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STOCKHOLM — Extremism comes on tiny feet. You almost don’t see it until it’s too late.

It’s just like the ones in Canada, found from Vancouver to Halifax. Everything’s the same. Same corporate colours, same stuff for sale, even the same meatballs and lingonberries. (Which are as ubiquitous as they are delicious, by the way.)

IKEA advertises everything from candles to pillows, but it doesn’t advertise one important fact: It was founded by a fellow who was an extremist. A neo-Nazi, in fact.

Oh, sure, IKEA doesn’t completely hide who their founder was. He was a genial-looking fellow named Ingvar Kamprad, who — says IKEA’s website— was “rebel-hearted.” Uh-huh. Ingvar had “a dream to create a better life for as many people as possible — whatever the size of their wallet — (which) is and will always be our driving force.”

Well, not exactly everyone.

Ingvar, who died in 2018 at the age of 91, wasn’t too fussy about foreigners, Jews and other minorities. He wasn’t so enthusiastic about “creating a better life” for them, actually. Ingvar was a member of the fascist New Swedish Movement. The IKEA website doesn’t have a whole lot of information about that.

Ingvar joined the New Swedish Movement when he was a teenager, even before he founded IKEA as a mail order company in his family’s backyard. The leader of the far-right group was rabid anti-Semite and Adolf Hitler fan Per Engdahl, who said Hitler was “God’s saviour of Europe.”

Historians record that Ingvar recruited members and raised funds for Engdahl’s pro-Nazi group, even while the Second World War was still raging. And he remained a confidante of Engdahl for many years after that.

When caught, Ingvar insisted his involvement with fascism was “a mistake.” But, in her wonderfully-titled book “Made in Sweden: How the Swedes Are Not Nearly So Egalitarian, Tolerant, Hospitable or Cozy As They Would Like to Have You Think,” author Elisabeth Asbrink wrote the Swedish security service had a bulging file on Ingvar titled “Nazi.”

And, as recently as 2010, when Canadians were still gleefully assembling IKEA bookcases with Allen keys, Ingvar told Asbrink that “Per Engdahl is a great man, and I will maintain that as long as I live.”

So, there you go. We are all sitting on couches that, at one point, funded Nazism. Extremism, in other words.

That’s relevant, these days, because there’s quite a bit of it to be seen just about everywhere you look. Not just Sweden.

Here in Sweden in September, the extremist Sweden Democrats took more than 20% of the vote in the national election, making them the second-largest party in the Riksdag legislature.

The Sweden Democrats trace their beginnings to this country’s neo-Nazi movement. They don’t particularly like Muslims or immigrants, and said during the election they favour giving foreigners “one-way tickets” back to Kabul.

To the extent that the world pays any attention whatsoever to Swedes who don’t play hockey, the huge success of a political party with actual pro-Nazi roots went more or less unnoticed. How come?

Well, because the beast is awake everywhere, pretty much. Extremism is to be seen in a lot of surprising places, these days.

Not, we hasten to say, in the policies of the parties led by Justin Trudeau or Pierre Poilievre or Jagmeet Singh. Not even in Poilievre’s Conservative Party, which may be conservative, but is on record as favouring the admission of more immigrants — and at a faster pace, too.

No, extremism is seen in less-visible ways.

When some people wave around a swastika flag during the Ottawa occupation, for example, and nobody does a damn thing to take it away from them. Or when white supremacist members of Diagolon are caught heading to the Coutts, Alta., border crossing with a cache of weapons, allegedly to murder police, and people shrug.

Or even when the richest man in the world gives a rabid anti-Semite like Kanye West back his Twitter account. After he said he was going to go “Def Con” on Jews. Or how Twitter blithely allows extremist threats against my Postmedia colleagues, and other journalists, all the time. All that.

So, we should probably give the Swedes a break, the fascist leanings of IKEA’s founder notwithstanding. They’ve got a problem with extremism, yes.

And, if we’re honest with ourselves, we increasingly do, too.

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I have had an amazing time in London. Finally saw the Churchill war rooms – a real War Room! – and it was quite amazing. Did a punk rock tour of Soho, went to Camden Town with my old high school pal Lee Hill, and tonight I am finally seeing the real Sham 69, with Jimmy Pursey!

Here’s a shot Lee snapped when we were in Camden. Anybody recognize where I was?

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Touché. I deserved that. But it’s still a clusterfuck.

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Trump lost.

His name wasn’t on any ballot, true. He wasn’t in any race, agreed. This morning, he is what he was yesterday: Donald J. Trump, private citizen.

But make no mistake. The stunning outcomes in Tuesday’s midterm elections were a short, sharp repudiation of the once and future Republican presidential candidate. In every corner of the US, across the land of the free and the home of the brave, Americans considered Trump, and said: nah. No thanks.

Early in the evening, one of Trump’s repellant sons tweeted: “Bloodbath!” But if there was any blood figuratively spilled, it was of Republican expectations. No Red Wave materialized, at all.

It was left to Trump’s loyal man-servant, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, to acknowledge the unhappy reality: “[It was] definitely not a Republican wave, that’s for darn sure. Hats off to the Democrats.”

Hats off, indeed. Consider these results, none of which are good for Trump or Trumpists:

• In the House of Representatives, where Trump loyalist Kevin McCarthy had been predicting a big GOP majority and absolute control, the Trump party will gain – best case – 15 seats. That’s a huge failure, by every standard. Why? Because it’s just a fraction of what has been achieved by the opposition party in past mid-term contests. If mid-terms are referenda on sitting presidents – and they are – Joe Biden won.

