Swedish VPN vendor Mullvad is facing a backlash from some customers after co-founder Daniel Berntsson personally donated SEK 5 million (£385,000, $519,000) to the controversial populist Örebropartiet, which is running in Sweden’s national elections for the first time.
Berntsson has this week published a blog post explaining the donation, alongside posts titled “Immigration,” “Political individualism,” and “Moral individualism.” Before that, he had not posted since 2019.
The flurry of posts follows weeks of customer criticism over the donation – for example, Finnish blog Moonwriting’s post “I’m done with Mullvad.” Another blog, Unutterable, is more direct: “Mullvad funding the far-right and the problem with tech company ownership.” The Hacker News discussion thread about the donations has reached a remarkable 1,784 comments so far.
Mullvad was co-founded and is still jointly owned and run by two CEOs, Berntsson and Fredrik Strömberg. Its name, as reflected in the company’s logo, is Swedish for “mole.” It also offers the Mullvad Browser, a privacy-enhanced fork of Firefox ESR co-developed with the Tor Project. Swedish socialist newspaper Flamman (“The Flame”) revealed the donation in its story “High-profile techie gives millions to the Örebro Party.”
In a post on X, the company said it was devoted to freedom of speech and tolerance, saying: “It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission, in the same way that someone’s opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn’t.”
Since there are always people who, purposely or not, misrepresent what’s going on here and I’ve hashed it out in other threads I’ll paste it here as well as some links to share alternatives. Like, how do I see upvotes on a comment saying it’s a marxist far left party? The National Socialists also promised homes and dental and everything good for the Aryan race once they ethnically cleansed the rest. They certainly weren’t any kind of left wing.
Sorry for the wall of text, copying and pasting from some of my other comments, I’ll bold the main points to create the throughline:
What, by definition, constitutes fascism?
Merriam Webster
Just to make sure we’re not looking at a singular definition, let’s look at Wikipedia too
And now, let’s look at what the Örebro party’s own stated platform, which received 72% of its funding from the Mullvad founder, which also amounted to 27 times their total funding in 2024, and has directly led to them stating that with this funding they can field candidates whereby they couldn’t previously:
https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut
And what’s remigration?
So fascism is about racial and national purity and hierarchy, as we defined, and the Orebro party supports remigration, which is a concept of forcing immigrants out of countries to preserve the purity of “culture” and the race of the nation.
“Sweden is for the Swedes”
“Israel is for Israelis”
“America is for Americans”
“Germany is for the Germans”
For those looking for other vpn options:
https://vpn.techlore.tech/
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1ijfqfLrJWLUVBfJZ_YalVpstWsjw-JGzkvMd6u2jqEk/htmlview#gid=231869418
IDK how they try to reach to electors, but “second generation immigrants” is absolutely far-right bs.
Fascism requires support for an authoritarian dictatorship, among other stances. It is not purely “about racial and national purity and hierarchy”. That’s ethno-nationalism. Yes, fascists are ethno-nationalists, but not every ethno-nationalist is a fascist.
And how do you enforce ethnic cleansing? Cause I hate to tell you, but it’s not democratically. Authoritarians simply use democratic methods to shroud legitimacy while ballot spoiling, gerrymandering, or any number of countless methods to undermine said democracy.
If you can’t understand that tearing up citizenship, thereby removing the ability for constituents to vote, is inherently authoritarian, I can’t help you.
In a democracy you just require a (super)majority for everything necessary to be changed and done to achieve anything.
It is of course easier in a dictatorship to achieve ethnic cleansing, but doesn’t require one. Look at Turkey and how they treat the Kurds. Not saying they are the best example of a democracy, but it isn’t a dictatorship by definition.
Turkey is actually a great example for my point, not yours. Erdogan has used nominally democratic supermajority mechanisms to strip Kurdish politicians of immunity, remove elected Kurdish mayors, imprison journalists covering Kurdish issues, and consolidate executive power to the point where the democratic form is a shell. If that’s your model of ethnic cleansing without dictatorship, it’s nothing but democracy in name.
The supermajority argument also has a structural flaw. It assumes the minority being cleansed retains voting power throughout the process. But the entire mechanism of the policy is to remove them before they can vote against it. Strip citizenship, remove from voter rolls, criminalize political organizing. A supermajority that votes to disenfranchise a minority and then prevents them voting on the disenfranchisement isn’t a functioning democracy but is already on the fall to authoritarianism.
And you don’t even need a majority to capture the apparatus. The Nazis never won a majority. Neither did Trump in 2016 or 2024 measured against eligible voters. Around 30% of actual eligible voters in both cases was sufficient to claim power through a combination of voter suppression, institutional manipulation, minority rule mechanisms like the electoral college, and strategic exploitation of democratic procedural norms that weren’t designed to survive bad faith actors. The democratic form provided legitimacy cover while it was dismantled from within.
Ethnic cleansing doesn’t require a dictatorship as a precondition. Nor do the destruction of institutions, nor does the use of religious idolatry to provide a pretense of legitimacy for war, death, and destruction. They produce one as an outcome. Fascism is an ideological process, not a label applied once a checklist is met.
I can see where you’re coming from, as I mentioned, Turkey isn’t the best example of a democracy, but even now Erdogan can still get removed by a majority of the population, which is not the case in a dictatorship. A dictator can only be removed by the military.
I disagree with the last sentence, the definition of fascism is pretty clear, it is an ideology with certain beliefs and opinions. Not a process, not a form of government, but a set of ideas. If the set of ideas is not complete, it is not that ideology. I already gave you the name of the ideology you were describing.
It is like describing something socialist as stalinist. Like yeah, stalinists are socialists but not every socialist is a stalinist.
You don’t need a simple majority when you can have a few judges rewrite the interpretation of the existing laws