Fake Sweden expert on Fox News – no connection to Swedish security

http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/fake-sweden-expert-on-fox-news-has-criminal-convictions-in-us-no-connection-to-swedish-security/

by adamwi • 9 years ago

118 75 9 years ago

dn.se

kevinbowman• 9 years ago

I'm interested in how this is being reported on in the USA - is there a discussion about the complete fabrication of this story, or is the story itself successfully doing the rounds? It seems amazing that manipulation of the public on such a massive scale is even possible in somewhere like the USA, if that's what is happening.

stanleydrew2• 9 years ago

I saw something about it on Twitter. But it's Fox News, so wasn't really that unexpected.

They have been attempting to manipulate the public on a massive scale for a long time, as long as the manipulation serves the preferred narrative.

JustSomeNobody4• 9 years ago

Surely, NBC, CNN, etc try and do this also?

Note: Don't take this to mean I, in ANY way, support Fox News.

plandis• 9 years ago

It's Fox News so only right-wing people are even listening to this crap.

cmrdporcupine• 9 years ago

Unfortunately the news cycle has already moved on.

hacker_9• 9 years ago

Utterly embarrassing, but not unexpected. News in the US exists in a different reality compared to other countries. If the BBC did this it would be such an utter shock it would probably make the newspapers. But in the US? Business as usual.

willvarfar3• 9 years ago

I don't get why the Right is so keen to vilify Sweden.

I've lived abroad and travelled and feel I have a fair handle on all the countries I've visited and I'm living abroad now.. In Sweden! Nordic countries are by far the best functioning countries I've ever visited and should serve as positive examples.

JustSomeNobody4• 9 years ago

Before the election, some of the people I talked to said that if Trump won, they'd exit the country. When asked where they'd go, it was always Canada or Sweden.

Maybe this has something to do with it?

briffle• 9 years ago

Did any of them actually leave?

spiderfarmer3• 9 years ago

The politics in Sweden are exactly the opposite of what Trump has in mind. The Right wants to pretend that Sweden is a mess so they can justify their own policies. They know that their electorate swallows whatever they tell them, because, well, they swallowed whatever they said during their campaign. So why change now?

jjawssd2• 9 years ago

The Right is so keen to vilify Sweden because they care about and want to prevent the disintegration of the nation, whatever that means. If they didn't care, they wouldn't complain.

Pxtl• 9 years ago

Because Scandinavia has countries that are aggressively left-wing and really successful at it. These are the places that prove that liberal ideals work. And they've accepted a tremendous number of refugees.

So ideologue right wingers are desperate to see them fail, as proof that Muslims are intrinsically hateful and that Scandinavians are chumps for falling for leftist ideals.

pavlov• 9 years ago

That seems to be basically it.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Soviet-affiliated communist parties were triumphant in large parts of Europe. In countries like Hungary and Czhechoslovakia, they came to power through elections and rapidly seized absolute government control. Many communists in Western European countries were expecting France, West Germany and others to soon follow suit. After all, the "scientific" theory of Marxism-Leninism explained this would happen, and enough cherry-picked facts were available to support the inevitability of the capitalist governments' collapse.

Today's right-wingers look a lot like those 1948 communists. Plenty of things are going their way, but that is not good enough in itself -- the Bannon-style ideological framework makes fatalist predictions that must be validated, by adapting facts if necessary.

_delirium• 9 years ago

That's the perception in the U.S., but I don't think I would really describe today's Sweden as "aggressively left-wing". Maybe... staidly center-left, or something along those lines. The Sweden of 2017 is not the Sweden of Olof Palme; it's no longer entirely dominated by the Social Democrats, and the Social Democrats themselves have moved much more to the center. It is fairly socially liberal, though, and still has a reasonable social safety net, so it can look left-wing if your baseline politics are debates over whether abortion should be banned and whether hospitals should be publicly funded.

