The Oslo Incident

6,433 words

Editor’s note: This is a heavily edited transcript of my interview for Red Ice on November 7, 2019. We wish to thank Lana Lokteff for the interview and Hyacinth Bouquet for the transcript.

Lana Lokteff: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, because there’s no in-between! Joining me is Greg Johnson, of Counter-Currents. He was detained, strip-searched, and deported from Norway. Why? For his thoughts! 

Welcome thought criminal, political prisoner, and friend, Greg Johnson. How are you? 

Greg Johnson: I’m fine. Thank you so much. This is the first interview I’ve given after my incarceration in Oslo this past weekend. I’m glad it’s you. I am not giving any interviews to mainstream media people, because every one of them that has contacted me is from a network or platform that has used the slur “white supremacist” to describe me. If they can’t respect my designated nouns, then I’m not going to give them any fresh quotes to decorate their boilerplate and help them support their narratives. So screw them! You’re the first.

LL: Awesome! I love it.

GJ: We have our own media now. 

LL: Yes, we do. Of course! I hate when people talk to the lame-stream. So, let’s just back up a little bit. You went to beautiful Norway to give a talk at the Scandza Forum on “The Very Idea of White Privilege.” Instead, you were arrested. I guess we can say detained, and then deported from Norway. 

So, let’s start from the beginning; and tell us the story. 

GJ: I came to Oslo. This was my second time in Norway. The first time I was there was in early July of 2017, for the first Scandza Forum conference in Norway. It was the first event of its kind in Norway, and our friends in Norway wanted another conference. They wanted me to come back. So Fróði Midjord, who runs Scandza Forum, organized this event.

The theme of the conference was human biodiversity. With the exception of Fróði, who is the MC of the whole thing, all the speakers had Ph.D.s. There was me; there was Edward Dutton, who edits Mankind Quarterly; there were Kevin MacDonald and Helmuth Nyborg, both of whom are emeritus professors of psychology. 

I was going to talk specifically about the idea of “white privilege.” There are biological differences between the races and sexes that lead to different outcomes in society — even if everything is “fair.” Even if the same rules apply to everyone, biological diversity creates different outcomes. When that happens, according to the PC mentality, that is a sign that something is wrong with society that has to be fixed. People are thinking wrong thoughts; institutions are wrong; unfairness is afoot. 

Even though all kinds of explicit forms of unfairness have been removed, we still find different outcomes. So they have increasingly “occult” explanations of different outcomes. The notion of “white privilege” is basically an odorless, colorless gas that pervades white societies and somehow keeps certain minority groups poor and in trouble with the law — more than average white people.

I argue that we can explain these different outcomes in terms of immutable biological differences. But I also argue that there is a legitimate sense to “white privilege.” Because if groups really are different, then it stands to reason that groups will construct societies that reflect their natures. That means that other groups, if they try to enter these societies and make them multicultural, are going to find that they are not good fits. They’re going to feel alienated, and they’re going to think that the white people in these societies have all kinds of advantages.

And they do! Because the societies white people create are tailored to be comfortable to them, and that is a legitimate sense of “white privilege.” But it’s ultimately based on biology, and it’s nothing that we have anything to apologize for. 

I was amazed, I was appalled, and I was very amused to find out that people in the Norwegian government, without knowing the topic or even the title of my talk, had become convinced that if I were allowed to speak, this would foment Right-wing terrorism in Norway. So I had to be arrested and expelled from the country.

I arrived at about 10:00 in the morning at the Scandza event facility. I was hanging out with friends. I met some new people. I was having a nice time. Not an hour went by before I was told by Fróði, “The police are here. They’re coming to arrest you!” I thought, “Uh-oh!” 

It wasn’t entirely a surprise, because two days before, on Halloween, the day I arrived in Norway, we learned that Filter News, a Hope Not Hate/Antifa-type blog, had run a piece on me, which I had to Google Translate out of Norwegian. It claimed that I was an Anders Behring Breivik supporter, that I had claimed that his attacks were justified. It’s all nonsense. 

LL: It’s all lies. Were there any sources in it? Of course not, because they can’t prove any of that. 

