Swedish writer Åsa Linderborg, who served as the cultural editor for newspaper Aftonbladet, has admitted the paper would label those against mass migration as fascists to stifle debate.
Linderborg, who is now a senior reporter at the same newspaper, served as the cultural editor from 2009 to 2019 and acknowledged that the newspaper contributed to creating a small window of acceptable opinions in which anyone who disagreed with leftist-liberal ideology would be branded a fascist.
“Everyone who did not want open borders or wanted to talk about integration was branded as fascists,” she said in a recent interview, Nyheter Idag reports.
She went on to talk about a book she had written on populism and the many issues raised by populist parties that the mainstream left has refused to touch.
“The difficult thing for the cultural left is to find progressive answers to the questions that the right-wing populists want to talk about. Then it’s easier to say: ‘we should not talk about that!’ she said.
According to Linderborg, some in the mainstream liberal-left largely turned on her when she spoke to members of the newspaper Nya Tider, an alternative newspaper that has been labelled a so-called “right-wing extremist newspaper” by public broadcaster Sveriges Radio in 2013 for reporting on migrant crime.
During the migrant crisis in 2015, Sweden’s political and media establishment be4came well-known for supporting open borders and mass migration.
In March of the following year, the official Swedish Twitter account, which was formerly managed by a different Swedish citizen every week, hurled expletives and other insults toward anyone critical of open borders.
While Sweden’s public support for mass migration has severely declined in recent years as migrant crime, gang crime and costs of mass migration rise, some on the left still support open borders and are more than willing to label their political opponents as racists for objecting to their ideology.
Earlier this year, members of the Swedish Left Party claimed that Swedish police were racists for cracking down on crimes in no-go areas in Malmö, many of which have high migrant-background populations.
Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, however, has denied a link between mass migration and rising crime saying, “The segregation is because there is too low employment and too high unemployment in these areas. But that would have been the same regardless of who had lived there. If you put people born in Sweden under the same conditions, you get the same result.”