Yesterday George Washington University associate professor David Karpf called New York Times climate denier Bret Stephens a bedbug on Twitter. It passed by without much notice until Karpf revealed he had gotten an email from Stephens—copied to his provost—complaining about the insult and inviting Karpf to "come to my home, meet my wife," and "call me a 'bedbug' to my face."
This is real. One of The New York Times' most reliably shallow and reliably misleading op-ed columnists sent an email to a professor and his superior complaining about being called a "bedbug" on a zero-retweet Twitter post. A dull-minded pundit who has been very, very certain that other efforts to harm careers based on speech were an assault on (conservative) rights. And it led, rightfully, to New York Times columnist Bret Stephens being the most mocked figure on Twitter by the next morning, upon which Stephens announced he was leaving the platform, a "sewer" that "brings out the worst in humanity."
But that wasn't all. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who during his entire tenure at the Times has contributed nothing above the standard of "college dorm know-it-all explains why the world's experts are wrong," was invited on to MSNBC to defend his email to the professor. He said being called a "metaphorical bedbug" in a clearly joking manner was "dehumanizing rhetoric" that "goes back to totalitarian regimes." (MSNBC did not offer the pundit’s target the same invitation.)
And here we see, once again, the intellectual rot that has overtaken the nation's ever-asinine punditry and has turned the op-ed pages of our major newspapers into an international toxin.
In professional punditry, you can advocate for the torture of war prisoners. You can claim it is no longer a crime because it just isn’t; you can do it with as much conviction as you like. There will be no professional consequences.
You can advocate for war, and with gusto. You can advocate for war based on false information. You can advocate for war based on speculation. You can acknowledge it may kill tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, and that those deaths will certainly be worth whatever geopolitical advantage needs to be gained or whatever "message" needs to be sent. You can lie, if needed. There will be no consequences.
You can declare, in the pages of The New York Times, that sorting refugee families into remote desert camps, dividing children from parents, is necessary because of the unique dangers those refugees pose to the nation. You can falsely assert that they pose a threat of violence; you can claim the danger they pose is "cultural," due to their inherent foreignness. There will be no consequences.
You can advocate for stripping food from the poor in an effort to improve their "work ethic." You can advocate for the death of unprofitable insurance patients as a cost-saving measure to boost other Americans' paychecks. You can boldly and repeatedly misinform the public about any scientific endeavor you like, in opposition to expert conclusions and based on whichever crackpot notions you wish to promote—no consequences. You can do so even if the consequences are considerably worse than even a hundred thousand war dead.
It is taken as given that there must be no consequence for steering the nation into plainly immoral acts. Punditry is the perch from which you can advocate for acts so monstrous that they would result in your expulsion from any other group. You can, quite literally, advocate for torture and for internment. You can suggest genocide. You can, and are expected to, point your finger toward which individuals in your nation ought to be expelled, or ought to starve, or ought to die outright. You can mislead the public, on purpose, not in one column, but in dozens, or in a hundred, and your paper will neither correct you nor admonish you. That is the pundit's pact.
None of these things are considered uncivil, immoral, or unethical. There will be no recoiling by your peers; you will continue to be invited to the same parties. You can be proven wrong in every column, and nobody will consider you stupid or misinformed or manifestly unqualified for your post; you are just contrarian.
What you may not do, and what each pundit will insist is the true danger to our nation, our system of government, and our civil discourse, is criticize the powerful. That is the thing that must not be allowed to stand, lest civility fall by the wayside.
And this message is incessant. It is omnipresent. The pundits of the major papers and networks will rise en masse, indignant, at the notion that those that advocated for war on false pretenses or those that encouraged the international war crime of torture should face professional consequences for their part in goosing the nation into criminal acts. A Bret Stephens will forever rise to the defense of a Tucker Carlson, when the latter provocatively dances over the line of overt racism and back, with the insistence that public consequence, in the form of boycotts or phone calls or the word "racist" itself, is the real wound to the nation. He will insist that the common rabble is attempting to inflict financial repercussions based on public notions of morality and ethics that the pundit class has declared itself, collectively, to have risen above.
It is the same metric used for public officials themselves. Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders lied to the public on a regular, incessant basis as part of an intentional strategy to mislead it. To defraud it. That is not deemed to be sufficient reason to deport her from the world of politics or of future punditry. It is not considered dangerous behavior, this clear move from political posturing to government-sponsored propagandizing directed toward the citizenry.
An unknown business owner making Sanders unwelcome in their establishment as a direct response to her unethical acts, however, is considered a shocking assault on our freedoms. The powerful can all agree on that: We are allowed to advocate for war crimes and atrocities. We are allowed to mislead and to lie. It is you responding to powerful figures with condemnation or with anger that is "uncivil."
It is class against class. Their caste is allowed to offer up every indecency; your caste should know its place. The Times, especially, has not attempted to hide its irritation at your caste piping up with responses at all, polite or otherwise.
As a self-defense mechanism, it is perfectly rational. The theory that pundits should be subject to public or, god forbid, career repercussions for being wrong, for lying, or for advocating monstrous acts is an existential class threat. It is the one thing that absolutely cannot be allowed to happen; therefore, it is the one thing that each pundit threatened by such notions can agree would most certainly doom our very nation.
Putting children into desert concentration camps is not worthy of debate. Killing a hundred thousand in an effort to build a geographically advantageous beachhead for capitalism is an agree to disagree discussion worthy of any op-ed page.
It is the people who say shit or damn or call someone a bedbug who are uncivil. This behavior needs to be leashed before it gets out of hand.
This is how we got into the Iraq War and—more to the point—how we will get into the next one. This is how white nationalism has moved from fringe racist lunacy to White House policy, and how the next dozen steps downward into new cruelties will be defended, robustly, in the papers of the day. This is why human-caused climate change is still sold as "controversial," despite there being no sincerely premised "controversy" for the last half-century, and despite it being the reason droughts, floods, crop failures, and submerging coastlines will now take place to a degree that could have been prevented—because of the pundit conceit that doddering scribbled what-ifs from the Upper Caste is of equal weight to the totality of the scientific record. This is malevolent slop, this ultraprivileged notion of a Class of Professional Thing-Knowers and Speculators who can dip into any debate or controversy and proclaim expertise and who claim absolute professional immunity if their halfwitted diagnoses lead to catastrophic outcomes.
It is being called a bedbug that must not stand. You call a New York Times scribbler a bedbug, and the whole edifice may crumble. You are not allowed to pass judgment here; you are not of the proper caste to do it. There will be repercussions if you try. There has to be.
If it were to ever dawn on the public that the Thing-Knowers never knew the Things to begin with, or if the advertisers or the subscribers began to worry that perhaps relentless advocacy for inhuman acts was not mere word-sport but oft resulted in those very acts manifesting, the rest of it would fall apart. Their wisdom is a currency that has worth only because the holders insist it does; their work is above ethical concerns and repercussions only because the practitioners decided it would be so.
And these bedbugs would rather kill us all than admit any of that.