GJ: Well, there were sources that they quoted out of context. When they said that I said that Breivik’s crimes were “necessary,” I was talking about Breivik’s rationale for why his crimes were necessary. They were ascribing his views to me. Anybody who read what I wrote on Breivik, honestly and intelligently, could not have concluded that. It was just a lie. It was just an attempt to smear me. 

Later that day, another article appeared, created by the same Norwegian, communist soy-men. They had talked to one of their buddies, who is a terrorism researcher, and got a quote from him saying, “I think this guy needs to be barred from entering the country.” Fróði said, “We need to prepare a response to this.” 

We went back and forth on Signal, drafting out a response. I said, “Okay. Translate this into Norwegian, tomorrow, Friday. If this attack has any traction, we will release it to the press. We will put it out on Counter-Currents. We will contact the press, if any of the mainstream news outlets in Norway take up this story.” I was hoping it would just die out in the weeds, on the Left-wing fringe of the Norwegian internet, and that would be the end of it. 

Friday was quiet. There really wasn’t much to worry about, so I went about my business. I put finishing touches on my talk. I went out to dinner with the speakers and some friends. 

The next morning, I arrived at the event venue and was informed that I was about to be arrested. I went outside, and there were two cops. I said, “Am I under arrest?” And they said, “Yes.” I said, “What am I being arrested for?” They said they couldn’t tell me. That sounded very irregular to me. I didn’t know what Norwegian law is, though. It certainly would have been irregular in the United States. But I just went along with them. I figured, well, we’ll see if we can clear this up quickly, so I said, “Let’s go.”

LL: Did they handcuff you?

GJ: No, nothing like that. It was super casual and polite. It was what you’d expect in a Nordic social democracy — kind of laid back. 

LL: Where did they take you? Walk us through that whole experience. 

GJ: They took me to a sort of non-descript part of the city, a diverse, immigrant-type neighborhood, with shawarma shops and graffiti everywhere, including hammer and sickles and Antifa graffiti. It was a dump, a place where obviously nobody who lived there felt at home. There were some hipsters out walking tiny dogs. Bearded men, well dressed, with big flamboyant scarves, walking tiny dogs past graffiti saying, “Fuck hipsters,” in English for some reason. I don’t know why English is the international language of graffiti. 

The booking process was Kafkaesque. They took my phone; they took my eyeglasses, my belt, my scarf, my coat, my shoes — anything that could be used as a weapon. Of course I was happy to surrender anything that could be plausibly used to kill me, thinking the worst-case scenario, of course, is Jeffrey Epstein, who didn’t kill himself in jail. I figured I could work this out. I knew I had people on the outside who’d be concerned and would go to work on my behalf immediately. I was fully checked in by noon.

Once I was in my cell, there was no place to sit comfortably, so the only thing to do was to lie down. I tried to sleep. It’s impossible to sleep in these jails. I was in a cell with no pillow, with a hard, plastic mattress and a blanket, which I wadded up into a pillow form. I was so uncomfortable that it was really impossible to sleep. I just physically ached. 

So I started thinking about various possible outcomes. I came up with a list of possible outcomes, ranging from everything’s okay and they’ll allow me to leave, to Jeffrey Epstein. Then I isolated the ones that were most likely. Then I went through each likely outcome and tried to rank it in terms of likelihood. I tried to think of all the possible ins and outs. Then I tried to figure out how I could turn every outcome to my advantage and bounce back.

After a couple of hours pondering these things with my eyes closed, a thought came to my head: “Where are my feelings?” Because I wasn’t feeling afraid. I wasn’t feeling angry. I was just cold. I just felt cold and calm and calculating. 

I spent a huge amount of time just meditating on different possibilities. I couldn’t write anything down. You couldn’t have pens or paper. I couldn’t have a book. It’s the kind of situation that can drive a person like me mad, but I tried to create a mental filing system so I could remember all these things. 

I was not depressed at all. I managed to maintain good spirits throughout. Even though I was physically uncomfortable, I just said, “This is worth it. What I’m doing is meaningful. It’s for Europa.” And there are lots of people who have suffered far, far worse for the truth than I was. So I had to keep that in perspective. 

