From Father Coughlin to Elon Musk: Media Figures and Fascist Playbooks
How Pop Culture Reflects—and Resists—Rising Fascism
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The Super Bowl brought up a lot of feelings for me, and none of them were about football. I was stunned by the crowd appearing to cheer for Trump when he appeared on the big screen (though not everyone was cheering). Did it bother me that, by comparison, Taylor Swift was booed? Not really. I think it bothered me that she was booed for the wrong reason. Presumably, she was booed for dating a member of the Chiefs in a stadium that sounded very Eagles-forward. Trump claimed later that it was because she endorsed his opponent. Classic “I make everything about me”-guy move. I wish it had been because she has not used her huge platform to call out fascism in plain sight.
I am particularly focused on pop culture engagements with the rise of fascism and activism against it because it feels so relevant, especially after the Super Bowl. During the game, Kanye West paid for an ad to drive viewers to a website where he is selling a swastika t-shirt. This after a weekend of tweeting deeply antisemitic content in which he declared himself a Nazi and offered support for Hitler. The platform is no stranger to Nazi content, as its current owner offered a Nazi salute after the inauguration, which he then defended with some poor attempts at humor including Nazi puns. What the hell is happening?
I have been very anxious about what I’m seeing in the world. Having studied how people use culture (in this case reading) as a therapeutic approach, I know that some find it helpful to lean into the source of their issues and read about it while others favor escape. For example, if you’re anxious, you might prefer to read a pamphlet on anxiety OR read a book that takes you away from your anxiety. For the last several weeks, I have treated political news as my source of anxiety and mostly chosen escape. This week, I chose to lean into history.
I don’t know that this will help, but I want to share some things I’m reading about and listening to that are helping me put what we’re seeing in context. For me, this approach is reminiscent of Elizabeth L. Cohen, an associate professor at West Virginia University and an editor of the Psychology of Popular Media. In an article in Vanity Fair on “Doombinging” or watching dark TV in dark times, she explained the complicated reasons we’re drawn to different sources of entertainment. Sometimes we are drawn to counterintuitive pop culture, so, for example, reading a dystopian novel like Station 11 or watching the show on which it's based during and after Covid.
“We assume that we’re going to entertainment because we enjoy it,” she explained, “but there are so many other reasons.” For some, reading a dystopian novel or listening to a podcast about the history of fascism (more on that in a moment) can offer comfort. Taking in darker content, “We can experiment with some of those difficult emotions, [and] having the experiences in a safe environment can be really beneficial to developing ourselves.” In other words, reading about a dystopian world like Station 11 can offer us a safe space to process the feelings associated with that reality without the literal stakes. Similarly, reading about the history of a period reminiscent of our own can offer the safety of processing the things we’re anxious about now at a remove.
For me, this meant returning to the Rachel Maddow-produced podcast Ultra. Debuting in 2024, it recounts attempts by far-right individuals and groups to infiltrate U.S. Democracy. Season 1 focuses on fascists working in collusion with the Nazis to infiltrate and subvert American institutions prior to World War II. In a strong episode in season 1, we hear the story of Father Charles Coughlin. For the unfamiliar, Father Coughlin hosted the most popular radio show in the country, broadcasting weekly from the Shrine of the Little Flower outside Detroit, Michigan. Reaching up to 20 million listeners a week at his peak in 1932, he foreshadowed the rise of televangelism and talk radio.
Initially, he talked about faith and politics but then moved almost exclusively into sharing his own political hot takes. First, he was an ally of FDR, proclaiming “Roosevelt or Ruin!” in the 1932 election. However, after FDR acknowledged the Soviet Union, Coughlin turned on his former political friend. Deeply in his “Roosevelt is ruin!” era, he used his broad reach to call out what he saw as the threats of communism and the Jews. His anti-Semitism was legion, spewing hate and misinformation on both his radio show and in his magazine, somewhat ironically called Social Justice. This was a man who wrote fan letters to Mussolini and blatantly misrepresented terror events like Kristallnacht which he presented as a response to an attack on Christians by Jews. Even his own station was obligated to correct his comments, calling out his “many misstatements of fact.” In a great piece on his eventual fall from grace, Slate reported his most shocking move:
On Dec. 5, 1938, in Coughlin’s house organ Social Justice, under his own byline, he plagiarized a speech by Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels, originally delivered in 1935 at the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg. By then, quipsters were referring to Coughlin’s church as “the Shrine of the Little Führer.”
Can you imagine plagiarizing a literal Nazi? In a magazine about social justice? What’s even more insane is that while doing this, Coughlin rebuffed any accusations that he supported the Nazis or was himself a fascist. How did he do this? The classic “I have Jewish friends!” routine. Big yikes.
Reading his history is a trip in part because it feels so absurd from the distance of 2025. How could a religious leader call on his listeners to follow his fascist and anti-Semitic lead? Insane! And yet.
