Scandinavia Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

In a fearless and deeply personal interview with RAIR Foundation USA, Norwegian journalist Rebecca Mistereggen exposes how mass Islamic immigration, weaponized hate speech laws, and enforced multiculturalism have turned Europe into a censored, unsafe, and unrecognizable continent – where truth-tellers are silenced, women are stripped of freedom, and national identity is collapsing.

Mass immigration. Exploding crime. Government-enforced silence. Rebecca Mistereggen knows what’s destroying Europe, and she’s naming it. In her exclusive interview with RAIR Foundation, the Norwegian journalist exposed the raw reality of life under Europe’s new regime: fear, censorship, and a continent slipping into chaos. As a leading voice at Norway’s Document Media, Mistereggen is doing what the legacy press won’t: telling the truth while it still can be told.

“Islamic immigration began long before 2015,” she explained. “It started in the 1960s. But the damage accelerated with mass migration—first a demographic shift, then a cultural collapse.”

Mistereggen was clear: what’s happening in Norway and across Europe is not mere cultural transformation. It is civilizational dismantling. She described a Norway that no longer resembles the country she grew up in—a nation where women are afraid to walk freely, crime surges are covered up, and even the police remain silent for fear of offending migrants.

“There were attack rapes in Oslo happening every summer. I felt stripped of my freedom as a teenage girl. I had to constantly look over my shoulder just to go outside.”

She pointed to chilling statistics. “Somali men in Oslo are 15 times more violent than ethnic Norwegians,” she revealed, citing an official report. Other high-crime migrant groups include those from Ethiopia, Iraq, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, and Russia. Yet the state remains willfully blind.

“We have open borders with Sweden, where you can now hire a 12-year-old as a mercenary. That’s how bad it’s gotten.”

But even worse than the violence is the silencing.

“We don’t have free speech anymore. Norway has a ‘racism law’—Paragraph 185—which means minorities can’t be prosecuted for hate speech, but the majority can.” She recalled calling the police after someone graffitied a church with “Kill the Whites.” The response? “They told me it wasn’t hate speech. Just vandalism. Imagine if I wrote ‘Kill all the Muslims’ on a mosque. Do you think that would be vandalism?”

Rebecca described the two-pronged assault on free society: a state-sponsored regime of “positive discrimination” that punishes native citizens while coddling migrants, and a cultural witch-hunt against dissenters who are socially destroyed for telling the truth.

“If you post support for Trump, criticize COVID policies, or question climate change, you can be de-banked, de-platformed, or fired. You can be ostracized by your family. People are terrified.”

She shared a disturbing case: an elderly man in a Norwegian town asked a migrant gang to stop intimidating shoppers. He was knocked unconscious. “The police ignored the case until media pressure forced an investigation. Then, a peaceful parade against violence was cancelled after threats. The next day, someone spray-painted ‘Kill the Whites’ on the church. Still no hate crime investigation.”

Mistereggen emphasized how Quran-burning protests—an act of free expression—are now criminalized in parts of Europe.

“In Sweden, Salwan Momika was murdered for burning a Quran. His friend was fined the next day for the same act. The case went cold almost immediately, despite the fatwa against Momika. Sweden now has a de facto blasphemy law.”

She emphasized how Islamic immigration and EU centralization have destroyed Europe’s uniqueness.

“Europe used to be the most diverse continent on Earth. You went to Paris, you felt French culture. Now it’s just like Oslo. The continent has become one uniform gray zone.”

Even worse, she warned, is the coordinated effort to glorify Islam while erasing Christianity.

“Our state church reads from the Quran on Good Friday. Schools are now required to teach how beautiful Islam is. Meanwhile, Christianity is gone.”

And in Sweden? “There’s already a Sharia Party. Yes, you heard that right. They’ve even won elections in some areas.”

When asked how her work has affected her personally, Rebecca was candid.

“People have tried to ruin my life. But I’ve always spoken my mind. I’ve had supportive friends and family. Islam hasn’t crushed me yet. COVID was harder – I had to fight everyone over that.”

But she made her stance crystal clear: “I’d rather die than let my country become Islamic. It’s not going to happen. Europe has kicked Islam out twice before. There will be a third time.”

Her message to Americans was blunt: “Don’t think this can’t happen to you. It’s already begun. Learn from Europe’s mistakes – before it’s too late.”

