"'I don’t like that he made this donation' — Mullvad CEO reacts to co-founder’s donation to controversial Swedish populist party"

Oh shit, that has got to be the poorest political party I've heard of 🤣

5,58 million SEK is around 600 thousand dollars. 202 thousand SEK is slightly more than 20 thousand dollars.

yeah it's like saying Elon is only a piece of shit on his free time so it's okay

edit: piss of shit

A commonly known US analog is the Chik-Fil-A restaurant chain. They are proudly Christian and got tons of flak for donating to “traditional family” organizations that spread gay hate and so on.

They stopped, but the owner still personally donates. So every dollar you spend there still fuels those hate groups. It just takes a slightly different path.

So the question isn’t “is the company bad,” it’s “what is your money funding?”

So you believe that customers of a company should have a say how the staff uses their wages?

I highly doubt you'll find any company composed solely of people that support ideologies you agree with. I know that sounds flippant and dismissive but ultimately we should support the best options we have. Or I guess you can roll your own solution and trust that you have the skills to stay ahead of the opposition.

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely ", unfortunately. I heard that studies have shown the neurophysiology of a person changes the longer they are in power and influence.

There is no such thing as an ethical corporation. I'm going to tell you now, if you cannot ever compromise then learn subsistence farming as soon as you can.

I think the response makes it obvious that a company is not it's co-CEO, and a co-CEO is not a company.

Granted a tiny amount of your fees may make their way to a political party you vehemently oppose, but I think you're also supporting a lot of other people in the organisation that are on your side.

You don't have to agree with the chef in politics to enjoy their food.

Acting like that zealously would make you quickly run out of options if you actually talked to most chefs.

The state financing parties is pretty valid and is practiced in many countries.

For example in Germany parties get paid around 1 € per vote received in elections.

millions in assets

Rich people and corporations will always be able to use their money to influence politics towards their interests.

Influencing politics works in other ways besides direct donations. The rich can put money into:

• media
• interest groups
• education
• studies
• events
• scholarships
• NGOs

Influencing voters to support your desired policies works well.

Then there’s of course the promise of investments, if policies are changed to your interests. In the simplest case this is a local government changing zoning, building infrastructure, softening environmental or noise regulations in order to for an investor to build a factory. This in turn brings money, employment, and tax revenue to the local government.

Instead of direct donations, a politician can be hired to give a speech somewhere.

Or less directly, hire the politician’s child into a well paying position.

Promising a politician a well paid job for their time outside government is of course also a popular way.

Of course you can regulate all of that in various ways to make it more difficult or at least more transparent.

Its the last remnant of the various property owning/landed gentry/aristocracy control of government. They had to give up their exclusive right to sit in court and then "democratic" government, and then their exclusive right to vote.

They are holding on to money-as-influence, trying to convince us its fair because everyone can make donations (you get a great tax receipt!!). However, even donation limits are mainly just a way to cover up their thumbs on the scale, because all they require the rich to do is spread out their money.

Giving tax money so politicans can market themselves needs to stop. We all here understand how crowdfunding works, it would work just as well with political parties.

The funding they receive from their own members should be enough.

i mean, that's not quite how it worked for me. politics (at least the kind i did) is basically getting the people with $10 million or more in assets to donate to and get involved with their communities. we had to trade some favors (there are a few musicians on the board who lend their services for such instances. most of the time it was that, once or twice it was "teach my fuckup kid how to work"), but we got funding for homelessness services.

if we couldn't trade those favors, we wouldn't have any homeless shelters in my county. they ran off grants mostly (during democrat administrations. during republican administrations, we ran off hope and loan forgiveness), but they can't expand without extraordinary help. which unfortunately takes politicking (which i hate, but they wanted me doing it)

lol. Yes.

I will sign up for Mullvad tomorrow if he actually does something meaningful about it.

I haven't even looked up the price, but I'll keep my word.

Only I won't have to, because the odds are this guy is another spineless piece of shit.

Just a rich person trying to get proto fascist powers. Yeah you wait a bit, but I won't and I hope it's the end of his company and career.

