Donation Controversy
mullvad.net
mullvad.net
That said, the fact that the person involved is the founder of this company (not a regular employee) does change things though. I don't know anything about the politics involved, but (with the exception of recent American executives) I would imagine you would want the people who run your company to be more neutral as to prevent controversy (or at least do so quietly).
I want them to be strongly biased in favor of free expression.
But they take my money and use it restrict how people dress, how they pray, what customs they are allowed to follow, what they teach their kids.
The agenda they support is anti-free-expression, and that's worse than neutral.
No, I think it's pretty good that they don't hide it. Customers should be well informed what their money goes to, and if the profits go to funding politics the customers disagree with they should be able to make an informed decision about that.
most people wouldn't even know the controversy happened nor care. with the response, you now trigger various human instincts that draw attention, promote further gossiping and wondering where the fire is with all the smoke.
What? How's publishing information about where a company's profits go, and letting the customers decide if that's something they want to support, in any way related to "deplatforming" or "censorship"?
I'm fine supporting companies that have people with poliical views I initially interested in Mullvad for political reasons and one of the founders giving a significant amount of money to a political group that wants to restrict the rights of other people is too much for me.
Not everyone is cynical. Some of us have actual values we act on.
How this is represented by people is different than that, and its hard for people who don’t speak Swedish to listen to the original sources, but be assured that in Sweden there is an actual party founded by Nazi sympathisers and it is the second most voted for party.
I get not wanting to support someone you think has immoral views, but check the facts first before blacklisting a company that is filled with people trying to push for a more open, private yet transparent internet.
Also, there are ways to keep companies from using migrant labor to undercut wages that don't involve mass deportation.
The situation in the US is so absurdly different. It would be like having an opinion on Chinese consumption economics because the local states sales tax was altered. (to use an american example).
I have.
I'm sorry but I'm just not persuaded and you don't seem to be engaging with anything I've actually said. I get that your from Sweden. I think we just have different political views.
[1]: https://xcancel.com/markus_allard
Sure, you find the odd reasonably put politic position. But, mostly, it is memes. Screaming. Ranting. Insults. Calling the head of the Swedish police a "crying bitch". Retweets of posts from who are not even shy in terms of being bigots and racists. The man is a toxic toad and I would rather have seen him paid to shut up than anything else. Yes, we need diverse viewpoints to be heard and we should be respectful and careful to shut them down. But, Allard is not this person and he is just ruining public discourse even further and waging an insane culture war (in my mum's constituency at that). Call me old-fashioned, but I expect representatives to at least try to strive towards holding morals and behaviour above the mean of society.
I have read Mullvad's blog post, but not Berntsson' yet (it is bloody long and I am at work, but skimming it, I saw nothing arguing why "public discourse arson" is warranted and just "something needs to be done, this is something"), so maybe I am missing some context. But if the answer to your question is "Bank-roll Allard", maybe it is time to take a step back and ask yourself what on Earth your question was in the first place? Because it seems to me like you are playing with fire and risk burning all that we hold dear to the ground. Do your views not have a Johan Norberg-like [2] character (something very rare, a Swedish Libertarian that has contributed to public discourse for over twenty years) that you can support instead? Or is the direction you want to see only professed by people that behave very close to what I would describe as the very worst our species have to offer?
I can't even find the right words to describe how wrong this sounds to me
The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party (118+695 points, last month, 3+1588 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
Obscura by definition is the same or better than Mullvad because of the multi-party relay. Similar with iCloud Private Relay but that's only for Safari which is inadequate.
Nym looks promising but mixnets haven't been tested as much as the Tor network.
Play radical games, win radical prizes. The last place I want my money going is towards radical authoritarianism, a cause that I thought Mullvad would thoroughly oppose.
> Self-censorship out of fear is an even bigger dampener than direct censorship.
Bullshit. Self-censorship is a self-preservation mechanism, a VPN doesn't change the consequences of saying illegal or offensive things. Direct censorship is an abuse of the monopoly on power, and much more inhumane than just feeling insecure about your edgy ideas being attached to your identity.
[insert Paradox of Tolerance quote here]
And the most extreme position they have stated is that "it doesn't matter if you're born here, if you commit crimes and don't respect the culture you should probably leave".
