Free Republic

Click the link for audio segment on Youtube. On his program of April 30, shortly after 9:35 AM EST, Glenn Beck slandered the heroic Catholic victim of 1930s Communism and the FDR smear machine, Fr. Charles E. Coughlin, as an "anti-semite," "Jew-baiter," "race-baiter," "a kook," etc., and as "okay with the extermination of Jews," and as believing "the ovens aren't that bad." Beck then went on to make other less-shocking, though equally baseless, characterizations of Coughlin's concept of "social justice."

Father Coughlin first took to the airwaves in 1926, broadcasting weekly sermons over the radio. By the early 1930s the content of his broadcasts had shifted from theology to economics and politics. Just as the rest of the nation was obsessed by matters economic and political in the aftermath of the Depression, so too was Father Coughlin. Coughlin had a well-developed theory of what he termed "social justice," predicated on monetary "reforms." He began as an early Roosevelt supporter, coining a famous expression, that the nation's choice was between "Roosevelt or ruin." Later in the 1930s he turned against FDR...