RAIR Foundation thanks Rebecca Mistereggen for her courageous work and truth-telling, and looks forward to future collaborations as the fight for freedom continues.

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As I have explained in previous columns for CapX, there are a number of myths surrounding the Nordic countries that don’t stand up to scrutiny. These include the notion that long life span in Nordic nations arose as the public sector expanded, the idea that generous public programs alone explain low levels of Nordic poverty and the myth that Nordic countries are bumblebees that defy gravity by not being adversely affected by high taxes.

But surely the Nordic countries do show one leftist theory to be correct: that social democrat policies can be popular with the electorate.

Although the Social Democrats have recently lost much of their previous support, they did manage to dominate Nordic policies for long. Sweden was sometimes referred to as a one-party state, since the Social Democrats ruled it almost consecutively from 1932 till 2006 (interrupted by two short spells of centre-right rule during 1976-1982 and 1991-1994).

It is sometimes puzzling to the outsider why the Nordic public repeatedly have elected tax-raising governments to power. The obvious answer is ideological support for welfare state policies.

However, there is also another reason worth examining in greater detail: the general public has not been fully aware of the price tag, in terms of higher taxes, attached to expanding public sectors. Politicians have created a fiscal illusion which has resulted in higher levels of taxation that the population would otherwise have accepted as feasible had taxes been levied in a transparent way.

Before policies radicalised in the late 1960s, the tax levels in Nordic nations were around 30 percent of GDP – quite typical of other developed nations. At the time, the tax burdens were quite visible. Most taxation occurred through direct taxes, which showed up on employees’ payslips.

Over time, an increasing share of taxation has been raised through indirect taxes. The latter are less visible to those paying them, since they are either levied before the wage is formally given to the employee or are included in the listed price of goods.

Finland is worth considering as an example. The country’s tax level was 30 percent of GDP in 1965. Indirect taxes in the form of VAT and mandatory social security contributions amounted to a quarter of total taxation. In 2013, the total tax take had increased to 44 percent of GDP, half of which was hidden taxes.

As shown below, Finnish governments have funded the expansion of the public sector by raising the hidden, but not the visible, tax burden. Denmark has followed a route wherein both hidden and visible taxes have been hiked.

Hidden and visible taxes in Finland (percentage of GDP)

Source: OECD tax database and own calculations.

Hidden and visible taxes in Denmark (percentage of GDP)

In Norway and Sweden, visible taxes are today lower than in the 1960s, although the true taxation is considerably higher. As can be seen below, it is clear that governments in both countries have followed a strategy based on replacing visible tax income with hidden tax incomes.

Thus, whilst the average worker has paid progressively more to the government, the payslips of the same worker have misleadingly shown a reduction in taxation.

Hidden and visible taxes in Norway (percentage of GDP)

Hidden and visible taxes in Sweden (percentage of GDP)

In other words, except in Denmark, the rise in taxation has occurred fully through an increase in hidden taxation.

This is in line with the predictions of fiscal illusion made by Italian economist Amilcare Puviani in 1903. Puviani explained that politicians would have incentives to hide the cost of government by levying indirect rather than direct taxes, so that the public would under-estimate the cost of policies.

The illusion can thus be created that an expanding state benefits individuals and families and yet costs less than it actually does. Nobel laureate James Buchanan and other researchers have expanded on the idea that it is easier for politicians to raise hidden, indirect taxes rather than visible ones.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that those who believe in a higher tax rate in other parts of the world have followed a similar strategy as the Nordic nations. The American left-liberal think tank the Roosevelt Institute openly recommends “less-visible taxes that Americans are more likely to support.”

The Obamacare system launched in the US represents a form of indirect taxation – through an overly complex system – that is even more difficult to comprehend for the average taxpayer than in the Nordic systems.

I don’t doubt that less visible taxes in the US, the UK or other parts of the world would prove an easier route to raise the tax burden than visible taxes. This is indeed a lesson that the left can learn from the Nordics.

But the question remains if this is a good route to venture on. Shouldn’t politicians strive for systems where people are aware of how much they are paying for the government?

Nima Sanandaji

Dr. Nima Sanandaji is a research fellow at CPS, and the author of Scandinavian Unexceptionalism available from the Institute of Economic Affairs.

EDITORS NOTE: This article was originally published at CapX.

Tag Archive for: Scandinavia

Scandinavian Myths: High Taxes and Big Spending Are Popular by Nima Sanandaji