What Tucker Carlson & Father Charles Coughlin Have in Common
Both mesmerized a large swath of Americans with lies, hate & traitorous propaganda. Coughlin fell swiftly into obscurity. Will Carlson follow?
In my recent piece on Tucker Carlson, “Russia Calling! Tucker Carlson's Fantastic Journey from Media Mediocrity to Putin Propaganda Shill,” I went into some detail showing how Carlson uncannily parrots the Russian propaganda line, particularly regarding Ukraine, and how it’s a well-paved two-way street with Russian propagandists liberally quoting and broadcasting Carlson at his treasonous worst.
The Kremlin, in fact, sent a directive to Russian news channels last year stating, “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States and NATO.” Russia media monitor Julia Davis describes Carlson as “practically the co-host” of state TV propagandists who “is often quoted to support official Kremlin narratives.”
I then went on to compare Carlson to such broadcast traitor luminaries as Axis Sally, Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose.
Now, with Carlson being abruptly fired by Fox, it’s not only the MAGA undead who are bawling and rending their raiments in shocked rage. Equally outraged are Carlson’s masters, er, admirers, in Moscow.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov deplored tovarishch Carlson’s sacking before the UN Security Council, no less: “I’ve heard that Tucker Carlson has left Fox News. It’s curious news. What is this related to? One can only guess, but clearly the wealth of views in the American information space has suffered as a result.”
It gets better.
Russian propaganda organs are falling over themselves to replace Fox as Tucker’s employer.
The Kremlin-run outlet RT — formerly Russia Today — informed Carlson in a tweet: “You can always question more with RT.”
Then Vladimir Solovyov, a Putin shill with the propaganda channel Russia-1, praised him for being the “last remaining voice of reason” in U.S. news media. “You have our admiration and support in any endeavor you choose for yourself next, be it running for President of the United States (which you should totally do, by the way) or making an independent media project. We’ll happily offer you a job if you wish to carry on as a presenter and host! You are always welcome in Russia and in Moscow, we wish you the best of luck. Tucker come join us. You don't have to be afraid of taking the piss out of Biden here.”
“Our beloved Tucker Carlson has been fired, it’s a disgrace!” lamented cohost Dmitry Drobnitsky.
With friends like that who needs enemies?
That’s just the point. Carlson’s friends are America’s enemies. The only difference between him and the World War II broadcast traitors is that the latter blasted their lies from behind enemy lines, while Carlson did so straight from one of Fox’s studio’s in Miami, Los Angeles, Washington or his vacation home in Maine. No reason to hide. MAGA-verse proudly keeps American traitors in plain sight.
With his ouster, Carlson brings to mind another disgraced former propagandist for one of America’s enemies. Father Charles Coughlin was a popular “radio priest” in the 1930s whose far-right populist broadcasts had a wide and loyal following. In his fascinating book, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States, Bradley W. Hart states, “In many ways, Coughlin established the model for the indignant, belligerent, no-holds-barred talk show host that hit the airwaves in every American city in the late twentieth century. He had an audience of an estimated 29 million listeners, in a U.S. population of some 130 million. Hart states, “Historians have estimated that his audience was the largest in the world and far surpassed that of every major radio star of the era, and was possibly the largest of all time.” By contrast, Rush Limbaugh’s audience peaked at around 20 million out of a total population of under 300 million. Carlson’s averaged around 3 million regular viewers.
Historian David H. Bennett has written of Coughlin, “He knew all the tricks of the propagandist, from name calling to glittering generality.”
Due to his runaway popularity, politicians paid deference to the radio priest, including FDR initially; many feared him. In 1933, 85 congressmen — nearly one sixth of the Congress — petitioned President Roosevelt to send Coughlin as a U. S. adviser to the London Economic Conference. (The White House demurred.)
Coughlin increasingly played on anti-Semitic tropes and spoke admiringly of Adolf Hitler. In one of his rants, Coughlin stated, “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.”
This went too far. The Roosevelt administration revoked Coughlin’s mailing privileges and informed Coughlin’s superior, Bishop Edward Aloysius Mooney, that the government was willing to “deal with Coughlin in a restrained manner if he [Mooney] would order Coughlin to cease his public activities.” Unstated was that the U.S. Attorney General was prepared to file sedition charges against Coughlin. Getting the message loud and clear, Mooney ordered Coughlin to cease and desist. Coughlin obliged and spent the last three-and-a-half decades of his life as an obscure parish priest, followed by retirement.
Here’s the question of the hour with Tucker Carlson: His bishop, Rupert Murdoch, having canned him, with the presumed power to keep him down, even unto exile, will he, like Coughlin, recede deservedly into obscurity, taking with him his vile hatred, lies and betrayal of his country?
One can hope.