(Important note: I do not speak Swedish. All Swedish language and quotes and screenshots for this article have been translated using Google Translate and are indicated by italics.
In January 2023, Swedish anti-racist magazine Expo released a report indicating that MIT professor Dr. Max Tegmark had offered a grant of $100,000 from his Future of Life Institute (FLI) to Nya Dagbladet, a far-right media platform that has a history of publishing racist conspiracy theories. Tegmark initially denied this, stating he had “not approved grants to any person or organization in Scandinavia”. After additional questioning from Expo, FLI stated that the grant had already been canceled and Tegmark refused to answer further questions. At the time, Expo suspected that the grant may have been promised to Nya Dagbladet because Max Tegmark’s brother Per Shapiro runs an anti-vaccine podcast that has been promoted through the outlet, but Per Shapiro and Nya Dagbladet also refused to comment on the matter.
FLI later issued a statement on Jan 18 2023 stating that “FLI finds groups or ideologies espousing antisemitism, white supremacy, or racism despicable and would never knowingly support any such group”. The statement claims that Nya Dagbladet was initially classified as a “right-of-center with an establishment-critical slant”, but acknowledges that their vetting procedures failed and need improvement.
There’s been no further news regarding this since FLI’s statement, but my research into Nya Dagbladet and Per Shapiro’s activities over the course of 2023 have revealed a more complicated than what was initially reported by Expo in January.
Nya Dagbladet’s Neo-Nazi Management
First, let’s review the two people in charge of Nya Dagbladet as their names will be relevant later on.
Per Expo’s info page for the site, Nya Dagbladet’s founder and editor-in-chief Markus Andersson was previously involved with Sweden’s far right National Democrat party. Through Nya Dagbladet, he advocated for racial segregation under the guise of “ethnic rights”.
Isac Boman, Nya Dagbladet’s other editor, released a book titled Money Power: A Force for Freedom or Slavery? in 2016 through Arktos Media, a publishing company whose founder previously distributed white nationalist metal music and Nazi paraphernalia. As of this writing, the top trending post on Arktos Media’s website is a book excerpt called The Struggle for the Soul and Blood of Europe that decries ills like “xenophilia”, “ethnomasochism”, and “the Islamic invasion”. Boman’s own website states that he’s been involved in “identity politics”.
Per Shapiro, Folkets Radio, and Nya Dagbladet
Per Shapiro’s Folkets Radio podcast frequently features anti-vax rhetoric and conspiracy theories. For example, the description for an episode from November 26, 2023 called “To vaccinate away contact with the soul” claims that COVID-19 vaccines changes people’s auras, making it “much more difficult or even impossible to reach the person’s soul or ‘higher self’” and implies that there is a “spiritual war against humanity”.
Folket’s guests are often anti-vax or have ties to the far right. A February 2023 podcast on Folkets features Max Tegmark in its credited cast alongside a host of conspiracists:
- Jacob and Inger Nordangård who together run the Pharos blog, which frequently posts conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum. An English post from 2022 claims that their ultimate goal is to build a “technocratic World Brain with a digitized humanity overseen and managed by Artificial Intelligence”.
- Lasse Wilhelmson, a “justice activist” who talked of “Jewish Marxists of the Frankfurt School” when he was interviewed by Nya Dagbladet.
- Ilkka Tiainen, editor-in-chief of Finnish website PosiTIV, which recently promoted an InfoWars video claiming that vaccines are “killing machines”.
- Torbjörn Sassersson, editor-in-chief of Swedish website Newsvoice. Newsvoice recently promoted the conspiracy film Plandemic 3: The Great Awakening.
- Max Winter, one of the leaders of the Swedish sovereign citizen movement. His World Freedom Alliance group was banned from Facebook in 2021 for spreading vaccine misinformation.
Max Tegmark has tweeted in promotion of his brother’s podcast several times; once to promote its launch in 2021 (with the caveat that he “doesn’t necessarily share” the opinions presented) and again in English in 2022.
Folkets Radio has continued to be featured on Nya Dagbladet since Expo’s investigation. For example, a Nya Dagbladet article from June 2023 written by Boman praises Dr. Tegmark’s “genuine fascination with the transformative consequences of the technological developments we face” before attacking “the media state’s Marxist house elves”. Two months later, Per Shapiro gave a comment to Isac Boman and Markus Andersson for an English article criticizing QAnon influencer Cornelia Gustafzon and accusing her of being part of a coordinated plot to discredit him.
The War on Life
In August 2023, Per Shapiro published a book about AI called “Kriget mot livet:Hur vi Manipuleras av Arkontisk Intelligens”, which translates to “The War on Life: How we are Manipulated by Archontic Intelligence”. Like Dr. Tegmark’s work, it focuses on the perceived threat posed to civilization by AI, but approaches it from a spiritual angle. Shapiro’s central thesis is that “ancient teachings of the Gnostics” predicted a coming future in which humans are assimilated into AI as a new species.
Dr. Tegmark (whose relationship to Shapiro isn’t obvious) provided the first endorsement quote for the book, calling it an “urgent contribution” and praising his brother as “one of our bravest journalists”.
Should our increasingly powerful technology benefit or replace life on Earth? One does not have to agree with everything in this well-written and thought-provoking book by one of our bravest journalists to appreciate it as an extremely urgent contribution to the most important discussion of our time. MAX TEGMARK, AI researcher and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT
The War on the Swedish Press
Per Shapiro’s activities and Max Tegmark’s connection to them have not gone unnoticed by the Swedish press. Sveriges Radio and writers for Flamman and Forskning & Framstegmagazines both pointed out the bizarreness of an MIT professor promoting such an unscientific book. This negative press led to an extended public spat between the brothers and Forskning & Framsteg writer Anna Davour.
