the radical Right relied on a particular assessment of postwar social and
political history in the West. Liberalism, according to French New Right
thinkers like Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, was so entrenched in
Western society that its values persisted regardless of whether ostensibly
liberal or antiliberal forces controlled government. After the fall of Fascism
and Nazism, values like liberty and equality were no longer thought of as
the ideology of a peculiar political cause. Instead, they were understood
as transcendent common sense: their power was hegemonic. And just as
Gramsci blamed culture for having made communist revolution an im-
possibility in 1930s Italy, so too did the New Right seek to counteract the
dominance of liberal values in the West through cultural campaigning—
through metapolitics— with the hope of forging a new consensus and po-
litical common denominator to work from.
There was little clarity from the New Right as to what counted as
“culture” in this scheme.5 The approach was embraced nonetheless by
activists throughout the early- twenty- first- century radical Right, from the
proto Alt Right blogger and producer Greg Johnson, to the semimilitant
Vigrid party in Norway, to the populist Sweden Democrats.6 Based on their
and others’ actions, the “culture” that is the target of metapolitics appears
broad, consisting in educational platforms and media as well as expressive
genres like film, literature, art, theater, and music.
The intended purpose of metapolitics, too, varies. Such campaigning
can seek either to infiltrate or replicate dominant cultural forms and
forums. It may, for example, strive to alter the curricula of public schools,
or create a parallel educational system saturated with radical values. While
the first approach attempts to shape thinking within a broader population,
the second aims to build a parallel population of zealots. Crucially, so-
ciety at large is not always the target arena for metapolitical campaigning,
as activists may also train their efforts on transforming the profile of a
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marginal group. In the case of the radical Right, the latter often concerns
efforts to reform antiliberal, anti- immigrant activism and movements.
While most activists have restricted their metapolitical campaigning
to one of these forums or objectives, one figure made it his business to
pursue them all.
Daniel Friberg
Daniel Friberg is perpetually late and impeccably dapper. He drinks and
smokes hard, but always keeps his cool, moving and talking slowly with
the deepest of voices. Since 2014 he has lived in Budapest, Hungary, and
spends most of his days roving between the city’s bars and cafés with
his business partners, dining almost always with hands shuffling between
a cell phone, laptop, beer, and cigarettes. And he is friendly, at least to-
ward me. He was a notorious brawler during his youth and was tried in
court for hate speech and, later, for threatening a former business asso-
ciate with a gun.7 That reputation may have insured his survival. A former
member of a militant National Socialist organization told me that he and
his associates once considered attacking Friberg, but refrained because
they regarded him as too dangerous a target.
His career— like that of most marginal political actors— has been con-
tentious, creating enemies out of potential allies, and vice versa, at every
turn. If one constant in Friberg’s story is interpersonal conflict, however,
so too is his leveraging of metapolitics to shape the activism of friend and
foe alike. He was born 1978 in the western Swedish city of Gothenburg to a
family he describes as relatively affluent, educated, and leftist. Encounters
with a more multiethnic population in middle school ( högstadiet) con-
vinced him to break away from that foundation, and at that young age
he entered the dominant anti- immigrant scene in Sweden: white- power
skinheadism. He shaved his head, donned combat boots and a bomber
jacket, and started attending concerts organized by local Gothenburg
white- power music promoters. The close- cropped cut would be short- lived
for Friberg. He recalls having quickly soured on the subculture, and came
to lament the fact that its stigmatizing boorishness and brutalism had
seized the nationalist cause. He recalls:
When I grew more politically conscious as a teenager, my first im-
pression was that mass immigration was harmful to Sweden. And
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my second impression was that the reaction toward mass immi-
gration was essentially worthless. And I saw it as my opportunity
to steer the movement in another direction, to steer all that energy
toward constructive ends. I wanted it to go in a more intellectual di-
rection, and away from everything I found problematic, everything
from skinhead subculture, to Third Reich nostalgia, to primitive
white power music, and so on.8
It is worth noting that Friberg nonetheless aligned ideologically with the
more radical members of that scene. He was what was Swedes referred
to as an “ethnonationalist”— a nationalist who fights for racial and ethnic
purity, as opposed to “cultural nationalists” who claim to fight only for cul-
tural homogeneity while disavowing interest in race. Friberg’s criticism
of other nationalists thus dealt with style, expression, and lifestyle rather
than agenda.
