Slate: The Deplatforming of Father Coughlin

January 28, 2021 Hunter Wallace History, Politics, Progressives 31

I saw it coming.

Neoliberal Joe is president.

American elites are more hated and resented than ever before. Trust in institutions has continued to crash to new lows. There is a massive vacuum in the middle of the electorate that was once occupied by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Wealth redistribution is going mainstream. The political establishment is brazenly using hard power to try to coerce, intimidate and muzzle its populist critics.

Slate:

“On Nov. 20, 1938, WMCA in New York had enough of Father Charles E. Coughlin’s anti-Semitic bile. After a supposed homily entitled “Persecution: Jewish and Christian,” in which he denounced Jews in language that might have been lifted from Der Stürmer, an announcer broke in to distance the station from Coughlin’s talk. “Unfortunately, Father Coughlin has uttered many misstatements of fact,” he informed listeners. Donald Flamm, the president of WMCA, later pledged “not to permit a repetition” of Coughlin’s inflammatory remarks, words that were “calculated to stir up religious and racial hatred and dissension in this country.”

The story of Coughlin, the demagogic radio priest who dominated American airwaves during the Great Depression, offers an intriguing analog-age precedent to the digital-age debates over the limits of free expression. Then as now, the serene pleasure of no longer having to listen to a noxious voice blare incessantly in the ear coexists with a queasy unease at the realization of how suddenly and imperiously the rulers of corporate media can switch off one’s microphone.

Coughlin was the longest-lived and loudest of the rabble-rousing orators who channeled the grievances of millions of economically desperate and culturally unmoored Americans in the 1930s. The lineup included Louisiana Sen. Huey Long, who wanted to make “every man a king,” or so he said; Long’s self-appointed successor, the unhinged hatemonger Gerald L. K. Smith; and the comparatively sane and lowkey Francis Townsend, who rose to prominence on a scheme for an old-age pension giveaway. Of those figures, only Coughlin’s fame is impossible to imagine without the amplification of radio, beamed out live, coast to coast, the new transmission belt for American culture. For the first time, a politician, an entertainer, or an advertiser could enthrall a nationwide audience at the same existential moment. …”

Joe Biden is no FDR.

He is barely holding it together.

The political and economic climate is ripe though for another Huey Long or Father Coughlin to come along, mobilize populists and horse whip the professional managerial class.

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31 Comments

  1. “The political and economic climate is ripe though for another Huey Long or Father Coughlin to come along, mobilize populists and horse whip the professional managerial class.”

    I dearly wish for this. However:

    “impossible to imagine without the amplification of radio, beamed out live, coast to coast, the new transmission belt for American culture.”

    Right-wing cranks are always telling me that we’re waiting for “The Man on the White Horse” – which usually means Napoleon or Hitler. I don’t know about Napoleon, but Hitler – along with Lenin, Churchill, FDR, Mao, and all the rest – were basically creations of the new Electronic Mass Media technology. (NSDAP used loudspeakers and even recordings for public speeches. FDR was known for his radio “fireside chats” that made people “feel like he was right there speaking to them.”)

    It’s astonishing to see it in action, but pretty much anything put on an electronic screen will brainwash a human being.

    Consider pornography – this causes a physical reaction in men and women, despite it being nothing more than blinking colored lights on a screen.

    This is a technology problem.

    I don’t see how the Leadership Principle is going to work without control of the Mass Electronic Media, in this time meaning Internet Social Media.

    Trump worked but Trump was already a TV celebrity famous among Baby Boomers.

    Now our White Nerds can, and have, built a censorship-free decentralized online media platform – multiple ones, in fact. So the technical problem is solved. But the social problem is very much not solved, and the economic problem is the first part of the social problem.

    Money is how people can coordinate their actions in large groups. We don’t have control of our own money, and conservative right-wingers attack us anytime we try to wrest control of money from the Usual Suspects, because right-wing conservatives are craven, cowardly ass-kissing suck ups.

    I don’t have an answer. I’m just some dude with a blog. But the problem is not hard to discern.

