Aron Flam and Henrik Jönsson challenge Sweden's "culture of silence," arguing that post-WWII welfare policies caused a 30% currency crash and that alliances between socialists and Islamists drove Malmö's decline. They cite Foreign Minister Margot Wallström's insults toward Jordan Peterson and the near-total exodus of Jews from 3,000 to 300 due to segregation. While Denmark now blocks Swedish violence exports, the hosts conclude that America's individualist melting pot offers superior integration compared to Sweden's enforced collectivism. [Automatically generated summary]
When we started getting all that money funneling into the country after the end of World War II, and the Social Democrats were like, look at us, how good socialism is working.
This is the Rubin Report and I'm once again, Dave Rubin.
Here's a friendly reminder to subscribe to our channel by clicking that pesky bell and turning on notifications so that you might, just might see our videos.
And more importantly, joining me today are two Swedish podcast superstars and free speech activists in no order, Aaron Flam and Henrik Jonsson.
There's O with two And I knew that the J was really a Y in our world, but I wanted you to say it first, so it sounded a little smoother.
Anyway, I'm thrilled to have you guys here.
I'll preface all of this by saying something that I told you guys earlier in the week when I did both of your podcasts, which is that, bizarrely, almost impossibly, our fifth most watched country for this show, The Rubin Report, is Sweden, so it's the United States first,
and then usually Canada and the UK battle out two and three, and then Australia is four, and then Sweden.
But about two years ago, I recorded a small YouTube video, well, actually a Facebook video on my phone, where I, out of spite, I was irritated with the journalistic, journalist establishments incapacity of correctly describing The difference between dividends and a profit in a private company, because we had this big debate about how we didn't want commercial companies in the health care sector.
So I made a video where I said, OK, listen, guys, if you want to talk about this, you need to understand the difference between those two different things.
And I'm going to tell you all.
So I posted it on Facebook the morning after I woke up.
My mailbox was overflowing and had so many people just going, wow, you're so good at explaining this stuff.
Nobody ever talks about this.
And then I started making videos.
Now I run the largest politically minded YouTube channel in Sweden.
Well, they should know because they should have watched every episode of your show.
I assume most of them have.
I'm a Swedish comedian, and then after a while I realized I can't do my jokes anymore, my beautifully constructed child pornography jokes, and then I had to... Well, we don't exactly have free speech in Sweden, we got it in 94 from the EU, and that's sort of...
But I would like to have some in Sweden.
So I've been working at that since last we met.
And since we met last, I've been doing very little comedy, although I have done some comedy.
And then, since last we met, because at the point when we met, I wanted to find the root cause of the craziness that is going on in the Western world right now.
And you've written a book about it, and I just finished and published my book about it.
Unfortunately in Swedish, but I'll get you an English version.
and basically, I got proof that the socialists and the Islamists have pretty much been working together
since the end of World War II and that the socialists didn't turn in '43,
but they were on Hitler's side until the end.
And after the war, they sort of swept that under the carpet, found alliances, because the Islamists, or what turned, morphed into the Islamists, were on Hitler's side as well, and they continued that alliance, and I think we're seeing the end point of that cooperation now.
So, you start doing video... Did you start doing video first?
Video right away.
So you start doing the video, and just by talking about these things, my sense from what's going on in Sweden is that there's just a lot of people due to cultural reasons that hopefully you guys can explain, just don't really say what they're thinking enough.
And then it makes guys like you very unique.
A comedian, it's one thing to be doing it, but a guy from a business background, were you shocked at what was happening?
Listen, I think part of the reason that your show is popular in Sweden is our nation is like the canary in the coal mine, and people are like so penned up Because we have a fiercely egalitarian culture.
It's very conformist.
So it's incredibly threatening to break the mold.
But there is this pent-up need of seriously engaging in open conversation about a lot of issues that are, well, they put the lid on those.
And I think that's what you were picking up on when you went there.
And I think that is why, once I started making my videos, it just exploded.
Because there were so many people, wow, how do you dare say these things?
Well, here's where Aaron and I kind of connect, because I wanted to debunk the idea that the social democratic rule, which has been running Sweden for the better part of the last 100 years, they took credit for the financial miracle that we had.