As part of his effort to transform anti- immigrant activism in his
home society, Friberg would use metapolitical tactics before he had
a name for them. His first political activism came in middle school
when he handed out leaflets for the nationalist Sweden Democrats
(Sverigedemokraterna) party. Shortly thereafter— and armed with a
new laser printer— he began making his own anti- immigrant prop-
aganda to post around his school. But his efforts accelerated when
he founded Alternative Media in 1997, a project conceived both to
propagate to the populace at large and to provide nationalists in
Sweden with literature other than the scene’s mainstays of white-
power music fanzines. He began by producing the newspaper Framtid
( Future), spending his entire savings as a nineteen- year- old to print
21,000 copies, and sent them to all graduating high- school students
in Stockholm in Gothenburg.9 The initiative provided few imme-
diate results, but it profiled Friberg within nationalist circles as a
bold media campaigner. The following year he joined the editorial
staff of the newspaper Folktribunen ( People’s Tribune), which served as
the main media outlet for the newly established Swedish Resistance
Movement (Svenska motståndsrörelsen, today the largest militant
National Socialist organization in the Nordic countries). He and his
closest team of collaborators quickly exited the Resistance Movement
as it was radicalizing, however, and initiated a project more expressly
in line with his orig
inal reformist goals.
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The Nordic League
In 2001 Friberg cofounded Nordiska förlaget (Nordic Press) with the
twin aims of providing nationalists new “education” and “inspiration.”
According to their debut website, translating— initially into Swedish—
and marketing books would fulfill the first goal, while music distri-
bution served the second.10 Friberg would make a vital contribution
to the organization’s musical offerings. His agency Alternative Media
initiated the three-
CD, acoustic singer/
songwriter project Svensk
ungdom (Swedish Youth). The project aspired to break with trends in-
side of white nationalist music making, which since the 1980s had been
consumed by skinhead punk and metal. In contrast with that status
quo, it featured subdued ballads and reigned- in language. Svensk
ungdom passed from Alternative Media to Nordiska förlaget, and the
first release in the series, Frihetssånger ( Freedom Songs), remains one
of the most popular nationalist albums in the Nordic countries today.
But Nordiska förlaget’s starkest contrast with the nationalist status
quo centered on book production. By sponsoring new texts, making
translations, or marketing existing offerings, Nordiska förlaget became
the first major source for literature in the anti- immigrant, white na-
tionalist scene. Thanks to them, nationalist concerts and festivals at the
turn of the twenty- first century began to feature, not only T- shirts and
music recordings but now books— most of them with a semiacademic
character.
Friberg was injecting— if nothing else— an aesthetic for intellectu-
alism into anti- immigrant activism that would mature as the years went
by. Meanwhile, he would continue to produce smaller newspapers and
magazines with the goal of allowing radical rightists to disconnect from
the mainstream media. His 2003 tabloid Folkets nyheter ( People’s News),
for example, promoted itself with the statement: “By subscribing to Folkets
nyheter, you will no longer need to read the established papers, no longer
need to support them financially, no longer need to read between the lines
to keep yourself updated as to what is happening around the world.”11
It sounded a lot like a campaign of metapolitics trained on cultivating
a parallel society. But Friberg had been operating on instinct up until this
point, following his own impressions of how one ought to build a stronger
opposition to liberalism. That all changed the following year when he first
came into contact with the writings of French New Right intellectuals. He
recalls:
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Daniel Friberg and Metapolitics in Action
265
df:It was this translation of the Nouvelle Droite [New Right] manifesto that
I read. It was online, written in English. And there I had this “aha”
experience. Thought it was totally brilliant, and wondered why these
ideas weren’t better known.
bt:What was so good about them?
df:It was the logical construction, the intellectual caliber— it was on a to-
tally different level that I was used to reading, texts from the right, that
is. It was the best I had ever read in the radical Right milieu. . . . It was
radical, but appropriately so. It dismissed egalitarianism, for example.
That is a core feature of today’s left- wing liberal society— it is that it
was so encompassing and well- argued.12
The French New Right’s call for an ostensibly nonchauvinistic ethnic sep-
aratism appealed to Friberg as a morally defensible and thereby politically
formidable alternative to white- power jingoism. Likewise, the school’s
methodological imperative to metapolitics motivated him to expand his
own campaign— giving it a name and intellectual cachet to defend the ap-
proach from naysayers.
