New York Times conservative columnist Bret Stephens is defending himself amid backlash for alerting a professor’s boss of a tweet in which the professor called the columnist a “bedbug.”
The drama started Monday night after George Washington University professor David Karpf responded on Twitter to the news that The New York Times newsroom had bedbugs. “The bedbugs are a metaphor,” Mr. Karpf tweeted. “The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”
Mr. Karpf later tweeted that Mr. Stephens had personally emailed him about the tweet and copied his boss to let them know how “deeply offended” he was.
Alright fine… here is the email: pic.twitter.com/A4E5I6CoB6
— davekarpf (@davekarpf) August 27, 2019
In the email, Mr. Stephens invited Mr. Karpf to his home to meet his family in an effort to learn something about the person he was insulting.
“I would welcome the opportunity for you 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,” Mr. Stephens wrote in the email. “That would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your part.”
Twitters users were merciless in mocking Mr. Stephens for the email. The columnist later apologized to “anyone I’ve ever hurt” and announced he was deactivating his account.
On Tuesday, Mr. Stephens defended his actions during an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Jansing.
“I think that kind of rhetoric is dehumanizing and totally unacceptable no matter where it comes from, so I wrote him a personal email,” Mr. Stephens said of Mr. Karpf’s joke. “I didn’t go to Twitter, I wrote a personal email, which I think was very civil, saying that I didn’t appreciate it, that I would welcome him to come to my home in New York, meet with my family, and see if he would call me a bedbug to my face. Because a lot of the things people say on social media aren’t the things they’re really prepared to say in one-on-one interactions.
“I also copied his provost on the note,” he continued. “People are upset about this. I want to be clear — I had no intention whatsoever to get him in any kind of professional trouble. But it is the case that 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 journalists interact with the rest of the world.”
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