Abstract
Right-wing extremism and white nationalism are creeping into the political mainstream, painting a very stark and worrying picture. However, the visceral reaction many of the non-racist public are having to these developments could simply be a highly emotional overreaction to what is, in reality, a small change. As well, the news media could simply be discussing and writing about extremist campaigns and officials disproportionately. This thesis endeavors to answer the question: has Congress increased its use of White Nationalist rhetoric over the last two decades, and what are the possible factors causing any change? I utilize two different methods to quantify the similarity between the rhetoric of the US House, namely, the Hein Daily Record and the members’ tweets, and a Corpus of White Nationalist texts. I analyze how the similarity changes over time using a variety of trend analysis methods. The findings of this analysis are inconclusive but indicate how further research can refine the quantification method to produce a measure of White Nationalist or other extremist ideology within a given text. This is an important extension of the current methods for Ideological Scaling within political science because it isn’t bound to the traditional left-right measurement scale.