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Tucker Carlson is best known for mainstreaming white nationalism - but he's also the heir to the Swanson frozen foods fortune. Famous for 'Hungry Man' dinners, Swanson's empire, and in turn Tucker himself, grew rich off undocumented migrant labor in meat packing + in the fields.
Despite attacking immigrants as "dirty," his own family came to the US from Sweden only several generations ago, settling in Omaha. Carl Swanson even arrived with a sign that read: “Carl Swanson, Swedish. Send me to Omaha. I speak no English." https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/09/archives/swanson-saga-end-of-a-dream-they-were-the-pride-of-omaha-but-today.html
At 10, his US ambassador dad + head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting married Patricia Swanson. Like any good elite kid, Tucker attended private schools + then applied for the CIA, but failed. “You should consider journalism,” his father told him. “They’ll take anybody.”
As a corporation, Swanson frozen foods rose to power during the second world war. With many working men fighting Hitler, who later some of Tucker's employees at the Daily Caller would come to admire, and many women working in war industries, "TV dinners" grew in popularity.
Ironically, while today Tucker Carlson screams about dick-less ginger bread men, it was the changing of gender roles brought on by a war against fascism that catapulted his family into great success.
But WW II also brought with it another major change - the Bracero Program. Between 1942 + 1964 (ironically year before white nationalists proclaim death of the US due to changing immigration laws), 4.5 million Mexican workers entered into the US legally to fill labor shortages.
Like guest worker programs today, these programs locked "guest" workers into second class citizenship, but on the other hand, generated massive profits for major corporations like Swanson, at a time when the US needed access to massive amounts of cheap labor during war time.
Harsh conditions led to revolt. In the Central Valley of California, black, brown, and white Oakies joined the IWW. Strikes broke out. Children of migrant workers grew tired white colonial rule. Riots broke out. By the 1960s, a new wave of labor and community revolt fermented.
But just as SWAT teams and 'broken windows' grew out of attacks on the Black Panther Party, immigration raids and the threat of deportation helped to keep workers scared of organizing on the job, reporting bad conditions and abusive bosses, and kept wages low.
Under Trump, this has led to some places becoming ghost towns, drastically hurting local business owners ability to even operate their businesses, as migrant workers flee from potential raids. https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2017/04/woodburn_taught_latinos_to_dre.html
This dual reality: of a repressive State that use immigration raids as a form of counter-insurgency which in turn also drastically impacts huge sections of the economy that cannot operate without migrant labor shows that the elites aren't always in agreement.
For instance in Arizona, some local elites opposed SB-1070 because a crackdown on migrants would lead to a smaller pool of labor. On the other hand, private prison bosses argued that there was in fact more money to be made through imprisoning migrants. https://www.colorlines.com/articles/npr-investigation-private-prison-companies-helped-write-sb-1070
This is similar to the forces that have backed Trump (and financed his campaign) and who have benefited from his policies: the private prison industry that is building massive amounts of new detention facilities and prisons. https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-immigrant-detention-plans-benefit-these-companies-1530523800
And of course, all of this has nothing to do with stopping so-called immigrant from "taking our jobs," as if under capitalism we were guaranteed one to begin with, and everything from benefiting from virtual enslavement of huge bodies of poor people with largely no defenses.
As it is widely documented, it's corporate globalization coupled with industrial automation, AI technology, and the growth of the service and gig economy which is "killing" more jobs than any boogeyman the Right could dream up.
This reality is excepted as fact among elite circles: that massive amounts of the US workforce over the next ten years will loose their jobs due to changes in tech. In 'Fear,' Woodward's new book, he documents how Trump's own team explained to him that over the next 8 years....
...if Trump was to remain in office, he would see up to 25% of the workforce loose their jobs due to self-driving + autonomous cars, buses, + vehicles coming online. Machines that don't strike, need health care, and don't call in sick. No mention of the threat of 'migrants.'
It is this crisis, coupled with the realities of climate change that drive revolts against neoliberalism like we saw recently in France. In the US, the way to classically deal with such a problem has usually been to divide the working class against itself; along lines of race.
Often in times of such change, either in terms of production, crisis of State legitimacy, or in the face of rising social movements, many politicians have benefited from scapegoating those on the very bottom; using them as a reason for society's problems.
This has always been the essence of the structural nature of white supremacy: a cross class alliance between (at least in theory) white elites and working and middle class strata. But as history has shown, this largely only equates to the "psychological" wage of whiteness.
Thus, despite having watched his family benefit in the millions from migrants, people like Carlson still have the audacity to call migrant workers "dirty" and say they make us "poorer." Because in the end; fear of 'the Other' - still sells. And for Tucker, business is good.
To see our thread about the long history of links between Tucker Carlson, white nationalists, and the Alt-Right, go here: https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1060414278463901696
For those looking to explore the connection between World War II and the frozen food craze, along with the role of the Swansons, here's a good place to start: http://ojs.stanford.edu/ojs/index.php/intersect/article/view/269
Also this is a fantastic economic history of the Swanson company, which in 1955 was sold, and the Swanson family set up Swanson Enterprises, a "holding company for stock, real estate, foundations, family trusts and smaller companies worth millions." https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/09/archives/swanson-saga-end-of-a-dream-they-were-the-pride-of-omaha-but-today.html
