Conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has quit Twitter over bedbugs. Well, kind of.

It came to a head on Monday evening, after Stephens emailed a George Washington University professor and his provost to complain about an unkind joke the professor made on Twitter comparing him to a metaphorical “bedbug.” But about 12 hours later, after the professor posted Stephens’s email to Twitter, Stephens ended up being the one facing consequences.

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“Time to do what I long ago promised to do,” tweeted Stephens before he deactivated his account. “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.”

Twitter users — and in particular journalists of many stripes — do often “quit” Twitter, even temporarily and in a high-profile way, over ill-advised tweets, so in that way, Stephens’s actions weren’t atypical. But to many observers, there was a particular irony to this one.

Free speech crusader Stephens — an anti-Trump conservative who has come under heavy criticism for his views about climate science and race, among other things — went to extreme lengths to make a stink over an obvious, harmless joke. After all, Stephens famously tweeted before he left the Wall Street Journal for the New York Times in 2017 that “[t]he right to offend is the most precious right. Without it, free speech is meaningless.” He even wrote columns on that theme.

What’s more, even after deactivating his account, Stephens still doesn’t seem to grasp why so many found the email he sent to be so distasteful in the first place.

During an appearance on MSNBC later Tuesday morning, the oft-criticized columnist claimed, implausibly, that he had “no intention whatsoever to get [the professor] in any kind of professional trouble” when he tattled to the man’s boss — as if there were any other reason for copying the provost in the first place — and compared the professor’s harmless joke to the rhetoric of “totalitarian regimes.”

Wow. A friend just sent this to me



Bret Stephens was asked about the Bedbug controversy on MSNBC by @ChrisJansing



Bret says he wasn’t trying to get @davekarpf in any professional trouble when he copied his provost on the email he sent him.



What? pic.twitter.com/xNckkEpHYN — Yashar Ali (@yashar) August 27, 2019

The chain of events that led to Stephens deactivating his account, explained

The saga that culminated in Stephens deactivating his Twitter account began on Monday when Stuart A. Thompson, an assistant editor for New York Times Opinion, tweeted that there were bedbugs in the Times’s newsroom.

About four hours later, Dave Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, responded to Thompson’s tweet with a joke about how “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”

The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens. https://t.co/k4qo6QzIBW — davekarpf (@davekarpf) August 26, 2019

Stephens emailed him and his provost at 9:10 pm to complain about it.

“Someone just pointed out a tweet you wrote about me, calling me a ‘bedbug,’” Stephens began. “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.”

Stephens went on to invite Karpf to come over to his house, meet his family, and insult him to his face.

“Maybe it will make you feel better about yourself,” he added.

It’s not like Karpf’s tweet, which didn’t even tag Stephens’s account, went viral. It had garnered a mere handful of likes and zero retweets when Stephens sent the email, which Karpf posted on Twitter. From there, the story exploded.

Alright fine... here is the email: pic.twitter.com/A4E5I6CoB6 — davekarpf (@davekarpf) August 27, 2019

In an email exchange with Vox, Karpf explained that he wouldn’t have posted Stephens’s email to Twitter if Stephens hadn’t copied his provost.

“Cc’ing the Provost meant that he was trying to use his social status to get me in trouble. And that means it isn’t about civility at all; it’s about power,” Karpf wrote. “If he hadn’t cc’ed the Provost, I wouldn’t have felt it was worth sharing. If he hadn’t cc’ed the Provost, the entire Internet wouldn’t have felt it was such an outrage.”

Suffice it to say that after Karpf posted his email, Stephens was widely and brutally dragged.

Bret Stephens: The biggest threat facing our society today is the stifling of free speech on college campuses.



Also Bret Stephens: I’m going to try and get a college professor fired for a joke he tweeted that didn’t get a single retweet. — Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) August 27, 2019

bret stephens would not survive 3 minutes of being a woman on twitter tbh — Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev) August 27, 2019

But rather than facing his critics, Stephens decided to retreat to a safe space.

“What surprises me is that he really doesn’t seem to understand what he did wrong here — either strategically or ethically,” Karpf wrote. “If he had emailed me privately, I would have been happy to have a conversation with him about civility on the internet. I think enduring silly jokes comes with the territory when you have a high-status position with the NYTimes Opinion section. I would’ve been fine explaining that and discussing how/whether social media has coarsened the discourse.”

Stephens did not immediately respond to an email from Vox seeking comment. Meanwhile, the George Washington University provost he emailed, Forrest Maltzman, posted an open letter to Stephens on the university’s Twitter account defending Karpf and inviting Stephens to come to campus and deliver a talk “about civil discourse in the digital age.”

