08/31/2019
Above, George H. W. Bush, Yale '48.
When bedbugs were discovered in The New York Times office, I was reminded of my 2010 article "Send America The Bedbug Letter!," in which I pointed out that bedbugs were back in America because of immigration, and at the time, I was amused to note that they'd been discovered in the offices of the immigration-enthusiast Wall Street Journal.
A left-wing Professor named David Karpf joked that "The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens."
Because Professor Karpf is a left-wing professor, neither his Tweet nor his account have been deleted by the digital bookburners at Twitter:
Bret Stephens famously went crazy, emailing Karpf’s employer, abandoning Twitter, and now, writing a self-justifying column in The New York Times. See Steve Sailer’s Bret Stephens: "Call Me a 'Bedbug' to My Face" and Bret Stephens Doubles-Down on the Bedbug Joke Menace.
Stephens, who is Jewish, says “Analogizing people to insects is always wrong … Being analogized to insects goes back to a lot of totalitarian regimes in the past."
But interviewed by The Forward, Karpf denied that he was anti-Semitic, for two good reasons:
Karpf, who is also Jewish, said he didn’t realize that Stephens was Jewish.
“Stylistically, his work often seems very WASPy to me,” he said.
Now, I’m not going to say that calling someone a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) is in any way analogizing people to insects. What I am going to say is that it reminds me of Roseanne Barr comparing Valerie Jarrett to someone in the Planet of The Apes movie, being fired for racism, and protesting that she never knew the pale Ms. Jarrett, pictured right, was officially black.
Part of the problem is that Bret Stephens is an extremely WASP name. (Stephen’s grandfather changed his name from Ehrlich to Stephens when he moved to America. See Being Bret Stephens — Or Not, by Stephens himself, WSJ, June 26, 2009.)
I think what Karpf meant by WASPy is that Stephens, while a crazed Never Trumper, is sorta-kinda conservative, to the point that Leftists were outraged that he should have a post at the New York Times. See this Vox interview: The NYT’s new columnist defends his views on Arabs, Black Lives Matter, campus rape, by Jeff Stein, April 26, 2017.
I think by "WASPy" Karpf meant "pro-American," or "not reflexively anti-white."
Based on his writings over the years, I would like to declare Stephens "Not Guilty."
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