrown history of white supremacy instead. Recently, he was browsing around in a new database of Ku Klux Klan newspapers from the 1920s when he noticed how eerily similar the headlines in some of the regional and national Klan publications the database catalogs were to those that have run on Breitbart of late.
Shulman saw echoes in “tone, temperament, sensibilities, fears, feigned outrage, and emotive language,” he told me over email. The comparison works in other ways, too. “The Klan of the 1920s,” Shulman pointed out, occupied a similar political position to today's Breitbart—“on the fringes of mainstream politics but capable of driving issues in ways mainstream politicians had to respond to.”
Can you tell which of these headlines are Breitbart and which are KKK? (We've removed the obvious chronological markers.) Good luck!