LL: Were there other people around? Could you see other prisoners? 

GJ: I couldn’t see anyone. I could hear them. These places are all tile and concrete and really echoey. People would be whistling; they would be shouting; they’d be making noise; some of them sounded quite nuts. 

You could hear every time a toilet flushed. It would rumble through the whole place. I know why people go mad in these sorts of environments. There is so much noise. You can’t rest. You can’t sleep at night, because people are peeking in to make sure you haven’t offed yourself, and the last guy peeked in an hour before. I tried to sleep when I could. I don’t think I slept more than three hours in the first 24 hours or more that I was there. They don’t turn out the lights at night, either, which makes it hard to sleep. 

That morning I’d had some coffee. I’d gotten Norwegian scones, which are distinct from other scones because they cost at least five dollars apiece. That’s the only difference. They’re just ridiculously expensive. I’d gotten a little bag of Norwegian scones for ten bucks, and I had nibbled my way through about a third of one scone before I was arrested. 

So, I hadn’t had any food yet. After several hours, I said, “Uh, I’m hungry.” And so they handed me three slices of bread and three packages of processed cheese. I thought this was a snack. But no, that’s all they gave me. I asked for more, and they brought me the same thing, plus little cartons of milk. 

They seemed to have an unwritten rule, that no matter how simple your request is, they would count to one million — very slowly — before they would grant the request. It just took forever for the simplest things to happen. 

It was several hours before I saw anybody. A young woman working for the immigration service asked me a few questions. She asked me how much money I had on me. She asked me about my passport, travel plans, stuff like that. It seemed to me that she was looking for an excuse to deport me. A pretext. For instance, I didn’t have enough money for the time that I was going to stay in the country, or whatever. 

I just answered the questions honestly. There was no point in lying. I didn’t want to say “I want to talk to a lawyer” at the time because I wasn’t sure if I’d even really been arrested, what my status was, if I could call for a lawyer. She just jotted things down on a post-it note. It was very informal. 

Then I talked to two plainclothes cops. They have what I call the “Norwegian face.” They looked like they could be cousins! There’s a certain Norwegian look. They dressed like a lot of plainclothes cops in America, kind of slovenly to blend in, I guess, with the crowd. They were obviously very bright guys. They gave me a letter in Norwegian explaining what the state wanted to do. Then a woman who was an interpreter read it over the phone to me in English. 

Basically, they told me that I was being detained and that I would be deported under a provision of the Immigration Act, which allows aliens to be detained and deported for reasons of state or foreign policy. They specifically said that they believed if I were allowed to speak, I would foment Right-wing violence. 

They didn’t know the topic or title of my speech, but they somehow divined that it was going to cause violence. I was appalled by that. I kind of laughed at it. I tried not to be a jerk, because I wanted to be diplomatic, but inside, I was LOLing. 

Moreover, if they had even bothered to look at what I had said at other Scandza Forums, for instance, the very last Scandza Forum speech that I’d given, in Stockholm that year . . . 

LL: It was against Right-wing terrorism, right?

GJ: Exactly. I’m the kind of guy who gets up and gives speeches that are designed to decrease the amount of Right-wing terrorism. And they’re saying that if I spoke on “white privilege” it would have just the opposite effect. 

I immediately knew what happened. Somebody in the Norwegian security apparatus had been “gotten to” by these Antifa liars and had not even checked out the veracity of their claims. If they had simply read the articles by me — and I think they were actually live-linked in the piece — they would have seen that I was the victim of dishonest, out-of-context smearing. And they wouldn’t have embarrassed themselves. 

Either they were in on it — they were part of the communist, Antifa, ultra-Left network in that country and doing a good deed for their comrades — or they were totally incompetent. Neither option is really a good look for the Norwegian Security Services. You want the intelligence apparatus in your country to be intelligent. You want the security service to actually make you more secure. You’re not secure if you have people who are dishonest, or just incompetent, making decisions like this.

