Bret Stephens, a columnist for the New York Times, deactivated his Twitter account after being mocked for taking offense to a man who called him a “bedbug.”
Stephens, 45, who has championed free speech, was enraged by a tweet by George Washington University professor David Karpf, who compared an infestation of bedbugs at the New York Times office to the conservative columnist.
“The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens,” Karpf jibed.
The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens. https://t.co/k4qo6QzIBW
— davekarpf (@davekarpf) August 26, 2019
Karpf said Stephens emailed him, copying his boss, the university provost. In the email, Stephens said that “someone” alerted him to the tweet. He invited Karpf 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.”
Alright fine… here is the email: pic.twitter.com/A4E5I6CoB6
— davekarpf (@davekarpf) August 27, 2019
Stephens was widely mocked for the email, which prompted him to announce, via Twitter and then MSNBC, that he was deactivating his account Tuesday.
“Time to do what I long ago promised to do. Twitter is a sewer. 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,” Stephens wrote before his account went dark.
Stephens, appearing on MSNBC, addressed the controversy. He called the bedbug comment “dehumanizing rhetoric” and drew parallels to dictatorships throughout history.
“There is a bad history of being called a — of being analogized to insects. It goes back to a lot of totalitarian regimes in the past,” Stephens said. “I’ve been called worse, I wrote this guy a personal note, now it’s out there for everyone to see.”
The New York Times has been twice embroiled in controversy surrounding Twitter recently. Tom Wright-Piersanti, a politics editor, apologized for “offensive” tweets he made about a decade ago, including celebrating “Happy Jew Year.”
Before that row, the New York Times demoted its deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman for “serious lapses in judgment” over tweets, including one that said Democratic congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were not truly from the Midwest.
