There is a kind of comment I can now recognise by its first four words, and it is never about what I wrote.
I have collected a few from the past year. I have been called a paid shill, a hasbara agent and a Zionist pig, and asked whether it is Netanyahu or "the Zionist federation" who covers my salary.
At one point someone informed me that I am a Danish Charlie Kirk, and that Israel will therefore come and kill me. So they pay me first and shoot me afterwards, which I must say is a rather peculiar HR policy. Particularly since I consistently place myself in front of the Jews - and often use the teaching of the world's most famous Jew to explain why the idea of a scapegoat is broken. But of course anything is possible for a man with his imagination turned all the way up 🤓
I have been called racist, Nazi, fascist, far-right, radical right, Islamophobe, xenophobe, Muslim-hater, Trumpist, MAGA, Christofascist, Christian nationalist, born-again, demagogue, cult leader, misogynist, Andrew Tate, conspiracy theorist, hate preacher, populist and dangerous - occasionally all in the same afternoon, which for most people would require a serious calendar, something I have not owned in fifty-two years. To Krisztina's great irritation.
I have been diagnosed from a distance as mentally ill, confused and in need of treatment, as an escaped patient, as being on pills, and one person wanted to know if I was on mushrooms. I am not. But I have tried most things. Most people can probably work that out. That a man like me has.
I have been told I am not a real Christian because I take my shirt off when the sun is out, and quite detailed statements have been issued about my looks, my clothes, my friends, my sex life and my mother.
And then there is my wife.
Her they have called mistress, whore, escort, bought and kept, and porn star, because she wore shorts on a hot day. She has been told to go home, although she is home. Things have been written about what she does, and with whom, that I will not give a line. And then there are grown adults out there who have collected hundreds of pictures of her, drawn lines across her shoulders, hips and hands and taken measurements, to prove that she is really a man.
I know what it is meant to do, because she is not the one they are after. The assumption is that a man's softest place is the woman he loves, and that he will stop writing if the bill is sent to her.
That calculation has two errors. One is Krisztina, who has stood in far harder weather than this - alone - and has not moved a metre. The other is that whoever sits down and measures a woman's body in order to hit her husband has told us everything about himself and not one thing about either her or me.
And I can see what is going on in them, because it is the same movement every time. Whether it comes creeping in underhand - or at two hundred kilometres an hour in full attack.
You read a text about Islam, or about Israel, or about what a Human being is, and instead of taking hold of a sentence and saying, here is something that sounds wrong to me, or something I cannot see how you arrive at, you start looking for the man behind it.
You are convinced that I really mean something other than what I write - that I hate Muslims, that I am paid for it, that the faith is a cover for something political, that I want society taken back to before women had the vote - and that I am simply too cunning to say it out loud.
So you poke and provoke and hope that one day I will be angry enough to let it slip, so you can take a screenshot and say - see, what did I tell you. There he was!
But let me write this as plainly as I can...
There is no one behind it.
There is no other man standing behind the texts, holding something back, hiding an agenda or meaning something other than what he writes.
I write all the way out to the edge of where I stand - and what is on the page you are reading is what I mean, and THAT is what I would dearly love to discuss with you, hard if you like and for as long as you like. But the notions about me I cannot help you with, because you made those yourselves.
That is also why I answer fewer and fewer of the profiles that turn up in that form.
Because they are not here to talk about what I write about.
They are here to talk about me. And I know of no more yawningly dull subject. I am with myself ALL day, and also when I wake at three in the morning - so I know PLENTY and have no need for further contributions on the matter.
And yes. There is something comical about having to write an entire post about myself to say exactly that. It will be one of the few. So enjoy it.
Then there is the other part, which some apparently count on - that if you just push long enough, I will become sad, angry, tired, despondent or lose faith - and therefore stop meaning what I mean.
It may well work on some.
On me it works the other way round, and there are two quite concrete reasons.
The first is that I grew up in a family where nobody backed down.
The louder one came thundering, the more force the other gathered, and an argument could easily run for years. I have one with my father that began when I was sixteen and that we have not finished yet. We have pushed and dragged each other around the ring all those years, and neither of us has at any point given up - or stopped loving the other.
That is the fire I am made of.
I was created and shaped that way.
The second reason is that you are meeting me close to twenty-five years into a journey that began because I broke myself to pieces and had to be put together again. It sent me on a long tour of the inner landscape, at home and abroad, where everything was turned over and set in place, one piece at a time. It has been tended, cared for, watered and fed ever since, and it has grown robust, clear and focused. I know why I mean what I mean - there is usually a calculation behind it that reaches at least a thousand years back.
And of course I still feel it when someone goes after the people I love. But everything on the lists at the top of this post, everything strangers may think of me?
It moves NOTHING.
Show me a sentence that is wrong, and I will move. I have done so again and again through my life, especially the last twenty-five years, so I am in no doubt about how a Human being does it - and I will gladly do it again. But a nickname is not an argument, neither is a psychological reading, and pushing hard is not a reason.
I know the age has grown used to men who apologise and say sorry the moment someone raises their voice, and who ask permission to mean what they mean. That is not me. And it never will be.
I know why I am here.
I know where I am going.
And I will not lie down until I am there.
And I know that where I stand will get harder to stand in the coming years. Not because of what I write, but because a hypnosis that digs itself deeper can bear less and less that someone says the old truths out loud - the obvious, what every grandmother knew. The deeper the sleep, the more violent the reaction to the one who speaks in an ordinary voice in the room.
And the more labels have to be stuck on him to make it bearable.
But someone has to do it. And one of them is me.
Voluntarily.
So those of you who understand what I write, and why I do it, and who have yourselves caught the scent of the same thing or seen its outline, should know that I do it with both eyes and my heart fully open.
So that is settled.
What you are looking for behind the text is in it.
