Bret Stephens Compared Me to a Nazi Propagandist in the New York Times. It Proved My Point.
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens went searching for an online insult last Monday night. He found a Twitter joke I wrote, calling him a metaphorical bedbug as a riff on the actual bedbugs reported in the Times offices. He tried to put me in my place, emailing me from his Times account and copying my university provost, daring me to come to his house, meet his wife and children, and call him a bedbug to his face. It did not go well for him, and has resulted in a riveting public meltdown.
The whole Internet, it seems, has had a nice laugh. The tweet originally garnered only nine likes and zero retweets; it now has over 32,000 likes and 4,800 retweets. There is something inherently entertaining about the self-proclaimed defender of uncomfortable speech on college campuses coming unglued when he found a sentence on the Internet that he didn’t like. Stephens may be the first person in history to publicly illustrate both the Streisand Effect and Godwin’s Law in a single episode. But the joke turned sour on Friday night, when he published a column that not-so-subtly compares me to a Nazi propagandist. There’s a lesson here, about power and introspection in modern America. But I have my doubts Stephens is ready to learn it.
Stephens’s column on Friday, “World War II and the Ingredients of Slaughter,” has been roundly mocked. It is a rare moment, in 2019, when Breitbart, Fox News, the Washington Post, and Talking Points Memo can find something to agree upon. Stephens’s core argument is that the “rhetoric of infestation” was central to the Nazi propaganda campaign, and that today this same rhetoric is used by the American left to target the most vulnerable population of all—“the moderate conservative, the skeptical liberal, the centrist wobbler.” There is no greater injustice today, it seems, than Stephens’s hurt feelings.
Stephens would do well to spend more time reading his own paper and less time trawling the depths of social media for perceived slights. He ought to read Michelle Goldberg on rising anti-Semitism and the revitalized Jewish Left. Twitter jokes from obscure academics are not where the armed violence targeting synagogues is coming from. He ought to read Sarah Jeong’s recent piece, “When the Internet Chases You From Your Home.” It takes an extraordinarily incurious mind to believe, in 2019, that the most vulnerable populations online are moderate Republicans like himself, given what women and people of color who dare to participate in public discourse routinely face.
The greatest irony is how easily this whole episode could have been avoided, or at least prematurely brought to a close. This should have been a goofy one-day story about barely anything at all. On Tuesday morning, Stephens could have simply said “I had a bad night. I shouldn’t have sent that email. I didn’t think the guy would post it to social media. That was embarrassing for me. I apologize, let’s move on.” That would have been the end of things. Barring that, he could have laid low for a week. He could have written a column about anything other than the “Bretbug” dustup. As a professor of strategic political communication, I could have told him that the only way for him to stop losing here is to stop playing.
Instead, Stephens used the largest weapon at his disposal—his New York Times column—to imply that the Jewish professor who mildly teased him online was the equivalent of a Nazi propagandist. (Godwin’s Law, by the way, is meant to describe internet discussion forums, not published columns in the paper of record.)
Stephens made no reference to anti-Semitic tropes in his original email to me. He had plenty of words for me—he declared that I lacked courage and intellectual integrity, and suggested that I was too much of a coward to say it to his face— but he did not come up with a supposed link between my joke and “totalitarian regimes” until the next morning, when Chris Jansing of MSNBC teased him about whether this was really the worst thing he had been called on social media. (He has agreed to come to George Washington University later this semester and I’ll have plenty to say to him in that setting.)
As I have noted elsewhere, this was never about online civility. It was about power. Bret Stephens believed that, by virtue of his comfortable position at the New York Times, he ought to be immune from insult or criticism. Stephens tried to use his social position at the New York Times to punish me for joking about him. Instead of apologizing when that gambit blew up in his face, he invented an entirely new rationale to justify his overreaction.
Despite everything that has happened, I am not canceling my Times subscription. The Times has too much good reporting, and too many excellent opinion columnists. Charlie Warzel’s privacy project is groundbreaking. I’m assigning the entire five-year Gamergate retrospective to my class this semester. The New York Times is supposed to cover the serious issues of the day. It’s supposed to enrich readers’ lives and challenge them with new information, ideas and perspectives. Most of the time, the paper succeeds. But there has to be some minimum threshold of quality for the paper’s columnists. If Stephens can abuse his position by searching out and threatening anyone who makes a joke about him online, and then devote an entire column to the nonsense personal vendetta that ensues, then I have to ask… how embarrassing is too embarrassing for Times editorial page editor James Bennet and his team?
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