cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8915892
(original article in Swedish that reported this)
Posting this because I hadn’t heard about it before and I’m probably not the only Mullvad user here, so might as well.
The party claims to stand for a “class-conscious populism” which according to party leader Markus Allard takes inspiration from marxist ideology and unites the “productive” classes of society against the “Transferiat”, with the “Transferiat” being a term coined by Allard to describe the classes of society that lives off transfers that are a net negative for society such as those who, despite having an ability to work, live off social welfare benefits, as well as those who work “made-up services”[…]
The party differs from modern day left-wing parties by seeing the working class as co-dependent with people working in enterprise and business and instead sees the classes that “live off transfers”, as specified, as a large economic net-negative and an obstacle for a functional society.
Their ideology is nonsense fake-marxist revisionism to redirect anger at capitalism and turn it against immigrants and people who need social welfare (though they do back some generally left oriented social policies, their main thing appears to be racism)
Even if you’re comfortable with funding this, it still begs the question of just how trustworthy Mullvad actually is.
I guess this still beats any of the dozens of Israeli VPNs that definitely spy on you, but it’s not great
Your headline is misleading.
One of the founders (and co-ceo) of Mullvad made a substantial donation to an unhinged political party. Mullvad did not, and Mullvad claim to be against it.
This has been all over mastodon for days.
Mullvad has not claimed to be against it. Mullvad has pretty much said “if you don’t like free speach, we’re sorry you feel that way”.
Their statement reads
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.
They’re pretty clearly saying that they as a company have no part in this political support.
True. But they did not say that they are _against_ the donation.
The original comment should simply be reworded to “and Mullvad says it has nothing to do with the donation and wasn’t aware of it” or something like that. Remove “
claim to be against”.They don’t plainly say against it no, but they’re still clearly distancing themselves from it. It’s not as good as outright denouncing it, but much better than staying silent.
Absolutely. IDK why me or you are getting downvotes tho. Did they claim to be agai st as the original commenter said? No. Did they distance themselves and clearly separate themselves? Yes.
“It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission.”
You’re moving the goalposts. Claiming to be against it and saying they had nothing to do with it aren’t the same thing.
Their response quoted here was too subtle, but you know it is pr for a very serious issue for the company.
“not part of Mullvad’s values” ,perhaps we interpret this differently because we are different people. If something is not part of my values, I am against it, because I am value based, how I interact with society is completely defined by my values.
For all I know you are corn chip based, maybe even a corn chip cooked in palm oil, using child labour, purchased from amazon, and delivered by ubereats.
If they wanted you to think his actions were against their values, they would have said “against”. The fact that it’s a company owner and CEO, means that the company values and the owner’s values are the same, whether they publicly state it or not. That’s why they’ve made such a fence-sitting PR statement. Even when they’re trying to downplay the link between the company values and the owner’s values, they don’t commit because the owner’s values are the company’s values.
Using the word “fact” doesn’t make something a fact, do you find people usually fall for that obvious bs?
People are deliberately trying to mislead other people with click bait headlines. Discredit the company by making it look like he is the company. Many people do not read past headlines, many people just follow the crowd, and are eagerly manipulated by it.
If he was the only owner, then yes his company would very more than likely be very much in line with his own morals, or lack of.
But he isn’t the only owner, he isn’t the company.
Decent customers should be getting refunds to apply pressure to the dodgy co-CEO in the hope that he does the right thing and leaves mullvad, or is somehow removed, or so that the (as far as we aware ) decent CEO makes his own vpn company with the morals that we believe(d) mullvad to have.
The irony of clearly dodgy people deliberately trying to make this a ‘mullvad is evil’ thing, is pathetic, but not surprising.
It isn’t obvious though because it’s the fucking cofounder that’s doing it and they keep misrepresenting it as a speech issue. It isn’t some random employee, it’s the people who invented and make the decisions for the service, and it’s a massive amount of money as well
Nothing is obvious for multiple reasons, one of them is that people are deliberately trying to manipulate this to be ‘Mullvad is the nazi party’
The headline of the thread we are commenting on is pure trash.
