Column | Insult as honor

To be honest, I feel seriously failed as a columnist. Until three times I recently reported on this place on secret telephone conversations between Trump and Putin. How these texts came to me, I had to keep secret, but I dared to stand in for its authenticity.

To my great regret, these revelations were dismissed as ‘satire’. Both Trump and Putin naturally had every interest in trivializing my work in this way, but it disappointed me that my journalistic colleagues also went along.

And see what is happening now with a similar unveiling The Atlantic, of which editor -in -chief Jeffrey Goldberg was probably accidentally added to a warlike chat with top politicians and the safety adviser of Trump. The gentlemen-always gentlemen-chatted about air strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen. « Good Job Pete and Your Team! » « The team in Mal did a great job as well. » « Great Work All. Powerful Start. »

Can someone explain why the unveiling in The Atlantic is not a satire – and mine? I just say it out of the ground of my hurt heart: I just don’t think it’s just. That editor -in -chief of The Atlantic can now enter the press history as a new Bob Woodward, and I have to muddle on on this back page with pieces that are at most a bit scornful.

It is especially indigestible for me that I am also remembered the anger of the authorities that Jeffrey Goldberg can now undergo as a hot shower. What did the American defense star Pete Hegseeth say about Goldberg again? « A cheating, heavily discredited so -called journalist who has appealed to constantly selling fake stories. »

Surely it must be wonderful to be insulted by such a raised patjepee as this Hegseeth? I would sign for it. Hegseeth who was thrown out of all sorts of jobs due to misconduct; who had to buy an accusation of rape in secret; who in 2015 in a bar in Ohio on a tour as chairman of the Concerned Veterans of America with a double tongue shouted: « Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!« 

It even seems like a great honor if you are tackled so false by someone like that. That way I became somewhat jealous of one NRC-colleague, the investigative journalist Joep Dohmen, who appeared in his recently published book Rig says that in 2021 Geert Wilders called him « rig of the richel » after an article by Dohmen about « the straps of his Protegé Dion Graus. »

« Wilders had been angry with me for years, » writes Dohmen. « In 2007 I was the first journalist that the PVV had an authoritarian and non-democratic party structure, with only one member: Wilders himself. After that he no longer spoke with me and later no longer with colleagues from my newspaper. »

Here I bend my head. For Dohmen. For years I have shown my aversion to Wilders in my columns, but he has never personally called me for ‘rig of the richel’. What are I due to that? What do Goldberg and Dohmen don’t have that I don’t have?

Perhaps I have done so often satire that nobody believes me anymore when I describe reality. Or has reality itself become satire?

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