Basically, Sweden rose from a rather poor agrarian economy into the per capita wealthiest country on Earth.
Over a couple of decades.
But that was mainly due, and if you ask economists, they will know this, but nobody speaks about it.
The reason that happened was because we did not take a stand against the Nazis in the war.
So we actually sold them iron ore and granite.
And after the war, we were also the only intact industrialized manufacturing nation in Europe.
So we exported everything to everyone, and that's how we became rich.
So you were acting like capitalists sort of on the DL, on the down low, but in effect... I'd say no, that's the worst brand of crony capitalism I would say.
Yeah.
What about you?
So you were doing stand-up first, but what were the issues first that you were talking about that you realized shouldn't be talked about?
Well, as a comedian, I know what cultural taboos we have, so I just made a list and, you know, started doing jokes on every cultural taboo because that was my job.
So I went through, you know, the usual shock thing, you can always do a pedophilia joke because, you know, or a fisting joke, it's funny.
But then I started drugs, marijuana.
Aaron, this is a family show.
And then I went to marijuana.
But I've never experienced as much hate as when I started my campaign to crush socialism.
Because in their minds, that's just the most taboo thing you could ever say.
That's the entire system.
You're basically shitting where you eat.
So when you say you don't have free speech, Well, you are free to say whatever you want as long as no one takes offense or gets insulted.
Yeah, and then when he talks about that, he breaks the culture of silence, that Sweden is peaceful, it is ordered, everything works, no one needs a gun for self-defense because the police or the state will take care of everything.
And remarkably enough, that's the reason why my book, by the way, is called This is a Swedish Tiger, because tiger in Swedish means both the apex predator and shut up.
So during the Second World War, there was a campaign in Sweden launched by the government that said, be a Swedish tiger, which means be silent but deadly.
But the second thing that I think is important to mention there is like, like the establishment media of Sweden and sort of, you know, the news organizations and so forth.
They have been losing a lot of their revenue to, you know, the digital tech giants like Google and Facebook and so forth and very unhappy about that.
So they've been pushing The government to intervene with what they're doing under the guise of, well, you know, it's promoting extremism or whatever.
People are writing nasty things on Facebook.
And they pushed it all the way to the top government.
So the Minister of Justice actually had a meeting with Google and Facebook.
You can read this in the papers.
I can send you links for this.
Where he actually told them, well, of course there's freedom of speech.
And it's great that your private companies And private companies make their own decisions.
Is that sort of putting like a virtual gun against your back?
But we think you should clean up some of the stuff on your platforms.
Otherwise, we might have to move forward with regulation.
Now, I wouldn't want to be, you know, the president of Facebook Sweden having to answer to an American CEO, you know, tell them that I'm the guy that made him regulate our company.
So when we talk about free speech, they haven't jailed you yet.
But what type of slurs are they throwing at you to make sure that it perhaps hampers some of your businesses or hampers your ability to perform at clubs?
Well, that would be... This was actually a text written by a rather famous establishment journalist in one of the biggest national papers, who had a big issue... So, in effect, he works for a state-run paper, but because... No, no, no.
So in effect though, someone on state radio, so he's funded by the state to get his message out there, called you guys, independent people, putting stuff up on YouTube.
Okay, so that's exactly where I wanted to go with this, because if you listen to our Socialist Democrats or Democratic Socialists or whatever the hell they are these days, I keep saying they're gonna drop the Democrat part soon enough, what they always say is, we should be more like Sweden.
AOC says this, Bernie says this, I doubt that AOC has ever been to Sweden.
Perhaps Bernie has been to Sweden.
But they say the Nordic countries usually, but it's specifically we should be more like Sweden.
Now you guys have 10 million people, we have 350 million people, we have people from every walk of life, from every corner of the earth, you guys mainly were a homogenous society into the last couple years.
There's all sorts of reasons that that analogy doesn't quite make sense.
But when you hear that, America should be more like Sweden, what is that?
Johan August Gripenstedt is the name of the guy that was very forward thinking, that made these reforms possible.
And then things started getting better after that.
The other thing you need to remember is that when we started getting all that money funneling into the country after the end of World War II, and the Social Democrats were like, look at us, how good socialism is working.