That is an extreme position, but it's not as black as people seem to paint it, which implies heavily that the party is just simply racist against non-swedes.
The actual racist party is the second most voted for party in Sweden, I think because of how intolerant the society has been about talking about the issues caused by migration. That is my own opinion though, as a migrant, living in the city with the most migrants in Sweden.
That's where it gets messy, at least in the States.
note: I have family in Sweden that are non-white but I've never discussed the issue as it felt a bit too "delicate"
I might be a migrant myself, but I have strong feelings about this too.
There's a fair amount of "cultural" attitudes I'm not thrilled with: child genital mutilation, honor killings, child brides, hijabs, forced marriages, etc.
Tradition/culture gets treated as sacrosanct but all of it should be open to reconsideration as we ostensibly evolve as a civilization.
'In 2026 Örebro Party leader Markus Allard sparked controversy on several occasions. In a debate hosted by Studio3 with Liberal member of parliament Martin Melin, Allard asked: "why won't the Liberals push for deporting 100 000 social welfare-Somalis?" and in the same debate said that "Sweden belongs to the Swedes. We have to make sure that we take care of our own damn people and we must deport these damn parasites who sit and live at our expense."
In a podcast segment about immigration and deportations Allard stated his opinion and said that "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish."'
The context in this case is that he was directly asked:
"What about the people born in Sweden who commit so many crimes and do not integrate at all, live their whole lives on welfare, as we are seeing in the statistics it is mostly the second-generation who are most represented" (I am adlibbing and translating, but this is the question).
Allard then said, as you put it: that being born here is not protection.
Now, that is an extreme position, nobody else would say such a thing, and to be totally clear: it's not possible in the Swedish constitution to strip someone of citizenship (even if they have a claim to another by blood- which is the most common method of attaining any citizenship btw) - it's also against international law to strip someone of a citizenship to leave them stateless.
However there's only 30,000 people (of 2.1M) foreign born people in Sweden whom are otherwise stateless (Palestinians; Balkans who did not reapply after the fall of Yugoslavia), and there is a huge issue with crime and integration.
There are no solutions, but it's kind of valid for Swedish people to be looking at people to ask difficult and stomach-churning questions in some way.
If they are called "social welfare-Somalis" (where do social welfare-Swedes get deported to?), if they are not included in "the Swedes" and "our own damn people", if "even if they are born in Sweden, [...] they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish", then integration is not what he wants.
Honestly, I really understand what you mean, but offering no solution and then talking down anyone who dares talk about it is exactly how extremists got support here in the first place.
If you're not living in sweden please keep in mind: this kind of demographic change is totally unprecedented in all of Europe and in all of history. In less than a 1/3rd of a generation, a decade, 10% of the population of a country was artificially added.
Such a thing has not happened historically unless a country was conquered. -- even then, it took 500 years for Skåne to be Swedish (in fact, many Swedes joke that they're still Danish). Just to say that a cultural shift of such magnitude is going to cause some tension no matter what, nobody has done it at this scale.
To then have those same people and their children, then, cause a disproportionate amount of violent and sexual crime while also being a disproportionate financial cost to the country: absolutely needs some kind of answer.
I'm not saying that Örebro Partiet or SD have that answer, but I sympathise with people who are tired of seeing this happening plainly with their own eyes, and being branded as racists, fascists or nationalists for clumsily trying to talk about it without the right verbiage because they've never had to exercise these kind of thoughts before.
Adding that detail, the situations are a bit more apples-to-oranges.
The circumstances are obviously different, and the sarcasm was my point too: the situation then isn’t the situation now, you can’t possibly hope to compare American history to contemporary Swedish reality. It’s like comparing, as you said: Apples to Oranges.
People need to understand taking that position is itself free speech. Nobody is saying he can’t give money to Nazis or fascists or some other problematic group, what we’re saying is that there are consequences for doing so. If Mullvad wanted to distance itself from these problematic positions or people, they could just buy them out and tell them to fuck off. That, too, is a perfectly valid response that doesn’t impugn upon anyone’s speech.
The problem with people claiming to be pro-free speech or anti-censorship while supporting authoritarian regimes or ideologies is that the two are inherently in conflict: the absolute last thing a fascist actually wants is freedom of speech, and so hiding behind such a virtuous shield while directly contributing to groups whose goals would dismantle and destroy that shield wholesale is such a naked act of hypocrisy that anything else they say or do should be suspect.