(And the rest of Scandinavia even less so. I mean Denmark's government is a conservative minority government that depends for its working majority on the support of an anti-immigrant nativist party, so it's hardly some kind of leftists running things there.)

rayiner• 9 years ago

It's been a long time since U.S. media has really attacked the Scandinavian countries because of their leftism or their welfare state. If anything, the attacks on Sweden implicitly assume the success of their model: the basic narrative is that Sweden has a good thing going but is throwing it away by accepting tons of refugees.

jahaja5• 9 years ago

Malicious propaganda will plant seeds of negative associations no matter how blatantly false and/or out-of-proportion the original statement is. This will probably make it harder to use Sweden and the Scandinavian countries as a good example with regards to basically everything - not just immigration.

An example of this is the immigration related clarification article from the Swedish government that even made it to HN. That shouldn't even be needed for such disproportionate bs. But it just works.

booleanbetrayal• 9 years ago

Because Trump amplified a poorly executed anti-refugee propaganda piece on Fox News and now they have to double down. You know ... to look credible.

LyndsySimon• 9 years ago

I don't think Sweden is on the radar screen of most Americans, regardless of political perspective. The only popular reference to it that I can recall is when Trump mad a snide remark about unrest in Sweden, the left-wing press mocking him for doing so, then the right-wing press doing the happy dance when there were some riots there that supported (or could be spun to support) their narrative.

I'm fairly politically engaged, and my largely uninformed opinion of Sweden - and all of Scandinavia, honestly - is that it's a largely homogenous society with a relatively long history of stable governance. There don't seem to be a lot of analogues to American society there, so I haven't cared to learn more about it.

dep_b2• 9 years ago

It's a bit weird that a country safer than the US now gets portrayed as a sodom and gomorra of rape and violence. The striking difference between Swedes and immigrants in terms of violent crimes (four times as much, five times for rape) is declared for a large part by the fact that Swedes on average are nice and peaceful people.

Fox and Trump blowing everything out of proportion shouldn't stop a healthy debate about what the benefits of the current wave of immigration for Sweden and the Swedes really are.

willvarfar3• 9 years ago

Immigrants don't commit crimes. Poor people commit crimes. It happens that the poorest people in Sweden right now are immigrants.

The rape stats are also way different from how they are portrayed in the media. In Sweden, if you are in an abusive relationship, every instance of abuse is counted individually, and as Assange learned, the law is very strict. As other countries tend to do far worse at reporting and prosecuting abuse, and as other countries tend to count all occurrences of abuse together as one crime, the numbers are not directly comparable to other countries.

Source: am living in Sweden in a "hotspot", am an immigrant but am rich and white. I saw nazis demonstrating in the local town center yesterday, which shocked me. Sweden is a very safe nice country, and the alt-Right in Sweden (SD being big where I am) and abroad are misrepresenting it.

nazgob• 9 years ago

I also have decent memories from Sweden, I've been living there for a few years. Apart from stolen bike (worldwide phenomenon) and housing scam (classic Uppsala) it was fine. But rising power of SD in Sweden is very worrying. On the one hand you have some immigrants that are not always on-board with advances that Swedish society did and on the other you have nazis. Not sure about SD support now but it was over 10% last time I checked and much more in the north.

baobrain• 9 years ago

I just want to point out that socioeconomic status is generally not an established correlate of crime, despite many thinking it is, though it's possible that the disparity may cause people to commit crime. It's probably not very accurate to attribute crime to immigrants being poor.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in criminology and also not very familiar with sweden's situation

reitanqild3• 9 years ago

Immigrants don't commit crimes. Poor people commit crimes. It happens that the poorest people in Sweden right now are immigrants.

Person living in Norway here:

No, being an immigrant doesn't make you a criminal.

However, statistically speaking certain crimes are very much overrepresented with certain cultures.

I'm not saying Europeans are perfect: a lot of bad stuff existed when I was young.

But there where certain things that just didn't exist.

It is scary to see the coming of a culture were rape is ok, honour killings are ok (as told by immigrants who speak up) etc etc.

indlebe• 9 years ago

I think it's a misconception that the alt-right and Neo-nazis are the only ones applying scrutiny to the immigration policies of Sweden and Europe as a whole. A large portion of these concerns are coming from the existing poor communities that are seeing an influx of refugees into their neighbourhoods.

