Francis James Westbrook Pegler (August 2, 1894 – June 24, 1969) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. journalist described as "one of the godfathers of right-wing populism".

[2] As an ardent proponent of States' rights, Pegler criticized a variety of targets whom he saw as extending the reach of the federal government, including Herbert Hoover, FDR ("moosejaw"), Harry Truman ("a thin-lipped hater"), and John F. Kennedy.

Six days a week, for an estimated $65,000 a year, in 116 papers reaching nearly 6,000,000 readers, Mister Pegler is invariably irritated, inexhaustibly scornful.

Unhampered by coordinated convictions of his own, Pegler applies himself to presidents and peanut vendors with equal zeal and skill.

The New York Times stated in his obituary that Pegler lamented the failure of the would-be assassin Giuseppe Zangara, whose shot missed FDR and killed the mayor of Chicago instead.

[13] However, Pegler went on to recant his views and, in a column responding to the United States Supreme Court decision in Korematsu v. United States, denounced Chief Justice Hugo Black as a deceitful political hack who had started his career by joining the Ku Klux Klan "a murderous... gang of night riding racial and religious terrorists" to win votes and had never ceased violating the civil liberties of Americans such as the ethnic Japanese.

Recent scholars (including Kenneth O'Reilly, Betty Houchin Winfield, and Richard W. Steele) have reported that Franklin Roosevelt used the FBI for the purposes of wartime security, and ordered sedition investigations of isolationist and anti-New Deal newspaper publishers (such as William Randolph Hearst and the Chicago Tribune's Robert R. McCormick).

[5] Pegler's reporting led to the conviction of George Scalise, the president of the Building Service Employees International Union who had ties to organized crime.

[16] As historian David Witwer has concluded about Pegler, "He depicted a world where a conspiracy of criminals, corrupt union officials, Communists, and their political allies in the New Deal threatened the economic freedom of working Americans.

[18] At the conclusion of the meeting, H. L. Mencken acidly suggested that every person named "Henry" should be put to death, offering to commit suicide if Wallace was executed first.

In the 1950s and 1960s, as Pegler's conservative views became more extreme and his writing increasingly shrill, he earned the tag of "the stuck whistle of journalism.

"[19] Despite having earlier called for the desegregation of baseball, Pegler denounced the civil rights movement and in the early 1960s wrote for the John Birch Society.

In 1965, referring to Robert F. Kennedy, Pegler wrote: "Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.

On August 28, 1922, Pegler, a Roman Catholic, married Julia Harpman, a onetime New York Daily News crime reporter, who was from a Jewish family in Tennessee.

[23] In the Gibbs/Pegler version, "Santa Claus" was actually Sammy Klein of Red Hook, Brooklyn, and had raped a six-year-old as a deliberate strategy to avoid being drafted into World War I.

He lives down the road a piece from me, and my name for him is Comrade Jelly Belly, after a poem composed about him once by an admiring fellow-traveller now happily under the sod.

Starting with a report on a little kid stealing a bike, it devolved into a long tirade against, among other targets, Roosevelt, Truman, the Falange, organized labor, municipal corruption and Abeline's Boy Scout Troop 18 (AKA the Abraham Lincoln Brigade).

[28] In a column about Palin's use of the quote, Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank described Pegler as "the all-time champion of fake populism".