This was a media figurehead who used his vast influence on a media platform to both spew hate and maintain a pose of purposeful ambiguity. He defended a literal pogrom against the Jews, called them out by name as a national threat, and pivoted from accusations of Nazism or fascism by citing imagined “Jewish friends.” This approach feels similar to what Elon Musk is doing today, using X (Twitter) to platform hate groups whose views he shares while maintaining a pose of what communications professor Shannon McGregor calls “strategic ambiguity.” This behavior, offering poorly conceived defenses that use “humor” to be purposefully vague about his intentions or views when doing something that looks an awful lot like a Nazi salute keeps audiences guessing, she notes. “It's aimed at different audiences who might interpret it differently. But the communicator stands to gain something from that." He can reach the people he believes shares his views, and use the ambiguity as cover from critics. The ambiguity also lets him adopt the pose of victimhood like Coughlin defending a literal pogrom against the Jews as a supposed result of Christian victimhood.
Coughlin also called for the organization of a “Christian Front” to defend the country from internal threats to peace aka communism. He described the group as “pro-American, pro-Christian, anti-Communist and anti-Nazi.” I’m not sure you can be anti-Nazi while plagiarizing Nazi work in your magazine, but okay! One such group in Brooklyn was raided by the FBI in 1940 for plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. At the time Coughlin claimed he was a member of a Christian Front but not that Christian Front. Reading about and listening to this history reminded me of the January 6th riots. Specifically, Trump’s pardon of January 6th prisoners on his first day in office echoed the acquittal of the 17 men tried for their real attempt to overthrow the government at Coughlin’s suggestion. How can such clear attempts at subverting democracy go unpunished?
History is something that helps me think about what’s going on around me. It’s a way of understanding how people in the past organized their worlds and how that attempt at organization, often taking the form of stories people told themselves about themselves, can speak to us now. Leaning into this history did not abate my anxiety about the current state of affairs. However, I take some small comfort in knowing that all of these attempts were thwarted.
How? Well, in the case of Father Coughlin, the attempted raid in Brooklyn pushed regulators to crack down on the political priest. The Communications Act of 1934 created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate communication. This, along with the National Bureau of Broadcasters, pushed radio stations to insist on a review of scripts ahead of broadcasts to silence Coughlin. In 1940, Coughlin ended his show rather than curb his hate speech. He still published Social Justice, which was shut down only when the federal government pushed an archbishop to stop publication of the magazine in exchange for not pursuing charges of sedition against Coughlin. At this point, 1941, Americans had soured on anything resembling anti-intervention after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Coughlin also had his hand smacked by a Chicago cardinal who offered his own radio broadcast condemnation of Coughlin’s views, making clear they did not represent the views of the Catholic Church.
So what can we learn from this? How does this help us now?
For me, it affirms the need for independent regulatory bodies to prevent the spread of misinformation and hate speech. Having the creators of our mass media, social media, and internet platforms allowed to self-regulate has been and will continue to be a nightmare. (This is my personal view.) I also think the long arc of the moral universe is long and bends toward justice, to paraphrase a man whose history is likely banned from government sites. Despite these real threats, I have to hold on to hope that our pop culture can be a space to move the proverbial needle to greater awareness of what’s going on and a willingness to act in response.
While the social media activity around the Super Bowl was somewhat horrifying, the event itself did offer one great example of how pop culture can offer a space for resistance. Kendrick’s performance was a great example of “show not tell.” An all-black dance crew accompanied him through a set that called out Drake (bc, of course) but also hinted at mass incarceration, racism, and anti-fascism. A dancer also displayed a Palestinian flag and was run off the field.
I am closing out with a song from Coughlin’s era that called out his insanity and hate. Woody Guthrie, in “Lindbergh” sings “Yonder comes Father Coughlin, wearin' the silver chain, Cash on his stomach and Hitler on the brain.”
Learn more:
“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.” pod.link/1647910854.
Thomas Doherty. “The Late ’30s Deplatforming of Father Coughlin.” Slate Magazine, Slate, 21 Jan. 2021, slate.com/technology/2021/01/father-coughlin-deplatforming-radio-social-media.html.
Charles R. Gallagher, S.J. Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten History of the Christian Front, 1939-1945, Harvard University Press, 2021.
Jude Joffe-Block. “Elon Musk Tried to Turn the Salute Controversy into a Joke.” NPR, 23 Jan. 2025, www.npr.org/2025/01/23/nx-s1-5269719/elon-musk-salute-inauguration-day-nazis.
Joy Press. “Doombingeing: Why Dark TV Helps Us Cope with a World of Real Terrors.” Vanity Fair, 14 July 2022, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/07/doombingeing-euphoria-squid-game-severance.
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