Immigrants don't commit crimes. Poor people commit crimes. I would rephrase this as "high crime rates are associated with low-income demographics, which those immigrating to Europe as part of the refugee crisis fall into". Also, one could safely argue that the poorer the community, the higher the crime.

"Low-income" neighbourhoods in Sweden have changed, they've become much poorer as a result of the refugee crisis, therefore crime has risen in areas that used to be "safe". Therefore those who used to live in those areas have experienced a major change in their surroundings and find themselves in less safe environments. Again, the world's poor are the ones bearing the weight of this change.

Full disclosure: My source is anecdotal, from friends that have families in the poorer neighbourhoods in Malmo who are struggling to relocate to safer areas.

kpil3• 9 years ago

"Immigrants don't commit crimes"... Well, if you import a lot of very poor and unskilled people, the result will be more crime.

Actually, I think it's more complicated that that. I can't find the data but I remember a report that stated that Somali and Iraqi immigrants had 5 time higher conviction rate, and that more than 25% had been convicted for a crime, compared to ~5% of swedes.

I also remembered that immigrants from Sri Lanka -that have been a conflict zone for a very long time - had more or less half the conviction rate than Swedes, which is an interesting fact.

[Swedish article about statistics in Norway, with very similar demographics and culture, except way lower immigration: https://www.svd.se/brottslighet-bland-invandrare-borde-oroa-...]

cancancan• 9 years ago

Perhaps you should move to northern Stockholm suburbs like Rinkeby and Husby where violent riots have become somewhat of a norm. Just a few days ago there was a five hour riot that included torching cars, throwing rocks at the police, looting shops and businesses, beating up journalists. The reason for riot? Police arrested a suspect on a drug charge. Same thing happened last August in the same part of Stockholm. Violent riots and 47 torched cars. Same suburb where more than 100 cars where torched during riots in May 2013.

Was there a single riot like that in Sweden that did not involve immigrants? How about honor killings?

Those are completely new categories of violence for Sweden.

I saw nazis demonstrating in the local town center yesterday, which shocked me.

That's what you get when you bury your head in the sand and choose to ignore the reality.

dep_b2• 9 years ago

Chinese people enter countries poor and usually do better soon. Other groups stay poor. I'm sorry to say it but the staying poor part might also be caused by those people themselves, not some external factor they cannot control.

The rape stats are also way different from how they are portrayed in the media. In Sweden, if you are in an abusive relationship, every instance of abuse is counted individually, and as Assange learned, the law is very strict. As other countries tend to do far worse at reporting and prosecuting abuse, and as other countries tend to count all occurrences of abuse together as one crime, the numbers are not directly comparable to other countries.

Yet in Sweden they measure immigrants and Swedes in the same way and it's five times as much on average while some migrant groups singled out are doing better than native Swedes.

ptaipale• 9 years ago

Immigrants don't commit crimes. Poor people commit crimes.

As I already wrote in in some other thread, Swedish national economist Tino Sanandaji (himself of immigrant background) has shown this is not the case: there is actually a problem of immigration-related crime in Sweden, not just poverty-related.

Sweden has had and still has very small income inequality. But in country-wide statistics, crime has still gone down generally while situation has worsened in some urban areas where there are regular shootings and grenade attacks, things that were completely unknown a couple of decades ago. In a word, there's less killings within a group of local men who have an argument about booze and kill each other with a knife, and there are more killings where a gang member is ambushed and shot or killed by a grenade.

Yes, Sweden is still a very safe society, on average. Much safer than the United States is on average. What's remarkable is, however, that the development has reversed: Sweden is no longer becoming safer, but United States is. During the time period 1990-2015 when homicide rate per 100 000 pop in Sweden has gone from 1.3 to 1.1, the United States has gone from 9.4 to 4.5. My native Finland, traditionally the most violent of Nordic countries, has gone from 3.1 to 1.3, and Norway from 1.1 to 0.4. Denmark is at 0.8. Sweden will soon be the most violent of the Nordic countries.

So Sweden does have a problem, it's not improving like other Western countries.