    • We need to ditch this “Waiting For Ye Greate Leadere” mentality. It’s up to us, the ordinary hobbitfolk. The small reddit traders. Wrest power away from the corrupt centers and decentralize for good. Think Switzerland.

  2. The Pope, you know one of those “good” Pope’s, told Coughlin to shut up and shut up he did for the next 40 years until his death.

  3. The only thing Fr. Coughlin, Ezra Pound, Col. Lindbergh and other “notorious anti semites” of that era did was tell the truth about the jews and their diabolical plans for enslaving the world. Notice how the jews have never denied any of the accusations against them, they are only upset that some lowly gentiles have the audacity to make those accusations out loud.

  4. The Israelis have vaccinated their old people and no doubt they’ve vaccinated their military. Expect them to push their Biological warfare advantage very soon.

      • This documentary is based of Josephus account. I think Josephus paints the Jews in a heroic light, a little too much. Puffed up Tito’s reputation as Josephus was the Flavian Court Jew. The Tribe probably converted the Temple to a Casino and Bordello for the Legions and agreed to tell a tale of derring do.

  6. I love capitalists running scared.

    What I want makes Trump look like the kiddie ride at Disneyland.

  7. The political and economic climate have been ripe for another Huey Long type politician for quite some time. The problem is, currently there is no such politician worthy of note. Bernie in 2016 came close, but he transformed into Woke Bernie around 2018 and that was it for him.

  8. “Joe Biden is no FDR. He is barely holding it together.”

    Very true, but, in fairness, I do not think FDR, or anyone else – for that matter- could ‘hold it together’, if by that you mean take The United States back to where it was in 2008.

    Although a dozen years is not so much time, what has transpired in the mood of this nation since then makes that return an insuperable gulf, and no amount of deplatformings will put the genie back in the bottle.

    Love or hate President Trump, his greatest achievement was, all at once, both witting and un- – the witting being that he very consciously took the citizenry off some of the principal moorings to which it had been attached since the end of WWII; the unwitting being that, in having waged scorched earth to put a stop to him, The Ruling Elite exposed itself beyond what can be repaired.

    One can brilliantly analyze the respective sides involved in this present conflict all one wants, BUT, in the end, the time in history no longer belongs to Les Globalistes.

    Yes, they will go kicking and screaming, but, in the end, they will go – one way or the other – just as went the Wehrmacht from Mother Russia.

    FDR could not save it for them now, anymore than the tactical genius of Erich Von Manstein could salvage The Eastern Front for National Socialist Germany in 1943-44.

    There is no going back, there are not enough dollar-printing machines and dissembling mass medias in the world to make it so.

    • @ ivan turgenev, along with the priest, ivan, the motor city.was thee home of the legendary ” black legion”, are you familiar with them?

        • @ ivan turgenev, thee “black legion”, was a civic minded, nativist association, centred in the midwesr , thee detroit area was a hotbed of fun in thee 20’s and 30’s with the legion and mr.coughlin and mr.ford selling newspapers along with his roadsters, h.bogart starred in a movie about the legion, simply titled ” the black legion”.

    • “There is no going back, there are not enough dollar-printing machines and dissembling mass medias in the world to make it so”:

      To the contrary (I hope I am wrong) the ruling Elites are not going back but looking forward. Babylon (the Empire) is stronger than ever, stronger than anything; the sun will never set on it, and the Dollar reigns supreme. As Victoria Nuland says, “Now we are going to deal with Putin once and for all.” And we are also going to deal with China and all other nations that do not fully submit. They will be made examples of, regime-changed, fully Western-corporatized.

      • “The West” cannot survive. It is a society gone completely insane. It is trying to destroy its founding race. Peoples who don’t despise themselves will not be conquered by this pathetic joke of a society.