Mullvad’s position, much like Cloudflare’s before it, is that we must tolerate the intolerant, even though the goals of the intolerant are to exterminate tolerance. This is the sort of Middle School thought experiment that should be a no-brainer, yet here we are again. For a company like Mullvad, that undermines their core currency - trust - at a foundational level that’s impossible to reconcile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party
The party has been variously characterised as left-wing and right-wing, as well as populist, nationalist and conservative.
Some key issues for the Örebro Party locally include strong secularism, a 30-hour workweek with retained pay, lowered wages for politicians, expanded social housing, abolishing preschool-fees, making public transport free of charge,[3] ending taxpayer funding of what it sees as wasteful sculptures, monuments and art and introducing free dental care.[4][5] Nationally the party has set out large-scale remigration, closing the Swedish borders to immigration, a stricter assimilation policy and ending taxes on energy and fuel as some of its key issues.
And for those who may not be old enough to remember the last time this happened in the techsphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
Personally I wish people like his had the balls to stop hiding behind that kind of thing, we all know what someone is about when “immigration is the main problem” in their viewpoint.
Own it. Or if it’s something to be ashamed of… accept the shame.
But everyone being crass and stupid was not even the question. The question was: how many more battles are going to be lost on that hill?
Most people seem to conflate immigrants with refugees, which is false (refugees are a small minority of all immigrants), to see immigrants as poor, hard-working people who just need one chance, which is also false (most immigrants are skilled workers, generally not the poor of their country, and most immigrants you see are probably family members of other skilled workers), and to view immigration as a leftist cause (again not true, immigration is something that's mostly lobbied for by corporate interests).
But many more people feel opposed to migration for entirely different reasons: personal hardships directly due to immigration (loss of job or house), political leanings (pro-working class can mean anti-immigration), social cohesion/sustainability/community considerations, etc.
Not empathising with those people and having a reductionist view of immigration, which often stems from simply being shielded from any negative effects of it, as most on this forum are, lets people take a position like yours, which further polarises society and plays into the cards of the powerful you seem to oppose.
We probably agree on almost every political view apart from this.
Progressives fuck this up continually across the policy spectrum, by having no answer other than "no you're wrong/immoral/stupid" to people who express concerns in categories that have strong orthodoxy requirements.
Blaming immigrants is easy because you get an immediate base amongst racists (the immoral). They'll perk up at the sound of your dog whistles, and immediately start barking shit like "finally someone had the bravery to say what we're all thinking". That amplification of your message then reaches the reactionaries, who accurately look around at the world that is hell bent on destroying them, but are a little too dense to understand the web of systems that make up that world, and thus are eager for a simple explanation (the stupid). And once your message gets embedded in the zeitgeist from that lot, normal, relatively detached from politics people start hearing all this talk about immigration being a problem, and believe it (the wrong).
The same way you can't be frugal to make up for making poverty wages, you can't shrink the pool of disadvantaged workers to make them advantaged.
The demographic of the largest cities in Sweden has changed from 17% foreign born in 1986 to over 55% today- in a single generation. (Malmö, were I live as a migrant myself).
At the same time, the healthcare service is struggling, the police can't cope with the crime situation and there are gangs shooting people and grenades blowing up apartments everywhere.
AND: At the same time, the Geni coefficient remains remarkably low, and income inequality much lower than the US, so this "blame the rich" makes sense in the UK and US, but it's not the problem that Sweden has.
Sweden has mismanaged a lot of its public services (training, then underpaying doctors - leading to them going private, then there being a shortage of doctors which leads to the government paying huge contractor rates for those doctors - which is hugely expensive, so nurses try to avoid you seeing a doctor - which leads to less preventative healthcare, and more serious issues, which is more strain on the healthcare service).
It's not uniquely immigrants fault, they have a role to play in the welfare system and being hugely overrepresented in crime, but it's really not rich peoples fault.
Not in Sweden.
Sweden doesn't go after the money you have earned already.
There's no standing wealth tax or inheritance taxes that I'm aware of.
Marine Le Pen's party in France leans socialist on econ but is painted as 'far right' for the same reason.