Why anyone cares about Bret Stephens in the first place

The New York Times’s decision to hire Stephens was widely criticized when it was announced in the spring of 2017. At the Wall Street Journal, for instance, Stephens wrote columns characterizing anti-Semitism as the “disease of the Arab mind” and another describing the “campus rape epidemic” as one of “liberalism’s imaginary enemies.”

As my colleague David Roberts wrote at the time of Stephens’s hiring by the Times, his addition to the opinion section of the Grey Lady didn’t really seem to add much to the publication:

For one thing, though the paper defends the hire in the name of opinion diversity, Stephens is a very familiar sort of establishment conservative — a cosmopolitan, well-educated, reflexively pro-Israel war hawk (who once wrote a column on “the disease of the Arab mind”) who thinks anti-racists are the real racists but moderates on select issues to demonstrate his independence. It is difficult to imagine a perspective more over-represented in DC political circles, at least relative to its representation in the actual conservative movement. In terms of intellectual contribution, his main credential seems to be that he has opposed Donald Trump. It takes a particular sort of insularity to hire a pro-war, anti-Trump white guy as a contribution to diversity on the NYT editorial page.

Stephens did himself no favors with his first Times column, in which he made a number of arguments aimed at poking holes in widely accepted climate science. Then-Vox reporter Jeff Stein (who is now at the Washington Post) challenged Stephens on those views, and Stephens responded with an anecdote about how a climate activist he knows just had a baby:

Jeff Stein This seems to be similar to what you’ve said on climate change — that there’s a set of what you think are dubious statistics leading to “alarmist rhetoric.” Bret Stephens A guy I know just had a baby and he’s a big global warming, climate change activist. If he thinks in 20 years we’ll be heading toward unsustainable climates and there will be tens of millions of people being displaced, presumably including himself, at the most apocalyptic level, then presumably he wouldn’t be having children. It contradicts the belief that we are heading ineluctably for an apocalyptic environmental future. Since 1880 — and I’d have to look it up — but according to the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], we’ve had about 1.7 degrees of rising temperatures. The best scientific evidence suggests temperatures are rising, and the best scientific evidence suggests man-made anthropogenic carbon emissions have some substantial thing to do with that. However, does that mean the trend will continue forever? We don’t know. Does this mean we will reach the upper bounds of what climate scientists fear? We aren’t sure. There are uncertainties in all of this. If I say, “Hey, there are uncertainties about forecasting the future,” that ought to be — in any other context — a statement of common sense. But now if you say there are uncertainties, you are akin to what’s called “a denier.” I think that term is incredibly ugly, because it almost explicitly connects doubts about the severity of climate change — not the reality of it — to doubts about the existence of the Holocaust.

While climate is far from the only area in which Stephens’s views have been widely criticized — his views on rape culture, Arab people, and Black Lives Matter have also been panned — Karpf told the Washington Post that he finds Stephens’s views on climate particularly wanting.

That time Bret Stephens defended Tucker Carlson's comments that Iraqi's were "semi-literate primitive monkeys" among other things pic.twitter.com/M2mmFTgE2X — Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) August 27, 2019

“He tends to write pretty lightweight, poorly researched columns about things that I know something about,” Karpf told the Post. “So I’ve always seen him as this person that everyone complains about but we just can’t get rid of. He’s a bedbug.”

During his Tuesday morning interview on MSNBC, Stephens tried to justify his decision to copy Karpf’s provost on the email by saying, “It is the case that 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 their journalists — interact with the rest of the world.” He went on to compare Karpf’s innocuous “bedbug” joke to the sort of rhetoric used “by totalitarian regimes in the past.”

The New York Times has had a couple of Twitter blowups recently

Remarkably, the Stephens fiasco isn’t even the first time this month that a high-profile New York Times staffer has gotten into trouble for responding to critical tweets with emails that copy critics’ bosses. As I detailed less than two weeks ago, deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman was demoted after he responded to author and New York Times contributor Roxane Gay’s criticism of racially insensitive tweets he posted by emailing her and her assistant and demanding an apology.

Stephens apparently didn’t learn from the Weisman episode. And Karpf told Vox he doesn’t really buy that Stephens will learn from this one either.

“If he spends his normal evenings google-searching his name on social media, he isn’t going to be able to stay away for long,” Karpf wrote. “I’m not sure whether he’ll learn anything from this episode. I don’t think he understands why this was entirely his own fault.”

If Stephens’s comments on MSNBC are any indication, Karpf is probably right.

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