I thought, well, this could be interesting. We could sue these “journalists” for libel. I wanted to look into that. I wanted to look into whether or not the whole thing could be overturned if we could prove that it was based on a libel. But the first thing I wanted to do was just get the hell out of Norway! It was after five, so I said, “The time of my lecture has passed. The event is basically over.” 

LL: So, “Let me go.”

GJ: “Let me go!” I want to deport myself. I want to get out of the country that night. I said, “Just bring me my laptop. I’ll buy a ticket. I’ll gather my bags, and I’ll be out of your hair.” They were a little taken aback by that because they’re used to people who want to stay and freeload off the system as long as possible. I just wanted to go. 

LL: Can you choose where you’re being deported? Can you choose which country you want to go to, or do you have to go back to the country you’re from?

GJ: You have to go back where you’re from. And that was not my first choice, because I was planning to spend several days in Lisbon. I was going to go to an academic conference at the university, where they had various scholars of identitarianism, the Alt-Right, etc.: people like Eric Kaufmann, Angela Nagle, and George Hawley. It was an academic conference on immigration, multiculturalism, and the identitarian backlash. It was open to the public, and I wanted to go. I wanted to meet these people. I wanted to listen to their talks, maybe ask a couple of questions, use it as an opportunity for dialogue. I wanted to go there immediately. I didn’t want to stick around any longer because I had no reason to stay. 

I also made a very good decision. The letter said that I had the right to an attorney, and to have an attorney appointed to me. I said, “I want to exercise my right to an attorney. I want to leave as soon as possible. Before you can deport me, I want to be gone. But I want to make sure that my rights are not violated and to expedite this process as much as possible.” 

They called an attorney, and they started trying to gather my stuff. There was some stuff at the place I was staying, some stuff at Scandza. Of course, I couldn’t get on the phone and just call people. I had to tell them where things were. And, of course, they would go to places and pick things up; but they wouldn’t pick up certain things, because they didn’t know if they were mine. It just went on and on. It was a lesson in how self-deportation is much more efficient than being deported by the state. If they had just given me my phone, I would have been out of there! Just drive me to the airport; that’s all you need to do. It took them two days. 

So after about two hours of waiting, I again was ushered into a room. There was a woman who was my lawyer. She appeared to be Iranian, maybe Kurdish. 

LL: I’m sure they love that. Let’s see his face when he sees her, right? But it turns out she was pro-free speech, right?

GJ: Totally. She said she worked for “Advocat Elden.” I thought that could be the name of a company, like a law firm. I don’t know Norwegian. Maybe it was free legal aid, for all I knew. 

Anyway, she was really nice. I just explained to her that I wanted to go as quickly as possible, but I wanted to make sure my rights were respected. She said, “We’ll do what we can. I’ll get in touch with the firm.” I realized she was the assistant to another lawyer. She also said at this point they’d already filed a free speech complaint. She said, “We want you to know that we don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, and it is wrong for them to detain you and prevent you from speaking because of what somebody might do if you’re allowed to speak.” What somebody else might do. It is an absurd situation that you can be arrested for what other people might do. It turned out that the whole country was talking about my case. It was the number one news item. Even people on the Left thought it outrageous. 

LL: Well, here they were happy about it. All of a sudden, lefties here in America, they love hardcore borders and deportation of people in Europe. They love it in your case, of course.

GJ: I know, exactly. These globalists have one principle, which is to destroy us. That governs everything. They are all for open borders when it means Muslims and Third Worlders coming in, and they are all for sovereignty and deportation and Schengen bans when it keeps us from moving around. 

LL: Keeping white people out of Europe.

GJ: Keeping white people out of Europe. Keeping people from meeting face-to-face. They’re willing to use national sovereignty and deportation law to further the globalist cause, which will eventually abolish all of these things. 

At the time, I was so focused on getting out of there I didn’t ask her any questions about the free speech angle. I figured I’ll just deal with that later, if at all. I just wanted to get out of Norway and on to my next destination. 

Later that night, I met another plainclothes cop, who was clearly dressed to blend in with an Antifa crowd, a very dignified man with greying hair and beard. He told me that 28 people had been arrested. Protestors had been at the forum. They’d been told to disperse and had been arrested. 

