Authoritarian Populism and the New Portrait of the American Agitator: Nicholas J. Fuentes

The Frankfurt School philosophers made research on authoritarianism in the 1930s and 1940s. However, there are parallels between the discourse of agitators and demagogues in the research and analyses of Theodor W. Adorno, Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, and the discourse of the informal spokesperson of the political leader in the US today. In this sense, the critical theory of authoritarianism advanced by Frankfurt School help us to critically analyze today’s authoritarian populist discourse. Thus in this paper firstly the concept of authoritarian populism will be discussed, then the discourse of the new media personality Nicholas J. Fuentes, who labeled the elites, all non-white people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews and communist as enemies, using white Christian America’s current prejudices will be analyzed, and early research on authoritarianism and anti-Semitism will be compared with “new” discourse of the “false prophets” in online news and social media