Since joining the New York Times in 2017, conservative op-ed columnist Bret Stephens has gained quite the reputation for his climate change denialism, his skepticism of the #MeToo movement, and for having incredibly thin skin when it comes to his many critics—just last month, he wrote a column comparing mean Tweets directed toward him to the French Reign of Terror. Yesterday, after it was reported the Times had a bedbug infestation, George Washington University associate professor Dave Karpf joked on Twitter that, "The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens." Stephens responded to the Tweet, which had nine likes and no retweets at the time, by emailing Karpf and his university provost.
"Someone just pointed out a tweet you wrote about me, calling me a ‘bedbug,'" Stephens wrote. “I’m often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people—people they’ve never met—on Twitter. I think you’ve set a new standard."
“I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for a few minutes, and then call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face,” he continued. “That would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your part. I promise to be courteous no matter what you have to say.”
Suffice to say, Twitter had a field day with this one.
“If he’d sent that just to me, I would probably send him a reply explaining, ‘Look, it’s a joke, you’re a public intellectual and that means people get to make silly jokes about you, good day sir,’” Karpf told Splinter. “But he cc'd my provost, which is an offensive power move. So I felt the most appropriate thing to do was to share on Twitter, ‘Look, a thin-skinned writer at the New York Times didn’t like a tweet that I wrote that got 0 retweets and 9 likes, and he cc'd the provost, and now here we are.’”
Karpf added that he probably won’t take Stephens up on his invitation to come to his house and call him a bedbug in front of his family. “I have an actual job that keeps me busy. I don’t get to spend all day Google-searching my name or accepting passive-aggressive dinner invitations,” he told Splinter.
Many pointed out the blatant hypocrisy of Stephens, someone who has passionately argued against "safe spaces," searching his own name on Twitter in order to yell at his critics and attempt to get them in trouble at their jobs. “I think that the worst way of dealing with hateful speech is to try and shut it down,” Stephens said in an interview with The Michigan Daily in 2018. “The answer to hate speech is more speech. Hateful speakers thrive on controversy that some universities thoughtlessly afford them by trying to ban them. Censorship is oxygen to hate speech.”
"People like Bret Stephens believe in the marketplace of ideas until they realize you can’t ask to speak to a manager," tweeted Samuel Adams. "Gonna go ahead and guess that if you think being called a bedbug sets a new standard of incivility, no one has ever threatened to rape you on twitter dot com," added Julia Carrie Wong.
This was not the first time Stephens has gotten into a public fight with a critic from Twitter and tried to email shame them into apologizing.
Early this morning, Stephens announced that he was shutting down his Twitter (which he had previously vowed to do as well). “Twitter is a sewer," he wrote in his final tweet. "It brings out the worst in humanity. I sincerely apologize for any part I’ve played in making it worse, and to anyone I’ve ever hurt. Thanks to all of my followers, but I’m deactivating this account."
However, he wasn't done defending himself: he appeared on MSNBC this morning to try to explain what happened. "I think that kind of rhetoric is dehumanizing and totally unacceptable no matter where it comes from," he said. He noted that he "wrote him a personal email, which I think was very civil, saying that I didn’t appreciate it," then defended his decision to email the provost:
I also copied his provost on the note. People are upset about this. I want to be clear, I had no intention to get him in any kind of professional trouble. But it is the case at the New York Times and other institutions that people should be aware, managers should be aware, of the way in which their people, their professors or journalists, interact with the rest of the world. And that’s certainly the case with me at the New York Times. My editors are always aware of what I’m saying and I’ve sometimes been called to account, and rightly so.
He added, "There is a bad history of being analogized to insects that goes back to totalitarian regimes in the past." As Jezebel wrote, this is an absurd argument: "The baffling, ludicrous, utterly unserious claim that a guy joshing you on Twitter is anything close to “totalitarian regimes” is absolutely insane, but it’s also a good indicator of where, precisely, Stephens is operating from: a sense that any personal slight to him, no matter how small, is nothing less than a national emergency and a worrying indicator of The Times in Which We Live."
We'll leave you with this flashback.