First, Per Shapiro made a post on Folkets’ website complaining that his anti-vax and anti-5G positions rightfully hurt his public reputation. Following Davour’s article, he and Dr. Tegmark released a joint statement addressed to her, accusing her of misleading readers, to which Davour gave a reply justifying the integrity of her journalism and doubts about Dr. Tegmark.
Max Tegmark probably understands very well how science works, and that is precisely why I wonder why he is so positive about Per Shapiro’s book…My commenting text does not attempt to provide a comprehensive coverage of all the content of Folkets Radio. It only highlights how the episodes where Max Tegmark is interviewed appear.
Next, Shapiro wrote another letter to Forskning & Framsteg’s editor-in-chief with more complaints about the publication, including one of a “biased” article about the lack of dangers from 5G. The editor-in-chief again defended his magazine’s reporting and fact checking policies in response.
In his initial response on Folkets website, Shapiro argues that the Swedish press were careless with the facts in bringing up Karneval as they didn’t publish his book. However, he fails to mention his distribution deal with the publisher.
Shapiro also fails to mention that he appeared at the publisher’s book fair, promoting his book alongside other Karneval’s conspiracy and anti-vaccine related books. A photo of him at the event accompanied an October article in Nya Dabladet promoting an episode of Folkets Radio entitled “Rotten Democracy”. Hard copies of Shapiro’s book are visible, presumably with Dr. Tegmark’s endorsement on the back.
The Nordic Times
Over the course of my research, I discovered that Nya Dagbladet has an English version of their website called “The Nordic Times” that appears to be operating in secret. The website is credited to “Per Andersson” rather than Markus Andersson, but the sites share the same design and many articles can be found on Nya Dagbladet’s website.
The mission of the Nordic Times, whose tagline is “The Polaris of Northern Enlightenment”, is to “strengthen Nordic culture and enrich other cultures through the spreading of Nordic perspectives and ideas”.
Tags frequently used by the website include “the globalist agenda”, “cultural revolution in the west”, and “the criticized covid vaccinations”. An article in the “globalist agenda” category is titled “Soros funds globalist ‘TikTok army’” while another consists of a transcript of a speech from Dr. David Martin, an anti-vaxxer whose lies have been repeatedly debunked . Both articlesare also present on Nya Dagbladet’s website, revealing that the Swedish versions were written by Isac Boman and Markus Andersson respectively.
A Nordic Times article called AI: A Threat to Life Itself authored by Per Shapiro was posted just a day after the same article went up on Nya Dagbladet. In it, he promotes his book and discusses his relationship with his brother with regards to artificial intelligence:
In an interview with Deutsche Welle, Max warns that humanity is building an “alien mind” much more powerful than our own, with which we will have to share the planet.
Max and I were talking recently about how we have strangely come to the same fateful question – although we have approached it from very different directions and with very different conceptual frameworks.
Many might spontaneously think that the threat of AI is a recent phenomenon. While it is true that technological developments have enabled the construction of this Frankenstein’s monster, this is only part of the truth. AI technology is, one might say, the interface that the ‘monster’ uses to more effectively take control of us humans. “The ‘monster’ itself, however, is not new. Ancient Gnostic texts warn of a soulless but powerful intelligence that can infiltrate human thought and lead us to destruction. In my book, The War on Life, to be published in August, you can read more about this force, which the Gnostics called the Archontic.
Shapiro’s op-ed also included a strange section railing against gender-inclusive language in medicine:
Moreover, it is no longer just the components of industrial operations that are considered production units, but also life itself, which is reduced to a bundle of specific functions. There was (fortunately) some outrage when it became known that Svenska Vårdguiden had advised against using the term “woman” in health care on its website. By referring instead to “the person who will give birth”, “uterus carrier” or “menstruator”, it would avoid offending transgender people who identify as women.
The header image used for this article was also reused for another Nya Dagbladet page promoting The War on Life that features Dr. Tegmark’s endorsement.
Verity’s Vetting
In their statement to Expo, FLI gave the following explanation for why they missed the fact that they supported a far right newspaper:
Why didn’t you immediately realize how extreme Nya Dagbladet was? As a baseline, at the time of the initial consideration of the Foundation’s proposal, FLI was simply not aware of the extreme nature of the associated newspaper or its history. There are a number of reasons for this, including: (a) The newspaper downplays such extremism and this fact and its historical relationships were not evident to us from their website or proposal. (b) The quality of public discourse worldwide has degraded so badly, with casual name-calling using highly charged labels, that many of these types of accusations are open to question upon examination. We confirmed however in our own due diligence process that sometimes these casual labels can be accurate.
This failure in due diligence not be too much of a problem if Dr. Tegmark didn’t also run an AI-based news aggregator called Verity(formerly known as Improve the News) that utilizes the same classifications FLI applied to Nya Dagbladet.
Verity’s news filtering algorithm allows readers to use two sliders to determine what kind of outlets they see: one for “political stance” (left vs right) and one for “establishment stance” (critical vs pro). Using these sliders to find other right-center outlets with an establishment-critical slant whose content is on Verity, I found a couple other problematic outlets: Neo Eastern Outlook, a website funded by the Russian government that was banned from Facebook in 2019 for creating a network of fake accounts and InfoWars, which has been infamously sued into bankruptcy for their promotion of fake far-right news.
The inclusion of these two websites known for producing fake news is not appropriate for a news aggregator, even when they’re labeled as critical of the establishment.
I’m sure that Max Tegmark and Per Shapiro will consider this piece to be yet another part of the media’s smear ongoing smear campaign against them that distracts from the dangers of AI or whatever. But if they don’t want outside criticism, then perhaps they should try to avoid appearing on websites run by Neo-Nazis.