And it had nothing to do with them.
In fact, their policies, big government policies, Wasted all that money and you know in the 1990s we actually had to devaluate our currency.
30% of everything was lost because of the welfare state they built up.
So if you hear Bernie Sanders or Warren say stuff like we need to be more like Sweden, well the part they're missing is that what was good about Sweden was free market oriented.
What was bad about Sweden, we turned out into a decent country in spite of socialism, not because of.
But do you think part of the issue here is that the extent The exterior of Sweden looks a certain way.
So for example, I had two trips to Sweden, to Stockholm, and I was only in Stockholm.
So what I'm seeing is a very snapshot version.
But just from walking around Stockholm, or maybe what we see in the media, or in the movies, if they show someone from Sweden, they're always very tall, they look very good, they're blonde like you, and they're in nice jackets.
And what I noticed from walking around Stockholm was it looked like everyone bought their clothes that morning.
Everyone looked fantastic.
Everything was clean.
The streets were clean.
All those things.
Now, I get it.
It's a very small little micro version of this.
But is that part of the problem?
That the veneer of this somehow is still selling well?
But I think, just like not speaking out against things you might see as wrong or incorrect, it is very important that everything looks good if you are to have a culture of silence and a quasi-socialist state.
Fiscally conservative, but socially liberal to describe myself.
So that's where most of the attacks are coming from on my end, you know, from journalists, you know, people of platform, establishment media platforms, they will be very upset and they will find a single word that they don't like in a sentence, pull it out and start a tweet storm, you know.
They will tell you things like, Well, you're dangerous, you're a populistic alarmist.
You're not taking responsibility for what kind of people you take on to your show.
And you know, going back to this thing with the canary in the coal mine.
This is the thing, because what all of these people have been doing is working so very hard at guiding the population to the correct moral standpoint at the end of whatever they produce.
And when you don't do that, you bring somebody else on the show and say, OK, this is a completely different perspective, and I'm not going to attack you.
I don't want to fight you.
I want to explore your idea and just see what I make of it.
So I told you guys that when I was in Stockholm for the two shows with Jordan Peterson, and I saw you there, that they really stuck out.
Well, first off, I was particularly excited about them because I knew that this small country was my fifth most watched country, and I was like, what the hell's going on here?
And Jordan also knew that a huge percentage of his viewership was from there.
So we both sort of had that date, that first Stockholm date in our minds as something special's happening.
The shows were incredible.
The first show sold out literally in a minute, which is why we added the second show.
The audiences were phenomenal, correct me if I'm wrong.
I would like to say that it was Jordan that was very popular, so just for the record.
The thing that truly struck me was that after the show we would do our meet and greets and Jordan would meet with hundreds of people.
Mine, we would just quickly sell them basically right before the show so I'd usually get, you know, 30 or 40 people because we have to do it very quick.
But at the two Stockholm shows we had about 80 or 100 people.
We jammed all of these people into a small room.
We're sitting there and it felt like something memorable to me.
Everyone in that room had something written down or something on their phone or something they wanted to hand to me or a book that I should read or a story or something.
And it was so moving to me that I think I said to you, is there a bar around here we can go to?
And we took everybody and we went to a bar and we hung out for hours.
So it's quite You know it's funny, or not funny, I suppose depressing at a certain level that she said that after our first show.
So then I think we had a day or two away.
I think maybe we were in Copenhagen or somewhere else.
And I remember thinking when we were coming back...
That, you know, we're going through security again, we're going through the border again, and I remember thinking, you know, we just saw this story, I think we saw it on the plane, what the foreign minister said, and I thought, why wouldn't they stop us at the border or harass him or whatever?
Now, they didn't, but that sort of thing, it's like we can sort of joke about it now and it sounds so ridiculous, but there is another human element to it that But you came in, and just coming in is breaking a culture of silence, so they have to do something.
They have to tell their listeners, don't listen to these guys.
I mean, the story you're telling about how all these people had written down questions for you, To me that's actually, it's so, it's a beautiful thing that it almost brings tears to my eyes.
Because, you know, I get all these emails from like young guys who want to, you know, begin exploring their lives and they are thirsty for, you know, an open discussion.