Changes to Friberg’s activism came in swift succession. That same
year, in 2004, his team of partners established Nordiska förbundet (the
Nordic League)— an umbrella entity that would contain the Press— in a
declaration of their ambition to create a more comprehensive output. It
also sought to profile itself as more self- consciously metapolitical, writing
on their debut website:
Both parliamentarian efforts and the physical struggle must be
seen as smaller parts or complements to a much broader ethnic and
political pursuit. We need a wide- ranging, and long- term approach,
a long- term Nordic survival strategy. We need a strategy that moves
forward and reinforces our positions in many different areas, that
deals constructively with the here and now, but that, at the same
time, has its sights on the horizon— that has its sights set on our
own Nordic, vital, and viable society. . . . And the first and vital step
in every survival strategy is education, to grow and spread knowl-
edge, to grow and spread inspiration.13
Rejecting democracy and militancy, Nordiska förbundet embraced a
strategy advancing their cause in “many different areas,” which is to say,
to message in multiple arenas of social behavior and communication. The
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goal was to forge an intellectual foundation for political mobilization. In
metapolitical practice, this would come to mean both refining the behavior
and thinking of current activists, as well as evangelizing to new audiences
previously turned off by nationalism’s crude forms.
If a turn toward the French New Right was apparent in Nordiska
förbundet’s branding, so too was it registering in their merchandise.
Friberg and Nordiska förbundet cofounder Lennart Berg were pushing to
include more and more texts from the French intellectual school and as-
sociated radical Traditionalists like Julius Evola and René Guénon in their
production while also striving to rid themselves more thoroughly of white-
power skinheadism. They met resistance, both from the wider population
of nationalists in Sweden at the time, and from old- guard members of
Nordiska förbundet itself (first and foremost cofounder and white- power
music connoisseur Peter Melander). Friberg recalls being dismissive of
such complaints and regards them today as by- products of nationalism’s
depravity at the time:
Their reactions were like, “What is this stuff that I can’t really un-
derstand? It must be harmful in some way, because it makes us feel
inadequate since we don’t understand it, so this must be resisted.
It is some kind of ideological deviance!” They saw it as a threat.
Because it was more intellectual, or because it was— in their eyes—
more liberal or because it was a departure from what they saw as
a more radical nationalism. But that isn’t true. It is instead an idea
that is being expressed in a way that attracts groups other than those
who existed in the Swedish nationalist milieu at the time. And of
course these old groups experienced thi
s as a threat since they were
not the main target of these new texts, and they weren’t capable of
understanding it, really.14
Openness to French New Right and Traditionalist thought became, for
Friberg, a sort of litmus test, a measure by which foot soldiers of a stale and
dying radical Right were separated from the vanguards of his new ideal.
Friberg gradually emerged as the foremost figurehead of Nordiska
förbundet during the following years as other leaders quit, were sidelined,
or were chased out. In parallel, Nordiska förbundet slowly centered it-
self on French New Right and Traditionalist ideology— often under the
heading “identitarianism”— and amassed a greater and greater number
of affiliated projects that would outlive Nordiska förbundet itself. In
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Daniel Friberg and Metapolitics in Action
267
July 2006, leaders established the Swedish- language blog portal Motpol,
featuring writers who were often ultraconservatives steeped in identitarian
thinking, but who had little background in white- power skinheadism. That
same year, Nordiska förbundet created the Wikipedia- styled online ency-
clopedia Metapedia. In an interview in Folkets nyheter, Friberg (writing
under the pen name Martin Brandt) described the motivation behind the
project, framing the initiative as part of an effort to advance a “cultural
war” ( kulturkamp):
A few friends and I were discussing how important it is for the na-
tionalist culture war to be able to present our own interpretations
of concepts, phenomena, and historic events for a broader public. It
is especially important these days, since many concepts have been
distorted and lost their original meaning, which you can see as an
outcome of our political opponents’ successful culture contesta-
tion. . . . Just look at how the Frankfurt School and their ideological
heirs have succeeded in stigmatizing what were once completely
natural values, by introducing concepts like . . . “xenophobia,” “ho-
mophobia,” and so on.15
The expression “cultural war” is here a substitute for the term
“metapolitics.” Metapedia would strive to replicate the educational func-
tion of Wikipedia, allowing those on the radical Right to craft their own
resources for interpreting concepts and phenomena. It would also have
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 44