The U.S. situation is, of course, a thing where also Donald Trump's narrative is wrong: the U.S. has become much safer over the past 15 years, not less safe. There is still some reason for concern in the U.S. though, because the crime is concentrated in a few cities (such as Chicago, the home city of former president, even if some other similar cities like Baltimore and St. Louis are even much worse.)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445237/sweden-crime-ra...

spiderfarmer3• 9 years ago

Things like this makes me worried about the future of the USA. How can a country succeed in the future if they reject reality? I know Fox News is not representative of all US media, but even the president admits that his worldview is based on whatever the news editor cooks up that day.

JustSomeNobody4• 9 years ago

I know Fox News is not representative of all US media...

No? I mean, maybe they're the most egregious, but I'll bet each and every media outlet bends things from time to time to fit a narrative.

Look at the live reporting that happened during the election. There was a lot of sputtering going on when THAT didn't fit their narrative.

splitrocket• 9 years ago

Evidence?

This is pretty clear case of a total failure to check the credentials of an "expert".

Additionally, Fox has a history of similar failures. No other major news network comes even close.

http://mashable.com/2015/10/16/fbi-arrests-fox-news-analyst/...

jjawssd2• 9 years ago

To understand what is happening ("How can a country succeed in the future if they reject reality?") you need to understand the concept of ideological subversion and the role played by the demoralization of a people.

Highly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qkf3bajd4

themihai• 9 years ago

All this makes me think a war is being cooked up though the stance on Europe doesn't make any sense to me. I thought China is the "issue" now not EU which still pays the price of the latest NATO war(s).

Bombthecat• 9 years ago

Yup, my guess it will be 6-7 years until war.

ptype5• 9 years ago

Ironically coming from DN, who under current editor Wolodarski has lost a huge amount of credibility among Swedish intellectuals. What used to be the premier journalistic publication of Sweden now runs a highly biased agenda, and has been involved in a number of journalistic scandals (cover ups etc).

jahaja5• 9 years ago

What scandals are you referring to?

ptype5• 9 years ago

I was on my phone earlier.

DN under Wolodarski has received a lot of criticism, which I suspect you are actually aware of. Please find a few examples below.

Aftonbladet: Journalists question the truthfulness of a series of DN's articles: http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article23755207.ab

Alice Teodorescu of GP has criticised DN and their journalistic methods on numerous occasions, e.g. "DN on collision course with reality": http://www.gp.se/ledare/teodorescu-dn-p%C3%A5-kollisionskurs... Also worth seeing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRivdUJO1ls

National economist Tino Sanandaji often uncovers errors in DN's journalism, e.g. this example of DN using incorrect statistics: http://tino.us/2014/06/p1-medier-granskar-dn-dn-star-bakom-h...

The DN cover up scandal (their rebuttal): http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/fragor-och-svar-om-dns-hant...

willvarfar3• 9 years ago

Up vote from me, because the image of DN has definitely changed. Used to be quality, now tabloid. That is the feeling I get from reading it off and on until the slide downhill.

Steer• 9 years ago

I find it interesting and telling that you don't present any sources for your argument. Which paper in Sweden does the "Swedish intellectuals" read now? I think it is still DN, but would be interested to hear your sourced argument why this isn't true.

ptype5• 9 years ago

If you read my post again, you will see that I did not actually say that the Swedish intellectuals (for the lack of a better term) are not reading DN, just that DN has lost a lost of credibility. It is my observation that this is becoming more and more of a wide spread view, based on discussions with friends and colleagues. You are right - I'm busted! - I have not conducted a market study of this. But then again, do you have any sources why they still read DN as you claim?

spiderfarmer3• 9 years ago

When an immigrant politician in The Netherlands made up a "fact" about Dutch doctors pulling the plug on immigrants patients sooner because of racism / a language barrier, he was asked by all journalists why he would use an unsubstantiated rumor in his campaign and how he thought that using something like that was ethical. When I saw that I was proud to be a citizen of this country, even though we have our own Trump wannabe with even tinier hands: Geert Wilders.

byrnedo3• 9 years ago

Murders / 100k people in Sweden: 4. Chicago has 27.

rodionos4• 9 years ago

It's actually less than that for Sweden, namely 3.1 for the year of 2015: https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/013dc374/2. Top right chart.

danielvf2• 9 years ago

Comparing Sweden to Chicago seems a bit of a stretch. A number more directly comparable would be the US Non-Black homicide rate, which was 2.54 per 100,000 in 2015.

