(n.) A leader of the rabble; one who attempts to control the multitude by specious or deceitful arts; an unprincipled and factious mob orator or political leader.
Example Sentences:
(1) He lost no time climbing on the back of the clown car of the demagogue who, with ghoulishly oedipal glee, he calls “Daddy”.
(2) Just one problem: she was singing the praises of Donald Trump, that peerless narcissist, deceiver, dodgy deal maker and demagogue.
(3) Privacy advocates contend Comey is demagoguing the issue.
(4) Why Livingstone is not recognised as one of the most unprincipled demagogues in Britain after this performance – why, indeed, Labour has not expelled him – is one of the wonders of the age.
(5) Critics describe him as an authoritarian populist and dangerous demagogue.
(6) Admittedly, these moments, when the left – broadly defined – stir the passions as effectively as any demagogue of the right are rare.
(7) If white Americans need black villains to feel superior in their decline as 2015 closes – and as the leading demagogue Republican candidate for president can confirm, they do – then innocent victims like Tamir will continue to be killed, and those who do so will be rewarded with acquittal, fame or even promotion .
(8) O’Rourke warned that perhaps Trump was not the real threat, but that his candidacy seemed to spark “an impulse to like a demagogue.” Carr agreed Trump could be “the harbinger of something to come.
(9) He also wrote A Face in the Crowd (1957), about a rising demagogue.
(10) I am the last person on Earth [Clinton] wants to run against.” But the bully, showman, party crasher and demagogue – as Time’s cover put it – is also the last person many Republicans want to see at the top of the ticket, though arch conservative Cruz comes close.
(11) The Financial Times Deutschland last week published an article on its front page headlined " Resist the demagogue ".
(12) The Saudi strategy to derail the nuclear agreement and perpetuate – and even exacerbate – tension in the region has three components: pressuring the West; promoting regional instability through waging war in Yemen and sponsoring extremism; and directly provoking Iran .” Zarif added: “Let us not forget that the perpetrators of many acts of terror … as well as nearly all members of extremist groups like Al-Qaeda and the Nusra Front, have been either Saudi nationals or brainwashed by petrodollar-financed demagogues who have promoted anti-Islamic messages of hatred and sectarianism for decades.” Other Arab countries followed their Sunni ally in cutting or reducing diplomatic ties with predominantly Shia Iran.
(13) Abandoning the vast single market across the Channel doesn’t just mean reducing Britain to the status of lapdog to the woman-groping Muslim-bashing demagogue across the Atlantic.
(14) Tsipras is criticised as a populist, even a demagogue.
(15) They feign outrage that a demagogue spewing vile ... is somehow winning in a party that has spent years telling immigrants they’re not welcome in America,” said Reid.
(16) In the US, the racist demagogue Donald Trump blames the Brussels atrocity on Europe’s immigration policy, while his fellow Republican candidate Ted Cruz demands special patrols for Muslim communities to stop them being “radicalised” – a policy guaranteed to do the opposite.
(17) Distorting realities, ignoring nuances and hijacking people’s fears: that’s the recipe for a demagogue who lives not on his own wits but others’ miseries.
(18) Now they have won and what Kipling said of the demagogues of his age applies to Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.
(19) Beyond the violent and potentially violent lie fractured and isolated ghettos, where large numbers are prey to religious demagogues.
(20) I'm not a demagogue or an actor; the French expect something else from me, they want results," he said.
Polemicist
Definition:
(n.) A polemic.
Example Sentences:
(1) I was following the libel trial brought by David Irving, the Holocaust denier and “pro-Nazi polemicist” – to quote the judge’s eventual verdict – against Penguin Books, which had dared publish a text which told the truth about him.
(2) Other jobs Reverend, polemicist, diplomatic envoy between England and Ireland Did you know?
(3) Kristol was not, however, either a humourless polemicist or a forbidding moralist.
(4) Patrick Michaels, the climatologist and heavyweight polemicist for the rightwing Cato Institute published a long op-ed piece in the DC Examiner , slamming Mann for an email quote about keeping sceptics' papers out of the IPCC report " even if we have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is ".
(5) There is a rich literature in this area, owing more to Frances Yates's seminal study The Art of Memory than to the works of Marshall McLuhan, but these days I find myself turning more and more to the American media and social critic Neil Postman, a conservative polemicist, in many respects, who – were he still with us – might perhaps have railed against smartphones and the internet himself, as he did against television in Amusing Ourselves to Death .
(6) Before that, in 2003, and wearing his polemicist's hat, Judt had published in the New York Review the single most controversial of all his essays, Israel: The Alternative.
(7) Even polemicists speaking out on their behalf cannot bring themselves to use their names.
(8) It has always sprung up.” As this new series develops, exploring the core of the Anglo-American tradition, we shall discover some fascinating connections between Klein and some of the radical journalists of the past, maverick polemicists such as Daniel Defoe and Tom Paine .
(9) Perhaps it should be written off as a polemicist’s provocation.
(10) One Labour polemicist in the blogosphere reckons Miliband is taking a moral stance whose political consequences could be "of no benefit to the weakest and most vulnerable at all"; another argues that "Ed Miliband's conviction is leading him and his party to disaster", and that Labour will "lose the welfare war".
(11) "We must be careful about politicians and polemicists who lavish us with this cheap alcohol and allow things to get out of control."
(12) "Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him," said Brooke.
(13) The Cambridge-educated polemicist then goes on to pick apart Prayuth's recent happiness campaigns across the capital, Bangkok, where locals and foreigners alike have been offered free meals and haircuts, music concerts put on by Thai soldiers and flanked by PVC-clad dancers, and the chance to both pet a pony and take a selfie next to a trussed-up soldier as an attempt to " bring back happiness to the people " after a decade of political in-fighting.
(14) After working briefly in the 1990s as a Bank of England statistician – for a polemicist, he retains an unusual, and potent, zest for figures – Montgomerie moved into full-time politics at Conservative central office, first under the leadership of William Hague, then under Iain Duncan Smith.
(15) Over the past dozen years, he has played multiple, apparently contradictory Tory roles: internal critic and cheerleader; intimate of the party elite; self-appointed voice of the grassroots; polemicist for a more populist Conservatism – sometimes more, sometimes less right wing – and dispassionate analyst of the party's ups and downs.
(16) For decades, the experiences of ordinary women had been largely overlooked by the literary world: either it was recounted in fictional terms (as in Mary McCarthy's The Group ) or it was relayed anonymously by feminist polemicists and social historians (Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique ).
(17) Today bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange oriental peoples.
(18) There is mention of such young(ish) columnists and online polemicists as Laurie Penny and Owen Jones: "They seem more like normal people," reckons Rowan Gourlay, 17.
(19) "The picture of Irving which emerges from the evidence of his extra-curricular activities reveals him to be a rightwing pro-Nazi polemicist.
(20) • Readers who have found themselves persuaded this week by the measured insights of Ukip donor Demetri Marchessini, who purchased an ad in the Daily Telegraph to declaim on the subject of homosexuality ("there is no such word as 'homophobic', it cannot be found in any dictionary") are no doubt anxious to hear more from the Greek businessman and self-styled polemicist.