The sickness: Swedish right-wing politics in August 2026

A wonderful parody of the latest propaganda from Sverigedemokraterna. Made by ponyhans, an alias on Instagram. This is how, in January 2020, the Covid virus exploded into the world’s general population outside China. An eighty-year-old passenger with the SARS-CoV-2 virus in his lungs showed symptoms during the cruise and became sick. That passenger was advised by the ship’s doctor to disembark in Hong Kong, a densely populated city of 7.5 million people, where he infected an untold number of others. “What happened on the Diamond Princess cruise ship is the definition of a superspreader event,” says retired admiral Brett Giroir, the U.S. assistant secretary for health at the time. These close-quarters environments—which also include airplanes, subway cars, crowded restaurants, gyms, and other places where people stand right next to one another—become superspreader events as the normal rate of infection transmission gets amplified by close proximity and poor air circulation.1 When I…