  9. Let me see… Antifa BLM have been rioting in American cities for half a year. The cops have been defunded because they are fascist racists. The libs/jews are banning everyone they disagree with from social media, their jobs, their bank accounts, and now stock trading. Washington D.C. is an armed camp, because Trump sent a mob of brainwashed qtards and riggers to march on it after he lost the election. The Democrats believe the white soldiers protecting their camp are naziswhowanttokillsixmillionjews! They despise their soldiers so much, they forced them to sleep on the ground in a dirty oily underground car park. Now Pelosi is accusing elected Republicans of wanting to bring guns into the chamber to murder her!

    I think the media drives *dumb* people crazy.

    I have long had a theory explaining why we have detected no signals from other civilizations in the universe. They invented mass/social media. It drove them all mad, and they nuked themselves out of existence. The end.

    • The US is in a death spiral. Why not just hand out a dole and tell everyone to sit down from six weeks…

      At some point whites will swarm and murmurate then make last year look like peace.

    • Between the Trumptards/Qtards and the Libtards believing that the literal Waffen SS just stormed the Capital with a coup to overthrow the State, I don’t know who is more insane honestly.

  10. I’ve felt that the markets are being manipulated since the mortgage backed securities bailout in 2009. This is longest period in the history of the country without a major bear market downturn. I’m not sure how they’re doing it, except I’m convinced it’s being done.

    One thing the government did was change the banking laws so that the major investment banks could claim assets that they don’t actually have, they don’t have to undergo the accounting process that any other business does. If I claim my 15 year old Ford is worth 90 thousand dollars, it’s not because I can’t sell it for that anywhere. .

  11. Not Coughlin. No no no! That stock market speculating, silver stashing right-wing-political Papist Priest was a TERRIBLE influence, misleading the people down blind populist alleys, serving them tantalizing truths always mixed with a little poison – a master superstition salesman, who worked to derail and defeat the true socialist movement, and amplified the government’s anti-communist cold war propaganda.

    • Coughlin admired Mussolini and especially the traitorous general Francisco Franco who he said was “defending Christian civilization,” and he published false stories of “Christians massacred by the Republicans.”

      In 1926, the Ku Klux Klan had burned down Coughlin’s church in Royal Oak, Michigan, after which he took to the airwaves and became “the radio priest.” He began attacking communism, which was beginning to receive a fair hearing in the U.S. and he supported FDR against the communists and socialists, until he switched to join the remnants of the late Huey Long’s right-wing movement. His activity in later years was cold-war propagandizing, as well as priestcraft.

  14. Hunter, could you write one about Eugene Debs? Debs went to federal prison under President Grover Cleveland, who sent the U.S. military to break up “Debs Rebellion” (railroad workers’ strike) and killed 30 of the strikers. In prison, he stopped being a Democrat and became a socialist. In prison again in 1920 “for sedition,” while running for President as a socialist he received almost one million votes, the highest total in U.S. history for a socialist candidate. Head and shoulders above the reactionary priest Coughlin:

  16. “Long’s self-appointed successor, the unhinged hatemonger Gerald L. K. Smith…”

    HL Mencken said that “unhinged hate-monger” was the world’s greatest public speaker – and he proved it time & time again by drawing tens of thousands of downtrodden, exploited “goy trash” to his speeches. So what did the kikes do? They imposed a media blackout against him: jew furniture & jewelry store owners told local papers that they’d pull their weekly ad accounts – which the papers depended on to stay in business – if they didn’t comply. It worked, just as today’s (((Big Tech))) deplatforming works.

  17. Hi everyone.

    I’m still alive and mostly sane.

    I highly, highly recommend the PBS documentary on Father Coughlin on The American Experience – “the Radio Priest”. Coughlin was populist, patriot American with a traditional Catholic Christian perspective.

    It’s so rare or almost impossible now to find American big church leaders that are populists, oppose the debt slavery J money banking cartel and are pro White European Christian families, communities.

    But, we had one then – Father Coughlin and he was a radio media superstar, a lot like Hitler.

    Here’s the link:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzh-koezHzo&t=6s

    J Ryan
    Left behind outside of Chicago

  18. I agree with Huey long, thank you for turning me on to more of his work. I think his platforms are a great step in the right direction of removing and cleansing our people from the parasites.

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