The IT company Mullvad’s founder Daniel Berntsson is behind a giant donation to the populist Örebro Party, which advocates “comprehensive re-immigration” from Sweden. “It’s sad that it’s needed,” he told Flamman.
~ https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropartiet/
Oh cmon! I trusted 'em to not shit in their pants, what next? We discover that Torvalds and Stallman are transphobic?
as soon as i started to see billboards and bus adverts i had a feeling mullvad wasnt what i thought it was. sad, i was hoping i was wrong.
Why do these kinds of products even exist? I’ve never used one but have thought maybe I should look into it. I sometimes proxy through a cheap or throwaway VPS, figuring small ipv6 allocations below the ISP level aren’t tracked very carefully above that level. In some cases the VPS host just gives you a bunch of addresses out of a /64, when theoretically a /64 is the smallest allocatable chunk and it’s what a single device is supposed to get.
The title is misleading because it doesn’t mention the millions are in Swedish Krona (I presume).
5 million krona would be €450 800.
That’s still the majority of the donation for that entire party. All from a single person.
The five million from Berntsson make up the majority – as much as 72 percent – of the Örebro Party’s income last year. It is also the largest single private donation to a party in 2025.
The money also seems to have been the triggering factor for the party’s decision to stand in the parliamentary elections.
(machine translation)
Fuck them. Not sure who to go with now. Paying monthly and not needing to remember to cancel were the main reason I used them.
Also, it seems safer to assume that all tech companies are rotten until proven otherwise.
https://www.vpnscorecard.com/ seems like a good place to check for alternatives although it doesn’t go into the politics of the company mostly. Still, their top scorer https://www.ivpn.net/ seems like a good bet.
I do like what I read on their about page. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll dig a bit deeper.
You know who hasn’t given money to far right extremists? Proton and it’s founder.
I remember when people went ape shit because the CEO, Andy Yen, approved of one of Trump’s pick for the antitrust division.
Then the antitrust pick happened to be good at her job, so Trump fired her and people realized Andy wasn’t so wrong after all but still hated him.
Everytime I tried to defend Proton, I got downvoted and insulted over this. Got called a MAGAt and a neo nazi sympethizer. I was told to use Mullvad and that it was so much better and I wouldn’t be encouraging some right wing sympathizer even though Andy Yen never took any political stance.
Well who’s laughing now?
Proton has sponsored some French (?) rasist person recently. They have apologised for it and said it was a mistake. However. This is not the first stupid thing they’ve done.
PS. I’m no way a fanboy of anything. While I have been a Mullvad user for multiple years now, it seems like I have to reconsider that.
Except for financing a French fascist and a Brazilian fascist who is the son of a dictator who was one of the leaders of a fascist coup… You know, besides them.
They responded to that recently.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u05xs2/comment/oqgihvq/
edit For those that don’t want to click -
"You’re right to raise this, and we want to address it directly and provide you important context on how this happened.
Vincent Lapierre’s channel should never have been part of our affiliate and sponsorship program, because we intentionally avoid association with channels whose content could distract from our message and divide our community.
Proton operates globally, and while our services are available to everyone regardless of political views and our mission is consistent everywhere, our knowledge of every local media landscape is not. In this case, our team didn’t have enough context about the French space to make a well-informed decision, and that’s on us.
We also want to be straight about what a placement like this is and isn’t. An affiliate or sponsorship arrangement is a transactional placement for awareness, not an endorsement of a creator’s views. In the case of Vincent Lapierre, this was a single video sponsorship, not a partnership.
But that distinction doesn’t excuse what happened here. The responsibility to vet who we put our name next to is ours, and we didn’t meet it this time. We’re now reviewing our vetting process and our guidelines for our marketing agencies to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
If you see something like this again, tell us. We rely on your feedback and vigilance."
What in the serious fuck are you talking about, Proton just got caught giving money to far right influencers. “Accidentally” of course. They promise not to do it again, lol.
Also Andy’s comment about Trump being anti-trust has aged like fine milk. It is almost like you should just keep your mouth shut when you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about
Perhaps you should stop giving corporations your hard earned money.
Everytime I tried to defend Proton, I got downvoted and insulted over this. Got called a MAGAt and a neo nazi sympethizer.
Welcome to Lemmy, either conform or get ousted. It’s almost like Karl Marx is here with us today.
Man and i just renewed my subscription. Why do people always get their shit twisted in politics or whatever, its not like they need the money, donate it instead.