The fact that Margot Wallström, the minister that told Jordan to crawl under a rock, that is like the perfect example of the culture of silence that we have.
Because the fact that he just showed up in Sweden, they had to make a stand that what this man is saying is not part of the narrative that we want here.
But the reason I mention that is because, as I said earlier, I did both of your podcasts, which we'll link to below because I want people to see you guys as hosts, but I mentioned the story to both of you of how the day of the Stockholm show,
it was cold out and I wanted to get a hat.
And I went into H&M, which is your, is that your greatest, well H&M--
It's like Gap here.
Are your greatest exports.
And I went into H&M and I was online to buy the hat.
And I see the guy in front of me, young guy, probably 20, 21 years old,
says to the cashier, "This is the first suit I've ever bought."
He was speaking in English.
He said, the first suit I've ever bought and I'm going to see this Jordan Peterson show tonight.
And then the cashier says, I'm going to see the Jordan Peterson show tonight.
So I tapped the guy on the shoulder.
I turned around and said, I'm going to see the Jordan Peterson show.
And he knew who I was.
And I just thought it was such an incredible moment.
Like this young kid who literally was buying the first suit of his life to, as you just said, listen to a Canadian psychology professor, tell him to sit up straight with his shoulders back.
So can you talk a little bit about what's happening with either young people or men or both or some combination?
There's a problem with language because what I think they're trying to do in Sweden, have been trying for my entire life, is they're trying to accomplish gender equity.
And that's not the same thing as equality of the sexes, right?
No, no, no, but when you go for gender equity, what you want is, well, you want a facade, right?
You want 50-50%.
50 percent here and 50 percent there, men and women.
It doesn't matter if they're competent, if they want to work there.
And we have government bodies regulating this and trying to—and we do this from kindergarten and upwards.
We encourage the girls to take up more space and be less like girls, and we encourage the boys to, you know, close inwards and not take up as much space.
So, basically, what they're trying to do is they're trying to make these kids go against their biology or whatever they feel is right, because they want it to look perfect.
So to be clear, it's not just- And equal, or equitous.
Right, it's not just, you know, you should act this way, but it ends up working into what jobs they choose, because Jordan mentioned this several times there, and a lot of people talk about this, that because you guys have had equality for so long, meaning you could do whatever you want as a man or a woman, it turned out that yes, women tend to be nurses more
and men turn out to be engineers more because women generally are more interested in people
I think it does hurt kids, because if you're raising up entire generations of girls telling them that they are beautiful and weak and strong at the same time and can do no wrong, well, you're turning them into sexist fascists, basically.
And you're telling all the boys that they are inherently evil, and we've been doing this for a long time now.
So is that the part that's particularly perverse about this?
So you take a society, you make them equal, then at the same time, because you know that humans are gonna have individual emotions, you keep telling the males that they're evil, despite the fact that you in Sweden have done more for equality than virtually anybody.
So it's really like it's just never enough, because actually, as you guys know, what they want is not really equality.
Now, over time, Crime in Malmö started to rise uncontrollably.
And again, coming back to the same topic all the time, this concept of being quiet about what is happening.
Because it's considered rude to mention the fact that we might have a drug war going on in this city.
And that's what we have right now.
People are working very hard at putting out different kinds of representations, statistical representations, saying everything is fine.
But you know, it's getting harder and harder for them to do that, because everyone knows that we did not used to have like weekly bombs going off in the city center, for one thing.
And if I can, I'd like to sort of tie this back to a personal experience.
You mentioned that time that I was burglarized.
And what's really interesting about that story is not so much the fact that I was burglarized, but rather the reaction I got from the media when I wrote about this.
I expect a better answer by the police than them telling me to leave.
So I wrote an editorial about this in Sweden's largest conservative newspaper and told the story about basically what the policeman told me, which I thought was the really shocking part.
The reaction by the local newspaper in Malmo was they didn't speak to me.
They spoke to the paper that took my editorial and said, this is completely unacceptable.
What poor taste and journalistic unprofessionalism that you should publish an alarmist, populistic text like this, which is drawing the attention from the people in need.
This is a wealthy capitalist.
He's spoiled and you should not listen to this alarmism.
And that really shocked me, because I had journalists attacking me on Facebook.