The party is using this money to push their reach hard. It's hard to use social media in Sweden without coming across clips of Markus Allard doing an "epic takedown" of another local politician or ranting with righteous fury against some waste of taxpayer money and the message is resonating with a lot of voters, for a lot of them the Örebro Party just seems like the "common sense" choice. There is a strong possibility that they will make it into parliament at this fall's election and they would not have been able to have this reach without this funding.

Given the poor alternatives, I may fall back on the utilitarian argument. Yes the guy is donating to evil, but it’s a closet full of evil clowns who aren’t accomplishing anything. So my money is briefly passing through evil without much consequence. And back to the lack of good alternatives…

Also it’s a damn VPN. Pick another one. It’s not even like they can use the excuse that it’s the best in the field (still not an excuse but loads better than, I just “like” it)

i mean, while there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, why does it seem like so many people are trying their hardest to rack up the most unethical consumption? Like there's a counter somewhere or something idk.

that was rhetorical, i know why. fucking cern weasels.

Then do something by promoting alternatives,

https://www.xda-developers.com/replaced-entire-proton-subscription-with-free-private-apps/

The irony of these holier-than-thou lemmy folks using a term like "calling a spade a spade"

"be 100% pure, organic, free-range, antifascist like me, otherwise we cant be friends or have discussions at all!!!"

Hey just FYI you wouldn't be saying any of this unless you knew about the donation. What grocery store do you shop at?

Where are the nazis? Are you talking about the leninist party ÖP as nazis?

that's the infuriating thing about all this. with Mullvad all you are to them is an account number. that's it. no email, no name, no address, nothing. you go to the site and they give you an account number and that's that. hell you can pay for the damn thing in cash.

So then the co-founder donates to a political party, with users money, that likely wants to do what you just said. How can I support that? my Mullvad subscription ends in like 2 hours today, i'm no renewing. And NOW I gotta spend the day finding a decent non-US based vpn. fantastic.

I've been looking at TOR, I2P, Reticulim, Freenet, Snowflake, IPFS

Tor get's blocked a lot. It's the fastest of the options. The level of anonymization is ok. If you piss off a nation-state, it may not protect you sufficiently. It's had a history of leaks, If an intelligence ag owns enough of the exits, timing attacks might out you.

I2P is more secure, harder to block, but it's really slow and has very limited access to the clearnet. It's also super easy to DDOS. There are some torrents, forums and chatrooms out there on i2p, latency is rough.

Reticulum is pretty cool. It's a protocol and you access things like nomad net on it. It's crypto is good, there's no clearnet access. It may have issues when/if it scales

Snowflake is slow AF, mainly used to get anonymous access out from restricted nations-states.

IPFS web3 crypto storage. you can host files/sites on it. It's kinda hard to make stuff on there go away, it's also kinda hard to get stuff to stay. If you're not paying a pinning service, even daily scripting the pins to keep data up there is a losing battle. It's slow, fragile, not very anonymous.

I’m out of the loop. What happened with proton?

who should offset the missing work

I don't know about the rest of your questions, but generally there wont be much missing work. Unemployment is rising thanks to automation and AI, and a lot of work is bullshit busy-work anyway.

With a lot of upheaval and confusion in the interim, I truly believe we could cut working hours by 50% and still be basically fine.

Energy & Fuel policy

In 2025 the leader of the Örebro Party, Markus Allard, in a post on X wrote that he wished to see a complete elimination of taxes on energy & fuel.[48] Allard once again said that this was a priority for the Örebro Party in an X-post in 2026.[49] As taxes on energy and fuel make up 40 to 50% of the price in Sweden, abolishing them would lead to the prices being significantly decreased.

Again, never a path of substance to make this happen. This is how this spreads. It always sounds great in quips but no actual policy substance to get it across the line.

It depends on what kind of work it is of course. But a large portion of jobs don’t see a reduction in productivity because people don’t really work 8h efficiently. Some see productivity increases. In combination with better well being, less sick days etc. it can be done.

I believe they said they would offer refunds if that's what you're referring to by the 200 days

https://piunikaweb.com/2026/06/30/mullvad-browser-vpn-options-after-controversy/

Not good enough. If I give them money, the fascist co-owner will use it to donate to other fascists. Either remove him from the company or lose some customers. That is their choice. There is no middle ground with fucking Nazis. It's us or them!