I HOPE this is fake. I find it hard to belive
If it hasnt been 14 days, and you didnt buy with cash, crypto, or gift cards, you can request a refund. I also recently brought a few months, but unfortunately I learned about this just a few days too late.
As a Swede - fuck that guy and the fucking Neo Nazis coming out of the goddamn woodwork everywhere. I was all-in on Mullvad, but that’s changing today. Anyone got a good recommendation for a DNS over HTTPS alternative that’s not owned by a racist/Nazi/Fascist asshole?
Proton VPN?
Or maybe you can configure your OS to use a DNS over https provider in the settings. I use Quad9
Proton has similar issues with leadership, unfortunately, just not as bad. For DNS, I use locally hosted unbound which retrieves records directly from the root servers. It’s not the same as DoH, though, so if that’s a hard requirement then you’d want something like Quad9.
Proton’s owner also gives me the ick with his Trump and the Republican Party praising. I’ll look into it further and see if there are any other good options.
[Edit] I learned that CIRA (Canadian domain name registrar) has DNS over HTTPS support so I’ll be reverting to them. Canadian shield does sound pretty good for a non-profit service without tracking: https://www.cira.ca/en/canadian-shield/
That’s about outright Trump support, which is not what the comment you replied said he did. They said Trump praising, which is actually kind of what Andy did. I do agree that he is likely just a liberal that didn’t fully read the room when posting to social media, however he did praise Trump in that post for that very specific pick.
Personally, I wouldn’t @ Trump and compliment him for anything, especially not if I was a leader of a large company. There is no need nor a reason to make trump’s ego any bigger than it actually is, not with everything else he’s actively doing to the world. For me, it’s less about him “supporting Trump” and more about his inability to read the room and not see why that would be taken as supporting Trump.
He also did say that the republican party used to be better, which, while true, it’s a low bar and it has been shitty republicans for a long, long time. Reagan was a republican, did the tables turn all the way back then?
FUCK, THAT MEANS I GOTTA GET RID OF MULLVAD VPN!
Any FOSS VPNs on F-Droid I should consider?
You shouldn’t use a VPN provider that doesn’t let you use Wireguard. If they require you to use their own client, they’re either up to no good or just dumb and shouldn’t be in this business to begin with.
God bloody dammit. I genuinely LOVE Mullvad and have tried to use their (not so cheap) services. I feel in this economy, privacy comes at a price and I was happy to do this.
Now, I realise my money is going to fund a POS far-right asshole.
Proton supports Trump.
Mullvad suports the far right.
Is there any major privacy respective service provider that isn’t a bloody cunt?
Can we stop with the “proton” supports trump. This has been echoing since the tweet. I understand the initial recoil, I had it myself, but proton as an entity very clearly does not support trump.
By that logic, Mullvad is fine too, because the entity doesn’t support the far right. You are just sending your money to the company which pays the people that do… so…
I mean I’m okay expanding that logic here as well for consistency. This is all on a spectrum, one of Mullvad’s top employees donates millions to far right politician is on the more extreme end of that spectrum than a tweet that failed to read the room.
Taking your counterpoint even further, if you found out some low level employees at any company used a portion of their paycheck to support far right politics would you boycott? Obviously not, which should show you that you don’t believe this should be a binary decision.
To be clear, I feel mullvad crossed the line here, my point was that the proton hate doesn’t compare and is overblown.
Proton itself sponsored a fascist influencer in france like just a couple weeks ago… You can pretend that having a MAGA CEO doesn’t have anything to do with that, and that they would have stopped the sponsorship and caught their “mistake” without significant public backlash if you like, but the dots are connecting to a lot of us watching.
Also, nice strawman, but are they paying the low level employee enough to donate literally millions of dollars? Probably not. Does that low level employee have direct influence over the company? Probably not.
The idea that you stop using Mullvad because the founder personally made a donation to right-wing extremists, but you are fine with using Proton that sponsors fascists and has a CEO that platforms far-right extremists talking points is bonkers. The claim that you are separating “the entity” from the “people” doesn’t even hold water.
Fuck me, this is gonna ruin mullvad, I hope. Never saw it coming though, wtf?
also thought mullvad was legit. also want to know if there’s any alternative
I’ve semi-seriously been thinking about bootstrapping a VPN service just to have one “not an asshole” service (and that’s setting the bar low - I’m definitely an asshole, just not that kind of asshole). But I’m also a US citizen living in the US, so not the best choice for the job either.
I originally stopped using IVPN because of slow speeds. Has that improved?
