The center-right commentators of this world are few, but they have made a big fuss about hating this country’s youth. The young people, they say, see “privilege” wherever there is individual merit. They possess a “reflexive and unnuanced sense of outrage.” Last week, Bret Stephens of The New York Times stood up and bravely declared, once and for all, that he really does bear the youth ill will. In an op-ed provocatively titled, “Dear Millennials: The Feeling Is Mutual,” Stephens delivered a generational jeremiad, with millennials in one corner and everyone else in the other.

The obligation to defend one’s entire generation should not come around all that often. But we must live in extraordinary times, for that onus keeps showing up on the doorstep of America’s youth, like so many spammy flyers melting in the drizzle.

Stephens’s peg is an old Joe Biden clip, recently resurfaced online, in which Uncle Joe disdains “the younger generation” who want to tell him “how tough things are.” Approving of this geronto-centric sentiment, Stephens, who is a full 30 years and a couple of generations younger than Biden, claimed that “no faction on the Democratic side more richly deserves rebuking than the one Biden singled out.”

Which “faction” is that, exactly—every person born after 1982? No: He means those millennials who engage “in histrionic self-pity and moral self-righteousness, usually communicated via social media with maximum snark.” Lest that demographic sound made up, Stephens clarified. “Gawker spawn and HuffPo twerps: This especially means you.”

Who? Perhaps Bret Stephens is talking about the editor of the Times Style section, formerly Gawker’s editor-in-chief. Perhaps he means his Times colleagues Caity Weaver and Kevin Draper, both spawn of Gawker properties. As for HuffPost, I can only imagine what former Times editor and current HuffPost boss Lydia Polgreen did to Stephens in order to earn the epithet “twerp.”