He was trying to locate some of my luggage that was at the forum site. They took very seriously my desire to self-deport and tried to get my stuff for me. I appreciated that. I honestly thought they were being sincere and doing their level best. They thought, “This is the easiest case that has come along in a long time. He just wants to go.” I’m sure they’re constantly dealing with people who are delaying the whole process. 

The next day, a young woman who worked for the Norwegian immigration police came to my cell with a new letter. Another woman read it in English over the phone. It was apparent that the lawyer had been at work because her name was mentioned in it. 

Basically, they were responding to the free speech objections to my arrest. I thought it interesting that they were trying to actually justify their position. But they didn’t justify the underlying assumptions that I was a Breivik apologist and that by speaking I would produce more Breiviks. The lawyer didn’t know to question it. I didn’t really focus on that when I talked to her.

I was told that I would be deported. They seemed to be open about the destination. I was hoping that they would let me go to Portugal rather than send me home. It seemed like things were budging. It seemed like there was some back and forth, there was some discussion going on, and their position was loosening up a bit. I thought that was interesting.

Later that day, I was transferred to another facility, a camp near the airport for deportation. I had to go through the whole process of being fingerprinted again. I had the indignity of a strip search. It was humiliating — for them. Then I got my first hot meal. I was given my own room with a private bathroom. It was much more comfortable. There was also a common area where you could get coffee, juice, etc. I was getting dehydrated, so I got a couple of giant cartons of apple juice and drank them. I could just take anything I wanted. They only locked us in our rooms at night.

I tried to make phone calls. I was told I could, but the system was down. Eventually, around seven at night, I spoke to my lawyer who told me that the authorities had decided I was free to go. I could go to the airport and book any flight out to anywhere in the world. Or I could stay for the period of my appeal. Or I could get on the deportation flight the next morning. 

I said, “Great, I want to go. Can you get on the phone to the people who run this facility, explain to them the change in plans, have them give me my access to a computer? I’ll see if I can book a flight.” But it was too late. Nobody was there who could process my release. I just had to go to bed, another sleepless night. 

I took the deportation flight because that was the most practical option at that point. It was a rather pleasant experience. When Freud was expelled from Austria by the Nazis, he was asked to sign a document stating that he had not been mistreated. He wrote, as if he were reviewing a hotel, “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.” I always loved that. I can heartily recommend being deported from Norway to anyone. It’s the best air travel experience I’ve ever had.

Two cops picked me up. They were nice guys. They shook my hand. Everything was very friendly and cordial. They got my bags and took me to the airport. They said, “Okay, we’re going through security.” There was no line. It was just a tiny private security area, for staff people to go through. It took minutes.

Then they took me to a lounge, where I was the only person. There was a really good coffee machine there, so I had my first coffee in a couple days. They had free food: Ramen noodles, stuff like that. I just skipped it. I was hoping I could go to the regular airport terminal, where I could buy some five-dollar scones. That wasn’t an option. 

They gave me my phone back. I had been incommunicado almost 48 hours at that point, except for one brief call to Fróði about my bags, which they cut off when we started trying to talk about what had actually happened at the Scandza event. So this was my first real contact with the world. I turned the phone on and watched as hundreds of messages downloaded. Friends all over the world were frantically worried.

Then I called Fróði, and he said, “It’s amazing! We’re the number one news item for two days in a row. When you requested a lawyer, John Christian Elden — who’s the best-known lawyer in the country — stepped forward and is representing you.” That was the “Advocat Elden” the woman worked for. He was Varg Vikernes’ lawyer at one time. I thought, “This is an amazing stroke of luck.” 

Folks, if you’re ever in trouble with the law, ask for a lawyer. You could luck out and get the number one lawyer in the country. Elden was probably circling, salivating for the chance to represent me because he likes free speech cases and high-profile cases, and this was a big news event.

I spent about 45 minutes sipping coffee, talking to Fróði, reading messages, and realizing what an amazing weekend the rest of the world had had while I’d been incommunicado. Then it was time to go. The police drove me to the airplane; they drove me across the tarmac to the base of the gangway tower. We went up a little staircase to the entry gangway. There was a yellow ribbon across the opening of the plane, saying “Don’t Enter.” The plane was not open yet. I was going to be the first passenger on the plane. 