Why do you write, why do you put a text like that out there?
But Malmö used to have a vibrant Jewish community of around 3,000 Jews for 100 years.
And by now there's probably maybe 300 Jews left.
They've all left Malmo in the last few years.
They go either to Stockholm if they're young or if they can to America or Canada or Israel.
So they've evacuated the city pretty much and it has gone so far that two private individuals donated 40 million of their own money to the Jewish congregation so that they can manage security for the 300 individuals left just for the coming 10 years.
So, we've had a huge influx of immigration from poor Middle Eastern and North African countries, where state anti-Semitism is part of everyday life growing up.
So they come to us, and they're still anti-Semites.
And the socialists of Sweden, being on Hitler's side until the end of the World War and never dealing with that, have been, you know, it's a low-simmering sort of thing that they've never dealt with.
And they have an alliance, and they don't care if the Jews are We need to mention that the social democrats who have been ruling for a long time, they are actively siding with Palestine in the Middle Eastern question.
You know, the historical, this goes way back, but it's got something to do with Israel being in cahoots with America, and America is the great Satan.
So then, because if you're a socialist, being oppressed is a currency.
The Palestinians are the more oppressed, so they side with them.
But we have, you know, the youth organization of the Social Democratic Party, and I'll send you a video of this, you can see it for yourself.
When they demonstrate, like on the 1st of May, they have sort of a socialist holiday where they celebrate, I don't know, whatever socialists celebrate.
No, and the former strongman of Malmö, the social democratic leader Ilmar Reepalu, he had, I mean, antisemitism, he has been accused of being an antisemite for Decades now, but he always denied it and by now they can't deny it because there is no there are no Jews left So yeah, can you guys explain a little bit about how the?
immigration Issue arose that basically this all started just in the last really seven years something like that that a pretty much homogeneous society for better or worse Decided I think but correct me if I'm wrong I think probably with good intentions by people that weren't thinking that much and to bring in a ton of people.
How many immigrants roughly have come in over the last half decade or so?
If you take it over a decade, the numbers are always changing because they're playing around with them, so it depends on how you kind of calculate it, but it is a bit over a million people.
But other than that, I think the idea is if you live in a culture that is so homogenous as Sweden is, you cannot think outside the box of our own culture.
They don't even perceive that we have a culture.
They probably believe...
They will become Swedes very quickly when they realize how right and good we are.
So if we were not to give them the benefit of the doubt, because I also I try not to go to people's motives and I think the road to hell is paved with good intentions and I think a lot of these people think they're doing the right thing, but let's go to the non-good motive part.
I think you just wrote a book about it.
I mean, what do you think these people thought they were doing, or what do you think they thought was going to happen?
Just when you change demographics that much, a tenth of a population is a huge, huge, huge amount.
Well, I think they wanted to… So, the Social Democrats came into power.
They actually lifted up the working class to a much better living standard.
And the idea was, as soon as we get them up to middle-class living standards, they will become true communists and understand that they need to devote everything to the struggle.
What happened in reality was that they were perfectly fine with their flat-screen TVs.
They wanted more flat-screen TVs and longer vacation time.
They didn't want to join a communist revolution.
They became, in essence, well, our equivalent of Republicans, I suppose.
So they needed new voters.
In a sense.
And they invoked—and then they took in a lot of people into the most overregulated labor market in the world.
And these people, second-generation and third-generation immigrants, they're not getting into the system.
They're keeping them for the ballots.
They want their votes, and they keep them on subsidies.
And some of these kids, they see that the system is rigged against them, and they have no choice.
They will—of course they will become gangsters or go off and fight for ISIS after a while.
So truly, people come in, and as you said, they're often fleeing war.
You have sympathies with all these people.
The government then says, here's some stuff, but you can't have it forever, although they sort of do have it forever, but not just that you can't have it forever.
It's a limited amount of stuff, right?
We can't put you, and then they can turn around and say, see, we're also racist because we didn't make you millionaires in night one.
This is a sort of dangerous question in a way, but I think these conversations always end up here, which is, do you think in a weird way, this then breeds racism?
