Earlier this week, I published an article exposing the website The Nordic Times as an English version of Nya Dagbladet, a Sweden far-right online newspaper that’s operated and edited by Neo-Nazis. Over the course of my research, I thankfully found virtually no references to the outlet besides content The Nordic Times itself has published.
However, I did discovered one rather shocking exception: a story in Newsweek, complete with an accompanying video!
A Newsweek article called Swedish History TV Series Faces Backlash for Using Black Actors was published on November 7, 2023 about an upcoming Swedish TV show called “The History of Sweden”. Newsweek’s writeup claims that the show was receiving backlash for its perceived historical inaccuracy - specifically, the “inaccuracy” of including non-white actors to depict Sweden’s pre-historic inhabitants. It cites The Nordic Times as if it’s a regular source in several places:
The History of Sweden will be broadcast this fall on Sweden’s tax-funded state TV channel Sveriges Television AB (SVT) after nearly three years of production, described by The Nordic Times as the network’s biggest ever historical venture. … “As part of the mass media and political campaign for continued mass immigration to Sweden, it has become increasingly common in recent years to claim that Sweden has always been multi-ethnic and that the early Swedes did not in fact look anything like today’s light-skinned Swedes—but more like sub-Saharan Africans—an ‘educational campaign’ spearheaded by SVT itself,” The Nordic Times wrote in an editorial in June.
Strangely, Newsweek doesn’t actually link to the writing in question. If they had, their readers might notice the obvious far-right leanings of The Nordic Times as well as the fact that the article was filed under “cultural revolution in the West”. Their readers might also notice that the Nordic Times piece, called Swedish history goes ‘multicultural’ in high-budget SVT series, doesn’t even have an author.
While op-eds are sometimes published anonymously or pseudonymously, this Nordic Times article is not an op-ed at all. Like the rest of the content on the website, it’s actually a translated news story from Nya Dagbladet with the authorship credit removed.
The original piece was titled “Svensk historia blir ‘mångkulturell’ i ny SVT-satsning”, which translates to “Swedish history becomes “multicultural” in new SVT initiative” and was written by frequent Nya Dagbladet contributor Jan Sundstedt. In it, Sundstedt doesn’t present his own opinions like one would in an op-ed, instead choosing to write about backlash coming from “many” unspecified “critics”. The only critic who’s identified by name is Jeff Ahl, a representative for Sweden’s far right Alternative for Sweden party. He’s quoted as saying that the “poison of cultural Marxism must be purged from our ‘universities’“.
Newsweek’s article reproduces Ahl’s statement, but only refers to him as a “a former member of Swedish Parliament”. Not mentioned is the reason why Ahl lost his seat in Parliament: he switched parties from the nationalist Sweden Democrats to Alternative for Sweden when the latter was formed by ex-members of the Sweden Democrats’ youth league who were expelled from the partyfor being too racist.
In addition to Jeff Ahl, the Newsweek article anonymously quotes two Twitter users without linking to them, but I manage to find their origins. One was tweeted by the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, and the other was written by a Republican influencer Robby Starbuck. Neither of these accounts are Swedish and both were posted in response to the popular right-wing account “End Wokeness”.
The weirdness with this Newsweek article doesn’t end with The Nordic Times. In the description of the criticism towards The History of Sweden, the phrases “revisionist history” and “proper science or history” link to older Newsweek articles about Sweden that bear no relation to the topic at hand. The “revisionist history” link is about the “SwedenGate” viral topic from 2022 that included discourse about Sweden’s contemporary history of racism and colonialism while “proper science” links to an op-ed about NATO and Sweden’s neutrality during the World Wars.
I dislike snooping through people’s social media, but the troubling nature of these clearly intentional omissions on the part of Newsweek was a giant red flag to me, so I felt the need to dig deeper. Nick Mordowanec, the piece’s author, maintains a Twitter presence that at first glance appears tame, but I noticed one major outlier in the accounts he’s recently followed: American Ethos, an account posts “patriotic” imagery and content littered with white nationalist dogwhistles.
On the day Mordowanec’s article went up, American Ethos tweeted that the American right needs to learn that “demographics is destiny” and should aim to take over or replace cultural institutions.
I have a lot of questions about how an article originally from an obscure Swedish Neo-Nazi website ended up in an official Newsweek story. Questions like:
- Is it common practice for Newsweek’s writers to quote from anonymous op-eds without linking their readers to them?
- Why are anonymous quotes from prominent conservative Americans being used in an article about Sweden?
- Whose idea was it to create content about this topic?
- How did no one involved realize that The Nordic Times and Jeff Ahl are blatantly racist?
- Did anyone involved know that The Nordic Times is an English version of Nya Dagbladet?
- How did Nick Mordowanec even find out about The Nordic Times in the first place when it has virtually no reach?
- Why are there unrelated articles included in this piece?
- Where was the editor during all this?
- What’s up with the American Ethos stuff?
- Seriously, what the actual heck is going on here?!