I requested and received my refund, I hope many others are doing the same with the aim of pressuring his removal from the company
The headline isn’t trash, it’s accurate. If Mullvad didn’t exist, the majority of the party’s funding wouldn’t exist.
“Mullvad is apparently the main financier of a Swedish far-right party”
you are dodgy
But I need to be angry against something and isolate myself in a corner on society where everything is evil but me!
Be CEO of privacy company
Donate $500k to a right wing party publicly
Clickbait title. It’s one of the coowners who has donated his personal funds to this party. The other owner and other members of the company disapprove of the decision.
So is the nazi coowner getting ousted soon?
Right now we’re at “Mullvad is part nazi, nazi adjacent, nazi lite, moderately fascist, feudalism-curious” stage.
Hopefully he leaves, not sure if that is possible/likely though
Right now we are at some people are genuine, some people are in denial, some people are apathetic, some people are clearly very right wing, and some people are deliberately posting clickbait and manipulative rubbish.
He owns half the company so I’m not sure if he can be ousted.
The company can be spun out into two.
Let the spun out Nazivad get their own customers separately, if they can.
Otherwise the whole company is now tainted.
Hopefully, but it may have to be his own choice, Mullvad might have no way of removing him.
Guess where part of your money is going to…
If you buy most products, chances are some portion of it is going to a Nazi sympathizer.
Once you get confirmation of this you have a choice. Free market and all that
Where does he get the money he donates?
From his job? Working for an employer who cannot tell him how to spend his own money.
Who does he work “for”? He’s a co-owner/founder according to most of the comments in her
I sympathize, but. The paradox of tolerance is at play here. We cannot tolerate the intolarent actions from this CEO.
If the rest of the company wants to project an open/free and honest stance. They must root out and remove all intolerance.
Until then, I will not use this company.
That is why I chose the refund route, hopefully enough people do that and it applies pressure that = change (him leaving the company).
Insane amount of Nazi sympathizers in this thread. “Aw but poor baby is just the CEO!! It’s not his fault he’s a Nazi! Let him do what he wants!” Freaks.
As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privilege, then they are ‘liberal’. But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges.
Assata Shakur
Quite a poignant quote.
Title is incorrect, it’s not Mullvad donating the money but one of the owners.
This is true, but it a co-founder with 50% ownership. Musk has like a 15% ownership in Tesla, yet they are the modern day Nazi car. Surely if half the ownership of a company supports fascists that kind of makes it a racist company.
Where does he get the money he donates?
He gets his money from multiple sources apparently, mullvad obviously being one of those sources.
I wonder if people will do this for my business. “It’s not the business! It’s the owner!” (The owner is the business…) I could get away with a ton of shit.
How many owners does your business have?
Mullvad has more than one.
They even released a statement regarding this.
Mullvad
Reverse credit card charge
Yeah… About that…
You mailed in cash didn’t you
Kinda their best feature
In the past they let you keep CC on file for monthly payments but now they’re prepay only and they delete CC info after 40 days. I think I prepaid for like a year and half before I knew any of this. Mullvad’s obsession with user privacy is completely unparalleled in 2026.
Monero
Even bigger yikes.
So… Is there any VPN provider without controversy?
I think Mullvad was the last one I knew of.
They’re either lying about logging, lying about backdoors, or apparently Nazis?
i would highly recommend ivpn
(recommended by privacyguides.org)AirVPN is awesome, also port forwards are nice for p29p
SOCKS
Windscribe have a good rep. Maybe
I can’t keep track of all the assholes. Going to need an asshole tracker soon.
That would be a fun website. Asshole tracker for Companies & Politicians and others?
Could do an Assholes Wiki and make it community contributions lol
Consumers are nothing but fish in a barrel these days
I would love to take my money elsewhere, but… Where? Everywhere else is just as bad or worse. Half the VPN’s are owner by one Israeli billionaire. I’m running out of options here.
i would highly recommend ivpn
(recommended by privacyguides.org)I’m using AirVPN since two years and I’m very happy with them.
God dammit, I already switched away from Express VPN because they’re owned by Israel, now I gotta switch away from Mullvad too??
i would highly recommend ivpn
(recommended by privacyguides.org)
Nobody using Mullvad is going to have their credit card tied directly to it. Much less are they going to start calling financial institutions and government agencies and tell them they’re a Mullvad user.