But then these people come into these countries, they're given these things, they demand more, the politicians use them for votes, and then good people who are not racist, but maybe don't have a lot of time to think about all these things, suddenly start becoming kind of racist.
I think the Swedes wanted to invite poor people from the third world to come and live in Sweden because they wanted to feel good themselves.
But also they thought everyone would want to become Swedish, of course.
But then they get a lot of immigrants and the immigrants look at the Swedish society and they're like, maybe I'm going to keep some of my own culture.
Yeah.
Because I don't think this is so great.
And if you were to sort of... And also, if you keep them out of the system and you never let them in and you stick them in ghettos, of course they will start to hate you.
And there's a weird thing that I think Europe has that America doesn't have, which is that if you were to assimilate them more, sort of push more of a Swedish culture on them, that would be against Swedish nature in a bizarre way, where America, we have a melting pot here, so come here with all of your traditions and all of those things, but mix into the fabric of America, where Europe has more of a ghettoization I think the reason America can do this better is because your country is founded on the principle of individuality and individuals, whereas Sweden is founded on the idea of collectivism.
Now, I have a good friend who's doing a lot of work with newly arrived African boys.
And like the top question, this is Mustafa Panjshiri, the question he is most often asked by these guys is like, how do I make Swedish friends?
I don't know.
They never open up.
I'm never in touch with them.
And at the same time, I mean, this is like, again, bringing tears to my eyes.
They want to work.
They want to break into becoming useful.
At the same time, Swedes will be telling you, oh no, how you should behave.
No, I couldn't possibly tell you.
Just be yourself.
And they give nothing away because they don't understand being so collectivist.
Like, we have a very closed, very complicated culture.
And if we want to invite people into our culture, we need to start, you know, here we do it this way.
This is, you know, but that is considered almost racist, certainly socially aggressive, to tell people that, well, this is how we do things around here.
Can you guys talk a little bit about how you differentiate from some of the other Nordic countries?
Because as I said, we always point to the Nordic countries, but Sweden is the one that we really focus on.
But it sounds, from what I could tell, and I did visit Denmark and I visited Finland and a couple other places, Denmark doesn't seem to have the problems as much as Sweden.
I've had Firming Rozan, who obviously, you know, is the...
Yes, publisher of the cartoons and I mean what an absolute brave person and someone who is you know now has to live unfortunately with a lifetime of security Who the idea that this is a racist or bigot is so patently absurd.
Yeah, I know he was trying to help I mean, it's yeah But I also think, culturally, over hundreds of years, Sweden and Denmark, they've fought for supremacy in Scandinavia, and they sort of culturally define themselves in opposition to each other.
So, Danes are more—they're closer to the continent.
They're more vivacious.
They like to call a shovel a shovel.
Actually, in Danish, it's a spade a spade, but that would be wrong here, I think.
So now it's like, you know, a situation where, no, I have to maintain that I'm doing it this way because it's too embarrassing to come out to say, okay, that was a big mistake, I'm sorry.
You know, the Danes are putting up border controls against Sweden now, because we don't want your problems with bombs you have in Malmo to be exported into Copenhagen.
No, and the response when Denmark did that, the response from Swedish politicians was like, oh, this is completely alarmist, but we welcome the Danes to do what they please.
So they were just saving face.
But it's, I mean, for Sweden, which is one of the most advanced IT service countries in the world, to have to deal with the fact that people are saying, we have to have border controls to you guys because there's so much craziness spilling into our country.
This analogy that you mentioned of sort of a Hollywood facade on all this, as I said, it looks too good on the outside, I really do think is part of the problem.
It looks too good from the outside.
Everyone looks too good, and everyone's clothes look too neat and new and pressed and great, and everyone looks sort of too healthy.
This was as much of a recap of, well I guess we should talk a little bit about IKEA or some of your other wonderful... We can talk about, he ordered a drink the other night when we were to dinner and they made him put it together himself as revenge for all the IKEA furniture they bought.
The name of my podcast is Deconstructive Criticism.
I have a few episodes in English.
I've just finished a book that I wrote and published myself in Sweden about the situation the Western world finds itself in today because of what happened in the past.
There will be an English translation on my webpage, aaronflam.com, soon enough.
If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about international issues instead of nonstop yelling, check out our international playlist.
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