At this point I was sending my first tweet, “I’m free!” “And Jeffrey Epstein still did not kill himself!” I sent the thing, and the two cops were wondering why I was chuckling. I said, “Apparently, I’m some kind of celebrity.” Of course they knew, because they had been following the news the whole weekend. Everybody knew. But I didn’t know that they knew, because they were all being very professional, and I appreciated that. 

The pilot or the co-pilot came down the gangway to the plane, and I shook his hand. He smiled. Obviously, he knew who I was. I thought, “Gee, this is great! This is total VIP treatment.” 

A stewardess opened the plane up. I was the first passenger on the plane. I sat down, got comfortable, and put on my dark glasses to hide from paparazzi. Then I tried to prop my eyelids open with toothpicks and start writing! I could write now. I finally had a pen and paper. I started writing out an account of everything that happened. 

The hilarious thing was that I wasn’t technically deported. I could have left any time, or I could have stayed, but I chose to get on the flight that they had paid for and be deported, because it was the most practical option. Honestly, at that point, I was so exhausted that the idea of spending several days in Lisbon at a conference, sleeping in a strange bed, was not appealing. I decided it was just best to go home. I needed to sleep, communicate with my lawyer, write up an account of what happened, and also deal with requests for interviews. 

It was easy to eliminate most interviews. I refused to talk to anybody who used the “white supremacist” slur. There have got to be consequences for that kind of dishonest and lazy journalism. We have our own media, and I don’t need these people. They need us more than we need them, at this point.

There is a horrible movie called The Human Centipede. I won’t elaborate on it. You can Google it. That’s my image of the mainstream media. They feed on one another’s lies and hysteria. Their job is deception. 

Before I actually saw myself in the funhouse mirror of the mainstream media, I used to think that people who get attacked in the media must have done something wrong. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right? But when you know the truth about yourself and see just how systematically everything is distorted — even simple things, even things that there’s no advantage to distorting — it’s very sobering. When I was in graduate school, one of my professors compared grading papers to fever dreams, in which one’s daily activities come back in garbled form. That’s the experience you have when you see yourself discussed by media people. 

LL: Why you? Why are you such a threat? 

GJ: That’s a good question. Why didn’t they target Kevin MacDonald? He was there too, and he’s a far more important person than I am. I don’t know why they targeted me, not him. They even found Kevin making comments about Breivik. They said, “Oh! He’s another Breivik supporter.” But they didn’t try to arrest and expel him. Maybe they think I’m doing good work. Maybe they think that I should be taken down a peg. Certainly, the amount of repression and deplatforming that we are facing has been ratcheted up enormously.

If that was their goal, they failed miserably. The whole incident enormously increased my visibility and Counter-Currents’ traffic, not just in Norway but around the world. I knew it would happen. As I sat in that office with the plainclothes cops, listening to the interpreter translate the letter about what was happening, I found myself gleefully rubbing my hands together. That’s probably a hate crime in Norway. 

By preventing me from speaking to a gathering of 90 people, they gave me press coverage allowing millions of people to hear about me. What a dumb move on their part! If they wanted my ideas to remain marginal and obscure, they should have just ignored me and let me go about my business, and that would have been that. 

Thanks to my arrest, I was the number one story in Norway for two days running. That weekend, our traffic was up about 30 or 40 percent. The month before my arrest, Norway was our number 16 country in terms of traffic. Norway has four million people. But it’s in our top twenty, which means that a significant percentage of Norwegians are reading the site. More Norwegians in a country of four million are reading our site than Brazilians in a country of tens of millions. That’s interesting. This month Norway is number four. So they jumped from sixteenth to fourth in terms of countries reading our site. They’re ahead of Germany, France, Australia, Canada, all much bigger countries. 

LL: Weren’t you blocked from speaking at the Copenhagen Scandza Forum? What happened there?