• In the Senate, too, cocky GOP types had been predicting total control. But, so far, that just hasn’t happened. The Republicans lost a seat they held, Pennsylvania, to a bald guy who wore hoodies and had suffered a speech-impairing stroke mid-campaign. And in Georgia, the outcome still isn’t known – but there, a football star and Trump favorite, Herschel Walker, remains behind his Democrat opponent.

• Republican hopes were dashed everywhere. While they now dominate Florida – more on that in a minute – GOP claims to capture the monolithic Hispanic vote didn’t materialize. Fantasies about expanding their base in House races, from Maine to Arizona, didn’t happen either. And Democrats prevailed in Senate races Republicans had been counting on, in New Hampshire, Washington and Colorado. New York, too: despite untold millions spent to prop up the Republican champion, a Democrat remains governor.

• Trump-endorsed election deniers were denied across the election map. In the Senate, the House, governor and Secretary of State races, at least 16 prominent deniers of the 2020 election outcome lost. Some, like the rebarbative Colorado Trump fanatic Lauren Boebert, blew a massive lead and was behind on Wednesday morning. And Republicans who defied Trump, and certified the 2020 outcome like Georgia’s Brian Kemp, won big.

• Most ominously for Trump, his likely opponent for the Republican presidential nomination, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, swept his state, turning it into a Republican stronghold for the first time in generations. DeSantis did that not just despite Trump’s attacks on him in recent days – he arguably did that because of those attacks. After Tuesday night, DeSantis is the strongest Republican politician on the national stage. Not Trump.

Trump was the loser on Tuesday night. But what of the man who beat him in 2020 for the Oval Office? Joe Biden, won, as well. Despite inflation, despite the price of a gallon of gas or a loaf of bread, despite a Democratic Party that has moved too far to the left, Biden did not suffer the humiliating defeat that many were predicting.

He won, last night. DeSantis won. Democrats won.

Trump lost.

[Kinsella volunteers for Democratic Party campaigns.]

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Let them eat cake.

In fairness to Marie Antoinette, who was the last Queen of France prior to the Revolution, she probably didn’t even say that. Jean-Jacques Rousseau published an autobiography in 1767, and attributed that infamous phrase to an unidentified “great princess” – and, what’s more, Rousseau actually claimed she said: “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.”

“Brioche” is bread. And there’s no evidence, none, that Marie Antoinette ever said “let them eat cake,” shortly before her head and her body were sent to separate locations by a guy wielding a guillotine. So let’s give the old gal a break, okay?

Chrystia Freeland, meanwhile, did say this to the media (who frankly resemble revolutionary executioners, some days):

“I personally, as a mother and wife, look carefully at my credit card bill once a month. And last Sunday, I said to the kids, ‘you’re older now. You don’t watch Disney anymore. Let’s cut that Disney+ subscription.”

She went on, digging herself ever-deeper: “So we cut it. It’s only $13.99 a month that we’re saving, but every little bit helps.”

Oh, boy. Where to begin?

She personally – don’t you love that she employed that Antoinette-ish flourish, “I, personally” – didn’t rely upon one of the 30-plus staff members assigned to her to break the heartbreaking news to the kids. She, the Minister of Finance of All of Canada, did it herself. She, personally.

There she was, squinting at her credit card statement all on her own, personally, and wrestling inflationary spirals to the ground. With a stroke of a red pen – there’s a lot of red pens to be found in Ottawa, in the Justin Trudeau era – voila! No more Disney Plus! Problem solved.

No more American Horror Story (Justin and Chrystia have been producing a Canadian horror story)! No more Kardashians (we get that already, when Trudeau and entourage travel abroad)! No more Lost (which the country kind of is, under the aforementioned Justin and Chrystia).

All those fine Disney-Plus shows, gone, much like Chrystia Freeland’s sense of self-awareness.

To get serious for a moment – just for a moment – did the Minister of Finance not notice the kerfuffle about her boss, the Prime Minister, staying in a $6,000-a-night palatial London hotel in the lead-up to the Queen’s funeral? Did she not note that the President of the United States, him personally, setting an example by staying at the U.S. Embassy and thereby saving his taxpayers a small fortune?

Or, has she looked at any polls – and God knows her department is addicted to polls – which tell her what Canadians are preoccupied with, these days?

It’s the cost of living, Ms. Freeland. And not Simpsons re-runs on Disney. Canadians, from coast to coast to coast, are focussed on how hard it is to get by.

Nanos: the top issue for Canadians is the state of the economy, far ahead of any other issue, with inflation not far behind. Abacus: 73 per cent say the cost of living is the most important issue they’re facing – followed by economy (45 per cent) and housing affordability (36 per cent).

Also Abacus: when asked what inflation and rising interest rates have made “much more difficult” to get, half said food. Thirty-five per cent said housing. And 34 per cent said energy – heating their home or fuelling their vehicle.

This, of course, is why Chrystia Freeland’s Disney-Plus gaffe was so plus-sized: it reminds everyone how utterly and completely out of touch the Trudeau regime is. They are tired, they are old, and they just don’t get it, any more.

Half of Canadians are trying to figure out how to properly feed themselves, says one of the government’s own pollsters. And the Minister of Finance thinks cutting some Disney cartoons will help?

Marie Antoinette probably never said “Let them eat cake.” But history says she did, so that’s that.

Chrystia Freeland, meanwhile, actually did – she, personally – suggest that cutting back on cartoons would help to put bread on the table.

You want cartoons? Watch the Trudeau government. They’ve become one.

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