You need to get way more subtle with your propaganda, corpos.
Sure lets entrust our privacy with infrastructure owned by a fascist…
clearly you don’t know how Mullvad works
Enlighten me how under a fascist takeover it couldn’t be undermined to track undesirables… even if, the owner is a fascist?! Clearly your life wouldn’t be in danger when tracked by a fascist…
Technically they could be lying about their privacy policy, and technically it’s not impossible that they’ve colluded with the government to lie about police finding nothing in raids, and saying “well they will lie about it because they’re fascists” is myopic and stupid. Moreso than being fascist, they’re fanatical about privacy. Everything runs on RAM. They couldn’t track you if they wanted to
saying “well they will lie about it because they’re fascists” is myopic and stupid.
Why?
Moreso than being fascist, they’re fanatical about privacy
and they will be forever and ever? There’s one move fascists have, coast on good will until it’s time for the rug-pull. A lot of fascists started out genuinely believing in some cause but sooner or later they all turn. What with contradictions sharpening and all
Why?
Because you don’t know anything about the infrastructure of their operation. It’s as yet impossible for them to track traffic through their servers.
and they will be forever and ever?
As long as it’s one guy making personal donations and not the company as a whole, yes
Enlighten me then? Simply calling others stupid and playing coy with your argument isn’t that convincing an argument.
As long as it’s one guy making personal donations and not the company as a whole, yes
that “one guy”? Oh he owns half the company, and we are very happy to run this operation with him don’t worry about him.
Explain to me how you activate an account on Mullvad. Right here.
Don’t Google it. Just explain it.
You create that id number thing and send them money. Do you think that means that your identity is completely secure?
Send them money in what form?
I was planning on sending them cash via mail
Do you write your name and address on the cash you send them?
No
That ideology sounds wild lol. Almost literal “national - socialism”?
The issue is rich people using undemocratic power to fund things like this. Which ironically sounds exactly like the “Transferiat” siphoning money and power from VPN users to funnel it into unwanted, fringe channels.
I was just thinking, the “transferiat” sound exactly like the wealthy ownership class
To be fair, much of this could be flak, deliberate distortion and slander by the neoliberal forces in Sweden. You can’t trust the mainstream media not to trash anything that isn’t neoliberal.
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,[4] ending taxpayer funding of what it sees as wasteful sculptures, monuments and art and introducing free dental care.
This all sounds great.
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 I suspect a clear majority of Europeans are also against immigration or reducing how many refugees we take in thanks to fucking imperialist wars by the elite. There is nothing “far right” about this. I’m also for sending refugees back (EDIT: After it’s safe to send them back!) and strictly limiting immigration in my country. The only real issue is that “remigration” is apparently code word for ethnic cleansing.
The larger issue is that this ideology sounds pretty half baked and too simple for the complexity of the current state of things.
Didn’t the swiss banks enrich themselves with Nazi gold?
Sure, it was acceptable in the 1930s. But what does that have to do with what I wrote?
How many degrees of separation do y’all deem acceptable and why? If Mullvad donated that money directly, that’s bad. If the owner donated that money, that’s also bad. What if the owner instead bought something from another company and the owner of the company donated the money? What if this second owner then bought something else from yet another company and the owner of that company donated the money? When can you stop saying “my money is used to fund this thing I don’t want”? Because money will spread so fast in the economy that inevitably, no matter what choices you make, your money will fund things you don’t like. For example, should the “true scotsman” vegan never buy anything because it is pretty much guaranteed that their money will end up in the pocket of someone who will spend it on meat? Again, I am not criticizing anyone, I am simply asking: where do you draw the line, why, and why not draw the line one step further than you currently are?
I think information is useful. I see no problem giving people the information and vehicles for making decisions… but as a society I do think we need to get to a place where we acknowledge that everyone has their own line and trust they are making the best decisions they can be, given the information they have.
I’ve asked the same question for situations where the court of public appeal has changed the donation decisions and yet people choose to castigate because they believe repreations to counteract their donations are due. I believe progress is progress and it should be rewarded, that is my line. Others will disagree and that’s fine.
