COMMENT. This was undeniably unusually stupid. In an interview with DN happened the Social Democrats’ party leader, Magdalena Andersson, suspect a designated independent opinion leader.
It was Sweden’s own YouTube star, Henrik Jönsson, who was suddenly thrown into a conversation about misinformation. “Who is funding him,” asked the party leader. She just raised the issue.
Well… the sale of the digital service “hungrig.se”, reasonably. His talk show, whose final episode reached a not-so-extremely threatening 30,000 streams, was reasonably funded by the business think tank EPHI, which co-produced it.
Having a youtube studio doesn’t cost much. The passion that drives him? Its free.
Underneath all the criticism in clumsiness
The play from Andersson is, of course, under all criticism in its clumsiness. There is as much as you want to say about Henrik Jönsson anyway.
Like most of the business right, he has no problem with seeing the world burn, only social democracy burns with it.
Like most people on the internet who call themselves libertarians, he is somewhere in the exciting borderland between personal development fluke, tax scandal, a dose of “it’s all the immigrants’ fault” and rigidly punitive authoritarian state.
All delivered with a smile.
In this way, apart from the smile, which in the government has been replaced with an increasingly hysterical look, he personifies Tidöstyret quite well. We can of course discuss that, but perhaps not in the same breath as loosely cooked conspiratorial thoughts about secret financiers.
Henrik Jönsson’s follies are very much his own. When speculation like this comes from a candidate for prime minister, it is therefore of course startling. It needs to be pointed out.
It takes a lot of evidence before politicians can start to suspect free opinion formation.
The same question about Joakim von Anka
Asking who finances Henrik Jönsson is, in the name of honesty, a bit like raising the same question about Joakim von Anka. He has money.
If nothing else, you can read Jönsson’s own, rather short, autobiography. It also clearly states who created him.
Henrik Jönsson has been financed by the social democratic welfare society he hates almost fanatically.
It has given him every opportunity to get an education, hang out at the theologian in Lund for a while, hang out at Möllan’s ölsjapp in Malmö, become rich in data, see the world and finally reach his life goal of starting his own YouTube channel where he presents his opinions as facts and worshiped by a few thousand idiots.
You can of course call what he does disinformation, but mostly he is just the Swedish dream of 2024.
