Product Code Database
Daniel Friberg (born 1978) is a Swedish businessman, publisher, and writer, and a leading figure of the Swedish neo-fascist movement and global alt-right movements. He is the CEO and co-founder (in 2010) of Arktos Media. He co-founded the AltRight Corporation with American white supremacist Richard Spencer in 2017 but severed ties in May 2018. He is a former CEO of the mining company Wiking Mineral.
At the head of an international far-right media, literature, and music empire, Friberg is influenced in particular by the "Metapolitics" strategy of the French Nouvelle Droite ("New Right"), defined by Guillaume Faye as the "social diffusion of ideas and cultural values for the sake of provoking profound, long-term, political transformation." Scholar Benjamin R. Teitelbaum has described Arktos Media as the "uncontested global leader in the publication of English-language Nouvelle Droite literature."
In 1997, aged 19, he founded the agency Alternative Media and the newspaper Framtid (Future) in order to propagate his nationalist ideas in the Swedish society at large. Friberg spent his entire savings to print 21,000 copies and sent them to every graduating high school student in Stockholm and Gothenburg. In 1998, he joined the editorial staff of Folktribunen, the main outlet of the Swedish Resistance Movement, today the largest militant Nazism organization in Scandinavia. He eventually left the movement after it was radicalized, and started to distance himself from the white supremacist culture.
From 2004, Friberg became inspired by the Nouvelle Droite (French New Right) literature, especially the works of Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, "It was this translation of the Nouvelle Droite manifesto that I read ... online, written in English. ... Thought it was totally brilliant, and wondered why these ideas weren't better known." The same year, he cofounded the Nordic League ( Nordiska förbundet), an organization advocating an ostensibly metapolitical stance that echoed the ideas of the Nouvelle Droite.
Along with other leaders of the Nordic League, he co-established in July 2006 the Swedish-language blog portal Motpol and, the same year, the far-right online collaborative encyclopedia Metapedia, portrayed as an effort to advance the "Culture war". He was also closely involved in the creation of the messaging board Nordisk.ru, which attracted some 22,000 Scandinavian nationalists and other far-right users, including the Norwegian far-right mass killer Anders Breivik.
In 2009, Friberg became the sole owner of the Nordic League and decided to cease the activities of the organization while allowing Metapedia and Motpol to continue to operate. In October, he planned with a Danish politician and two Danish collaborators the creation of the publishing house Arktos Media, officially established the following year in 2010. Friberg became the CEO of the company, and American John B. Morgan its chief editor. Arktos Media has translated to English and published various far-right authors such as Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Aleksandr Dugin, and Paul Gottfried. During the 2010s, it had grown as the largest retailer of radical Right literature in the world according to scholar Benjamin R. Teitelbaum. American white supremacist Richard Spencer has also credited Arktos with having increased access to European New Right and Identitarian literature among American white nationalists.
In early 2015, Friberg co-founded the online media outlet RightOn.net, and he published his first book, The Real Right Returns ( Högern kommer tillbaka), where he contended that it was the right time for nationalists to enter the public sphere without fear of massive political repression.
In January 2017, he partnered with Spencer and the Swedish white nationalist website Red Ice to establish the Alt-Right Corporation and the website AltRight.com, seen as a major effort to unite European and U.S. white identity figures. Friberg was a scheduled speaker at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Virginia, which broke out in violence and lead to the deaths of one counter-protester and two law enforcement officers. Friberg blamed the violence on antifa counter-protesters and police.
He has spent occasional time in prison for weapons and other offenses between 1995 and 2010.
Notes
Bibliography
|
|