Are you able to get through geo-restrictions on streaming services with IVPN? They have fewer servers than Mullvad it seems. Like for Singapore, they have 2, Mullvad has 5. In Japan, they have 1, while Mullvad has 9.
Signal was kickstarted by the CIA, so dissidents in regimes they wanted to topple could communicate securely, but at least that seems genuine.
Matrix was an Israeli spy company’s invention.
Telegram is Russian.
Reddit started out as the creation of Aaron Schwartz, but he got demonised and committed suicide. Then it was left to that shit eater spez, who sold his soul to the Epstein crowd making Ghislaine Maxwell a powermod among others, also hosting r/the_donald and bridging Trump’s popularity from 4chan into the mainstream. Now he sells everyone’s data to Google, while still not paying the manufacturers of that data anything.
TrueCrypt got shut down because it was too cool.
Man, after his death Aaron Swartz has gone from an early employee of Reddit, to a founder of Reddit to now the creator of Reddit. Give it a few years and he’ll have provided the VC money for it too.
No lol but I guess they did it twice?
It was in the news a year or few ago that the CIA was ceasing its funding of Signal.
If that was in the news you’d think I would be able to find an article…
Thus was the first hit I got when searching.
https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/signal-facing-collapse-after-cia
Matrix does have fundamental design issues you would expect from cellebrite devs…
Simplex, Monero and Whonix are all as cool as veracrypt!
and the SimpleX creator is a far righter, too https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/114630877715286899
IT company Mullvad founder Daniel Berntsson is behind a huge donation to the populist Örebro Party, which advocates “comprehensive remigration” from Sweden. “It’s sad that it’s needed,” he tells Flamman.
Five million kronor. That’s how much money the populist Örebro Party received in 2025 – from a single person. This is shown in the party’s income statement, which Flamman has reviewed.
Behind the giant donation is Daniel Berntsson, founder and co-owner of the internationally successful IT company Mullvad.
“This is a donation from me personally,” he writes in an email to Flamman.
The company has made large profits in recent years through the sale of so-called VPN services, which make it possible to surf anonymously. In 2024, the company had a turnover of 314 million kronor.
The five million from Berntsson constitutes the majority – a full 72 percent – of the Örebro Party’s income last year. It is also the largest single private donation to a party in 2025. ———————————————
That’s the entirety of the article the toot references. No idea what it means.
The main part is the party’s support for so-called “remigration”, which is
ethnic cleansing[1] via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry
About the immigration policy of the party:
Markus Allard initiated heavy debate in 2025 by claiming that Sweden is “the land for/belongs to the Swedes” and that the Örebro party favors a large scale remigration policy. He also criticized the Sweden Democrats for, according to him, allowing too many immigrants into the country under their watch as confidence and supply to the Kristersson cabinet.
In 2026 ÖP 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.” [45]
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.” [46]
About the foreign policy of the party:
In a podcast in May 2026 Allard clarifies some positions that his party holds and among other things made clear that leaving the EU and NATO were on the table for ÖP. Regarding NATO Allard claimed that Sweden cannot trust or rely on NATO and that the country should instead seek to massively increase its weapons production and also become a major arms exporter, arguing it would benefit the Swedish economy.[47][48]
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.”
Lol how is being born somewhere not a natural connection???
Also how far do you go back? What’s the magic number? Cos at some point pretty much everyone’s is an immigrant to their country.
You’re falling for their rhetoric by asking that question. We all know that they don’t give an actual shit about the technicalities of their racism. If your skin isn’t as white as the driven snow, you are seen as inferior to these fucks.
Well, according to the Sweden Democrats, the far right party the government collaborates with and their youtube channel (which they have allegedly cut ties with, but that proved to be a lie a while back) that also gave Allard his own show, had a program worrying about “third generation” immigrants, when talking about who is “great replacement” replacing Swedes.
Thats right, in a program where they were talking about how every single one with two foreign born parents and half (because “that seems fair”, they said in the program) of those with a single foreign born parent are paricipating in a replacement conspiracy, they at the same time worried about the great gap in the statistics that does not keep track on who is third generation immigrants, so the replacement is even greater than that.
How far? If you’ve got a you got a grandpa with a sun tan you might be impure to these fucks. But our government thinks they are fine people.
Edit, oh yeah, the native Sami people and Jews are not Swedish to them either. They have doubled down on this many times.
I just had a surreal vision of Trump sending the whole state of Minnesota to Norway and Sweden.
Sounds like you entered the country via a small boat if that was the case. Sorry gotta throw those back.
