Mette Frederiksen, the Nordic hermit kingdom’s iron-fisted leader, has insisted that such rooms serve as “mechanisms of oppression” against young women — and, for good measure, young men as well. Why not? When your claims float untethered from observable reality, there is little limit to whom they might implicate.

The campaign to close these spaces is spearheaded by something called the “Commission for the Forgotten Women’s Struggle,” a state body set up to weaponise feminism as a cudgel against Muslims. The commission claims, with impressive solemnity, that these rooms violate “basic principles of gender equality.” One might expect at least a shred of evidence to support this sweeping paranoia about “social control”. Yet, as so often in Denmark’s peculiar brand of cultural hygiene, evidence is optional. The head of the Moderate Party-controlled Ministry of Education, when pressed, struggled to name a single concrete example of oppression, gesturing instead at the faint possibility that somewhere, somehow, a young woman might have been forced to pray.

The students who used the room, some simply needing a moment’s escape from the industrial hum of modern education, will now seek refuge under staircases and in empty hallways. One wonders if the great Danish experiment in “hygge” extends to praying alone beneath a flight of stairs.

Source:

• SDU lukker fordybelsesrum permanent, DR (state media), July 4th 2025

The reform includes newly tightened residence and employment requirements to receive more than the lowest tier of benefits, a Kafkaesque hurdle demanding nine years of residence and two-and-a-half years of full-time work within the past decade. Previously reserved for those arriving after 2008, now, in a generous display of equal-opportunity cruelty, this barrier has been generously extended to all benefit claimants. Mette Louise Brix, a social worker and union coordinator in the municipal job centre in Gribskov, puts it starkly: “There are citizens whose monthly benefit is being halved… Some citizens can see they will have trouble staying in their homes. Others are asking how they are supposed to ensure food for their children.” She adds that this policy also targets people with substance abuse disorders and young people with severe mental illness. “Social workers are worried about what they might do,” she tells.

But Denmark’s benevolence does not stop at mere impoverishment. Those relegated to this basement-level benefit must now prove their “usefulness” through a mandatory 37-hour weekly work obligation. Failure to comply results in sanctions to their already skeletal benefits. This obligation may be fulfilled through Danish language classes, unpaid internships for private employers or through the Orwellianly named “usefulness jobs.” These are not jobs in any meaningful sense but rather penances in the form of unpaid labor for the public sector, such as park maintenance or cleaning public toilets, ritual humiliation designed to deter and discipline rather than to prepare for real employment. The subtext is clear: work will set you free, or at least keep you too busy and broken to complain.

Signe Færch, Chairwoman of the Danish Association of Social Workers, notes the bitter irony: “It is thought-provoking that they talk about de-bureaucratisation and yet introduce new bureaucracy where social workers risk having to control citizens’ commute times, attendance and job seeking efforts. … We know that usefulness jobs rarely lead to lasting employment.” She is concerned that the reform compels social workers to become overseers of “pseudo-work” instead of facilitators of real jobs.

Simultaneously, despite dire warings from 18 humanitarian NGO’s, the reform eliminates a crucial lifeline: the section 34 housing subsidy, until now an indispendable tool in efforts to reduce homelessness. This support was vital for benefit recipients facing high rents in a country experiencing a severe shortage of affordable housing, especially in large cities. Jeanette Bauer, head of the independent humanitarian organisation Danish Church Aid, has warned that scrapping this aid would be a “human catastrophe.” The homeless advocacy organisation SAND was blunter, stating its removal was like “setting a roadblock on the road from shelter to housing” and has stated that it is guaranteed to lead to more homelessness.

The human cost, predicted by experts and NGOs with near-unanimous dread, is stark. People battling addiction, severe mental illness, or simply the crushing weight of systemic disadvantage are deemed insufficiently “useful” or too racially impure to deserve adequate support. They face hunger, eviction, and destitution. Færch summarises the cruel paradox: “Necessities like rent, food, and transport are expensive in Denmark. You cannot live a dignified life on DKK 6,789 before tax… If a citizen is worried about whether they can pay their rent or electricity bill, it is difficult to muster the surplus to write a good CV.” The reform, she concludes, creates “another roadblock” for the most vulnerable.

This Danish experiment in punitive welfare “reform” is not an isolated incident. It resonates with a disturbing transatlantic trend. Across the North Sea, the Starmer regime is pushing for eugenicist cuts to Personal Independence Payments (PIP), a vital support for disabled people, insinuating that the sick and the disabled are simply malingering. In the US, the Trump regime’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gleefully gutted essential support systems for the most vulnerable. The shared logic is painfully clear: the disabled, the racialised, the poor, those least “productive”, are to be discarded.

