Tucker Carlson & Charles Coughlin

Fox News announced it was ending its association with Tucker Carlson, and it made me think of the rise and fall of Father Charles Coughlin. [Source]

Father Charles Coughlin was a Roman Catholic priest and one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach a mass audience.

He started broadcasting his sermons in 1926 as a way to pay for the mortgage he'd taken out for his church's building, but when the radio station was bought out, the new manager (George Richards) requested that he make his sermons more political. Then, as the stock market crashed in 1929 and the economy tanked, Coughlin became increasingly vehement in his criticism of various groups.

He targeted the banking system, Jews, socialists, and Soviet Communism, as well as the captialists who drove the working man "into the ranks of socialistm by the inordinate and grasping greed of the manufacturer." [Source] With an American public angered by the inexplicably severe Great Depression, his invective found a fertile soil, and in 1930 CBS picked him up for national broadcast. In a country of 120 million people, his audience reached 30 million -- a quarter of the entire population.

Throughout the 1930s, his views grew more closely aligned with George Richards, and he became more "openly anti-democratic, calling for the abolition of political parties and questioning the value of elections." [Source] To the extent that there was a common thread to his various policy prescriptions, it was the general anger at the status quo -- he wanted action, but then railed against government actions that either proved ineffective or had undesireable secondary effects.

Coughlin's bromides raised eyebrows in November 1938, two weeks after the Kristalnacht pogrom in Germany. Referring to the millions of Christians who had been killed by the Communists in Russia, he said, "Jewish persecution followed only after Christians first were persecuted." (Like the phrase, "Go woke, go broke," this is the "post hoc ergo prompter hoc" logical fallacy.) [Source] When three radio stations dropped his program in response, he accused them of being under "Jewish ownership," to which they answered, "Unfortunately, Father Coughlin has uttered many misstatements of fact."

But Coughlin continued. In January 1939, the book "The Fine Art of Propaganda -- A Study of Father Coughlin's Speeches" revealed Coughlin had been using many of the same techniques as Nazi Germany. In October 1939, the after after Germany invaded Poland, the National Association of Broadcasters, squelched the "sale of air time to people deemed to be controversial," and he lost his primary audience. His print publication continued until 1942, when -- following the Pearl Harbor attack -- non-interventionists like Coughlin were largely discredited.

The much-reduced-in-influence Father Coughlin lived out the rest of his days as he began -- as the priest of the small church he founded, and passed away in 1979 at the age of 88.

I see many parallels between Tucker Carlson and Charles Coughlin. Roger Ailes influenced Carlson just as George Richards influenced Coughlin. In our time, Carlson has exploited anger among white conservatives against those on the fringes of society, just as Coughlin did among the white working class in his time. And just like Carlson has praised the autocracy of Russian president Vladimir Putin, so also did Coughlin sympathize with the Fascism and antisemitism of Nazi Germany, all the way up to the outbreak of the war.

As Mark Twain once said, "History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme."