Right-wing climate change denier and all-around embarrassment to The New York Times Bret Stephens continued to get dragged across all social media platforms Tuesday. This all comes after it was revealed that the columnist emailed George Washington University associate professor David Karpf and copied the provost, complaining about Karpf calling him a “bedbug” on Twitter. Karpf dropped the email on Twitter Monday night, and his revelation went viral. By Tuesday morning, tiny-headed Bret Stephens awoke to lots of “mentions,” none of them flattering. Stephens then decided to do what conservatives do: project their own vile behavior onto everyone else. So he quit Twitter, all while claiming to have been nailed to a digital cross.
MSNBC had Stephens on to explain his position—while not offering up the same opportunity to Karpf. Stephens used that airtime to be even more oblique and offensive; he claimed that he was being oppressed, and that being called things like an insect "goes back to totalitarian regimes." Sure. And let’s just forget that Stephens wrote a fascistic set of treatises defending then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh from the very compelling accusations of sexual assault leveled at him by Christine Blasey Ford.
Karpf was finally allowed to give his side of the story in an interview with Slate, where he points out how utterly full of shit Bret Stephens is—and why the email wasn’t as effective as Stephens may have hoped.
The two things that stand out are that it’s entertaining, and distracting. It does keep occurring to me the reason why this is actually pretty fun for me is that I’m a white guy with tenure, which means that—if he had sent this to me before I had a tenured job, that would have been a powerful and terrifying message, and I’m 100 percent sure that that’s what he expected it to do. When he writes a message where it says, “From Bret Stephens, New York Times,” from his New York Times account, it means that he’s trying to indicate that he’s above me in the social hierarchy. But I’m a professor of strategic political communication, and I have tenure, and I really didn’t do anything wrong. That makes the entire thing bizarre and fun. If I was pre-tenure or I was a woman and had to deal with harassment on Twitter all the time, then I imagine this would be a lot less fun.
Karpf also explains that he really overestimated Stephens’ intelligence.
Upon receiving the email, he realized how truly dumb Stephens was: The fact that Stephens copied the provost showed that this was a serious attempt at threatening him. This was just strategically idiotic for someone in the important public intellectual position that The New York Times provides.
But the fact that he was CCing the provost, and I assume that he doesn’t know I have tenure when he writes that message, means that he’s not actually asking, “Where is the civility?” He’s certainly not inviting me to come to his house and have this little conversation. What he’s trying to impress upon me is that he’s more powerful than me and I should feel fearful and ashamed.
He goes on to explain that in his opinion, the Times needs to explain to Stephens what an abuse of power this was—especially if they are going to continue to employ him.
Bret Stephens, of course, is a big-money conservative shill. He’s an intellectual lightweight and wannabe bully whose attempts at shutting down free speech failed because he’s such a failure.