Meanwhile, western leaders find no difficulty mustering funds for other priorities. The money that could have gone to help the civilian population are spent on balooning military expenses, with NATO recently planning to raise expenditures to an eye-watering 5% of GDP to fund agressive military buildup. While civilians are ordered to subsist on crumbs and scrub toilets to prove their worth, the Danish regime has embarked on a dangerous path of rearmament fueled by the slogan “spend! spend! spend!”.

Denmark’s sleek Nordic image remains a powerful export, candles, hygge and smiling cyclists. But beyond this curated postcard lies a ruthless machinery of surveillance and social discipline. Under the smooth slogans, one finds that the cruelty is the only point.

Sources:

• Reform sender tusindvis under fattigdomsgrænsen og gør flere hjemløse, Arbejderen, July 1st

The activists made declarations of solidarity with Palestine and led the crowd in chants for Palestinian liberation. One chant in particular hurt Tarp’s delicate zionist sensibilities, prompting him to tweet his outrage: “From the River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.”

Tarp claims to have left the festival grounds in shock shortly after thousands of ordinary people joined the chant, long understood as a call for equality and freedom in all of Palestine. In subsequent statements to state media he made the claim that it was a call for “the extermination of an entire country”, seemingly unaware of the dark irony in making such statements in defense of the zionist entity that is committing an ongoing extermination of the country of Palestine.

Tarp had taken a rare trip outside the safety of the political bubble and mingled with the general public. Rather than feeling the warm embrace of the people he claims to speak for, he encountered mass dissent against the ongoing genocide — and it filled him with horror and disgust. In his tweets he inadvertently admitted that roughly 80 percent of the crowd joined the chants, describing them, in his own words, as “lemmings” swept up in the “rabid madness” coming from the stage.

In true form, regime-loyal media promptly turned to Tarp for comment, hoping to turn this into a Danish equivalent of the moral panic against British band Bob Vylan who is being attacked by Zionists for chanting “Death to the IDF” at their performance at the Glastonbury Festival. State media presented Tarp as merely “a festival-goer”, and not as a professional regime propagandist, granting him generous space to share his bigoted accusations. Without irony, he claimed to know what the chant means better than the people actually chanting it, spreading zionist disinformation as he insisted the call for equality and freedom in Palestine was actually an exterminationist threat.

Observers familiar with Denmark’s Social Democratic party describe it as fervently Zionist and deeply Islamophobic, a part of the reactionary “anti-woke” wave that has spread from America to the rest of the western world. Tarp’s social media history shows him to be a loyal foot soldier of this ideology. In his Twitter feed he is branding New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani as “utterly insane”, he scolds the Nordic hermit kingdom’s main LGBTQ+ organization for refusing to take part in islamophobic scare campaigns, he rails against other parties voting not to derail an anti-racism plan for public schools with Zionism and he makes so-called jokes asking whether pro-Palestine activists should be “cancelled for cultural appropriation” for wearing keffiyehs.

Despite Tarp’s histrionics, reactions to his tweet were mixed. Although many agreed with his hateful comments, one alleging that Roskilde is now “a Muslim festival celebrating Hamas”, others mocked Tarp’s hysteria and called him out for lying about the invented of the Palestinian liberation movement. “The state of Israel and Jewish people were never equated,” countered a concertgoer. “If you were there, you’d know.”

The festival itself, meanwhile, is standing firm. Rejecting Tarp’s demands for censorship, organizers have defended Fontaines D.C., affirming that their stage is a place for artistic freedom and that the performance did not violate any guidelines. Meanwhile, critical reviews of the concert have been overwhelmingly positive, with critics praising the band’s willingness to break the silence and center human lives over spectacle.

The entrenched political elite may continue clutching their pearls and scribbling outraged tweets, but if Roskilde is any indication, a new generation is choosing freedom and solidarity over hate — even if it makes spin doctors shriek into the night.

Sources:

• Irsk band deler vandene med koncert, der forvandlede sig til Palæstina-demo, DR (regime media), July 3rd 2025
• Skaber stor debat: Pro-palæstinensiske kampråb fra scenen i Roskilde , BT (corporate media), July 3rd 2025
• Tweet by Tarp (CW: Racism and celebration of genocide in comments)