I think that's lower than the Sweden figure in the sibling comment.

[Edit: I had said that this rate was also lower than England. I was wrong on that one. ]

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

AdeptusAquinas2• 9 years ago

The actual rate for Sweden and the UK is 0.9, each. So even the 'non-black' rate in the US is higher than both, put together.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...

byrnedo3• 9 years ago

Well, considering the Malmo rate is 3.4, it's still quite a factor reduced from that. Malmo might be considered the most 'dangerous' city in Sweden (please correct me if anyone disagrees? I guess Stockholm is probably statistically a better choice due to the sheer size difference).

paulddraper2• 9 years ago

Wow, way to cherry pick!

The U.S. homicide rate is 4.5.

byrnedo3• 9 years ago

If you mean that by choosing one city in the US vrs the whole country's rate then you're right.

But my point was that Sweden is incomparable to the USA (Sweden has a population approaching 10 million). You'd find it very hard to find a city in the Nordics approaching that of some in the US.

rodionos4• 9 years ago

Let's look at raw statistics for a second. The data comes from the Swedish crime agency bra.se: https://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statist...

1) Total numbers of offenses. Rape statistics chart is displayed below:

https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/013dc374/1/#fullscreen

2) Population pro-rated:

https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/013dc374/3/#fullscreen

What happened in 2002-2004? As was discussed in media, the Swedish authorities have encouraged reporting of sex offenses and changed the methodology of how rape crime is reported and counted.

One of the unintended side effects is that it's difficult to compare the time series, and this is one of the challenges that all statistical agencies are facing. If you change the definition, be prepared for misunderstanding and misreporting - both intentional and not.

By the way, the country where Julian Assange is alleged of a sex assault is ... Sweden.

rodionos4• 9 years ago

By the way, here are two rape definitions used by the FBI: 'legacy' and 'revised': https://www.ucrdatatool.gov/offenses.cfm

Made a difference to Brock Turner's case.

Melchizedek• 9 years ago

Nevertheless, what he said was completely correct.

"National security advisor" in an American context is apparently not just someone who gives advise on national security, but a specific high ranking post. Nils Bildt however is an independent analyst from Sweden who is based in the US. If the Swedish government considers him an "expert" or not seems irrelevant.

While the presentation of who he is was misleading, it doesn't seem like a huge conspiracy and could simply be a mistake. The reaction to it looks like a case of killing the messenger when you don't like the message.

znfi• 9 years ago

In what way is the term "defense and national security advisor" used in the US? Does this necessitate being an advisor to the military or the ministry for foreign affairs?

Because this article to me, as a swede, seems to contain very little substance, and given that DN for no apparent reasons lists this guys whole criminal records makes you wonder what the purpose really is here. For comparison I'm not aware of ever having seen this detailed of a listing of someone's criminal record. There is no mention of any inaccuracies in what this person has said, only that the title chosen by Fox News is incorrect.

It's also somewhat ironic that they quote Nils Bildt as complaining of the way media behave, when this whole article, and publication of his criminal record in particular, in many ways seems like a way to "punish" him for criticizing the politically correct image championed by the media over here.

Finally, it might be worth pointing out that the surname Bildt is in Sweden strongly associated with the politician Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and former minister for foreign affairs.

xorcist• 9 years ago

The family name Bildt is an old noble one with registered heraldry and absolutely not a surname you can take in Sweden. It's also the surname of the prime minister at the time Nils emigrated. Perhaps that's a bit of background to who puts on such a charade.

xname2• 9 years ago

So many comments here imply that there is no immigration problem whatsoever in Sweden. It's all Trump/right-win made-up. But it is not true:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/world/europe/sweden-natio...

Sweden, Nation of Open Arms, Debates Implications of Immigration

"In 2014, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats gained 12.9 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections to become the country’s third-largest party, up from only 2.9 percent eight years earlier."

Fake Sweden expert on Fox News – no connection to Swedish security

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