There’s a certain type of content creator in political media who no matter how irritating and pathetic he becomes, he can always get worse. Bret Stephens is that exact type of content creator.
In a piece of content for The New York Times this week, Stephens did his favorite thing, which is claim to be at political odds with Democrats while simultaneously lauding their virtue and cheering for the defeat of Republicans. He also did it while complimenting himself on being better than others, which is another one of his favorite things.
“We are led,” wrote Stephens on Tuesday, “by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.”
I’m so glad he was able to get that radiant bit of originality off his chest. God knows another content creator at the New York Times publicly declaring his antipathy for the president is exactly what the world needs. It’s been in awfully short supply these days.
The root of Stephens’ angst was Trump’s statement following the murders of movie maker Rob Reiner, who was a maniacal Democrat of the first order, and his wife, Michele. In that statement, Trump said the Reiners died “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME…”
Because of it and other moments of Trump’s conduct, wrote Stephens, “our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized.” Of Reiner, whose every TV appearance featured nothing but disdain for people who didn’t vote Democrat, Stephens, a professed “conservative,” described him as “honorable and sincere.”
It’s not so much that Stephens admired Reiner. To each their own. It’s that he’s pretending to be an authority on honor, sincerity, standards, and manners when he’s the opposite. He’s a petty, low-rent jerk. Stephens is the guy who literally tried getting a random man fired because he tweeted a joke that likened Stephens to a bedbug.
I’m not making that up. In 2019, a little known college professor posted a joke on Twitter about the New York Times office building having bedbugs. “The bedbugs are Bret Stephens,” it said. The post itself got next to no engagement — less than 10 “likes” and no re-shares. Yet Stephens emailed the professor with a passive aggressive invitation to “call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face.” He copied the professor’s boss on the letter.
When he was mocked for that, Stephens excused his ridiculous behavior on live national television. “There’s a bad history of being analogized to insects,” he said on MSNBC, “that goes back to a lot of totalitarian regimes in the past.” Yes, he pulled the “totalitarian” card, and in a follow-up piece of content for the Times, he referenced a Nazi Germany quote related to bedbugs.
Earlier that same year, Stephens emailed a blogger who was ridiculing him over content pieces he had written on Israel — Stephens has also written a widely criticized piece about the intellectual superiority of Jews — and with cosmic kinds of condescension. “This is very sad, and embarrassing, because (for now) you have so little to show intellectually or professionally speaking,” he wrote in the missive. Stephens was also sure to note that he’s “a national judge of the Livingston Award” and had “chaired two Pulitzer juries.”
This is a New York Times content creator punching so far down it’s a wonder he never struck oil. Stephens isn’t thin skinned. He’s a tacky classist of sociopathic proportion. He has no manners, and he has no taste. He’s just a pretend conservative rooting for anti-American Democrats, dead or alive, in pieces of content for the New York Times.
He’s a bedbug.