GJ: Three weeks to the day before the event in Oslo, we had a Scandza Forum in Copenhagen. I got there about thirty minutes before the event was supposed to start, and there was a huge mob of black-clad Antifa — I’d say sixty to eighty people — besieging the building. They were actually carrying the flag of the Soviet Union. The flag that flew over the Gulag! 

These people are communists. No, they’re not “the real fascists”! They are actual communists. One of these people, a six-foot-four freak with a nose ring, had the hammer and sickle tattooed and a Kalashnikov tattooed on his face. These people are advertising what they are. But a lot of normies won’t accept the message.

The police created a perimeter around the Antifa, but they didn’t clear them away to allow conference attendees to safely enter the building. This was just dereliction on the part of the police. So I couldn’t get in. About a third of the attendees couldn’t get in the facility. Most of the talks did happen. The videos of them are up on the Scandza channel. 

It wasn’t all bad. I bumped into a couple of people that I knew. There were a couple of people that I planned to meet at the event, and I bumped into them outside. Since we couldn’t get in, we spent the day talking. I met Laura Towler and hung out with her. There was a core group of four who went through the whole experience together. But there were Antifa lurking in the neighborhood too. Finally, around 4:30, I decided to just give up and head back to my hotel. 

Because of my experience in Copenhagen, I went to the Oslo event two hours early, thinking that if there were a siege, at least I’d be inside, not anticipating that I would be taken away by the cops before the event could begin. The Antifa came; they protested; they cut the power at one point. But the event went on. The police did their jobs. They cleared them away. Only three people didn’t show up, and they might not have been kept away by Antifa. One of them might have been an Antifa mole, for all we know. All the speeches but mine were delivered and videoed. They also videoed the mayhem outside. Twenty-eight protesters were arrested and have been hit with huge fines by the government. This is very, very encouraging. 

After the events in Copenhagen, mainstream papers were decrying Antifa violence. These counties are surprisingly sensible. Sweden is the nuttiest country in Scandinavia. The Danes are probably the most sober-minded. Norway quietly decided in recent years to back slowly away from the abyss; they seem to be inching towards Danish rather than Swedish attitudes. 

The public in Scandinavia is pro-free speech, which is good. In Denmark, in the last elections, Mette Frederiksen of the Social Democrats ran on an anti-immigration, anti-globalization platform. Her position was that globalization and immigration are bad for Danish workers, the constituency that Social Democrats need to take care of. Instead of debating whether or not immigration is a good thing, now the real debate in Denmark is how re-migrate them back to their homelands. That’s enormous progress, metapolitically speaking.

When asked the question, “What are your feelings about Denmark’s reputation as an Islamophobic country?” I think about 15 percent of Danes said they were ashamed of that, and more than 70 percent said they were perfectly comfortable with that. The rest didn’t know. That’s very encouraging. Mette Frederiksen said, “Being opposed to immigration doesn’t make you a bad person.” That is a huge metapolitical gain for us. When people get over the idea that nationalism is immoral, everything is possible. 

When I was locked up, I was rehearsing answers to hostile questions from the press. I was thinking: What if they throw the “Nazi” question at me? “Do you believe in National Socialism?” or something like that. My answer would have been: “Absolutely not. I believe in Nordic social democracy without multiculturalism.” If you put it that way, most people in Nordic countries would probably think, at least privately, “Yes. Why not? Why not Nordic social democracy without all these problems that we’ve been importing?”

LL: I have to ask you: How far are you willing to go? If they really clamp down, they’re coming for you, how deep are you going to go into this?

GJ: For me, there is no exit. There is no backing out. We just have to go deeper, deeper into the struggle until we come out the other side. Until we have victory. 

LL: Ultimately, take it as a compliment; and hopefully it’s inspiring for you to continue. I’ve already said, we’re going to do what we need to. If we need to go back to living in a studio apartment, if we have to do what we’re going to do, we’re not going to quit. 

GJ: It’s worth it. Somebody has to do this. I enjoy doing this. I have a meaningful life. I have traveled to interesting places. I have met fascinating people. I’ve even been to jail! I’m looking forward to writing my memoirs. I’m doing something meaningful and effective. I think that’s why I’m being persecuted. And I’m just going to keep doing it until we win. 

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