That reply just shows me that he fundamentally misunderstands the issue. By giving money to Mullvad I would directly support the pos party that this guy donates to. Do they not understand where the money in their bank account is coming from?

Sounds reasonable for me to cancel Mullvad and tell everyone else to cancel. I don't care if that piece of shit white supremacist Nazi did it as a personal choice or as part of the company. He is my enemy, I am at war with him and I will not do anything to support him. Hopefully enough people stand up so they put him out on his ass and he loses everything which is less than Nazi's deserve.

Understandable how?

All I see is a bunch of both-sidesing, conflating "speech" with economic power, and making claims that clearly don't align with their actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

It seems that IVPN is getting a lot of new customers. I have never heard about them before though. Don't take this as any sort of recommendation or anything.

Do they offer wireguard or openvpn configs? They don't list a Linux client on their website, so I'm not sure if I can use them at all.

Turns out lots of people can be shitty at once.

It also wasent a single tweet. It was tweets/comments plural, with him also talking about how the GOP was immune from the influence of big tech (ultra mega LOL) and would take them to task (a stunningly, knee slappingly stupid statement), that the GOP was the new "party of the little guy (holy fucking shit was that tone deaf)," then him using right wing phrasing and talking points to defend himself before finally defaulting to the same defense as Mullvad just did. "We are a political company that should not say political things, I.e. we have shitty political opinions that will cost us money once people find out about them so we will shut up now."

The proton CEO has not once apologized or said he was wrong about the Trump admin, even after they fired Gail Slater in the first year, the person he praised in his first effusive tweet about how great the incoming Trump admin was.

Hilarious, isn't it?

Why do you think it's a smear campaign? Did he not donate?

So you are saying they are combining nationalist and socialist ideas? Do they classify themselves as a workers party?

Might have heard something like that before somewhere, just can't put my finger on it.

"Remigration" is their made up word for ethnic cleansing.

This is not an all or nothing situation, people can criticise this for what it is, even if they're using any of the products/companies mentioned by you. Navigating a tech-fascist ecosystem is difficult and every criticism here is valid and important.

(Not using any of the aforementioned products/companies btw)

This is a bad attitude. It's like saying being vegetarian is performative if you aren't full vegan. And for the record, I use Mullvad (for now), I don't use any of the other services you mentioned, and I am vegan ;)

Loving the “hey, man, you’re completely wrong! But yes i agree” replies

I believe in allowing people to live comfortably and safely no matter their cultural or ethnic heritage. I believe in gay marriage and women’s rights.

What middle ground am I supposed to find with people who want to remove anyone who they deem not white enough from their country? What compromise do I make for the people who want to imprison homosexuals and violently convert their gay children? What is there to agree on with the man who believes that women are inferior, should stay at home and have 10 children, and owe him regular sex just because he is a man?

If you tolerate these ideas because you think it will make for a more peaceful world, those fascists are going to take your naivety and run away with it. There is no tolerance for intolerance.

Never heard of the tolerance paradox have you?

The way to resolve the tolerance paradox is to not tolerate intolerance.

"Donating money to" and "bankrolling the entire party, 10x-ing their entire funding in 2024 alone" are different things.

There are SO many people here who would happily dine with actual fascists just because they "make a good product." Completely ignoring what their funds that support them go to and lead to direct harm.

And if you think I'm hyperbolic, please, tell me how this is an incorrect line of thinking: https://lemmy.zip/comment/27359847

Sort of a "national socialist" party, one might say?

Fascists coopting the language of socialism is as old as fascism. That people continue to fall for it amazes me.

Their website literally doesn't have a party programme. From the looks of it they get their votes by spreading propaganda on facebook, which I guess is easy given the donation of five mil. Bananas.

Or else enjoy finding dirt on, and discussing them.

i do.

Party is run partly by an ex narc cop that got fired bought out for being a far-right ass

acab

Yeah, but it seems you can read. Closing your eyes won't make this go away.

And why did we need to know this? You can remedy your ignorance by reading up on it.

I’m not Swedish, but I don’t have to be to take offence to racism being promoted in their country.

He donated to a party that's basically a mini version of Trump.