On Friday, compulsive provost cc'er and New York Times writer Bret Stephens published an audacious and summarily self-discrediting column in which he implicitly likened the barrage of criticism he recently received on Twitter, a social media site, to the experiences of Jews at the hands of Goebbels and Himmler.
It all started when Stephens went prowling for instances of Twitter users besmirching his good name. When he seized on a tweet from George Washington University professor David Karpf, a tweet boasting nine likes and zero retweets, a tweet which did not tag Stephens directly, a tweet whose sum total of offensiveness was that it described Stephens as a “bedbug,” with the implication being that Stephens has “infested” the Times with bad takes, Stephens had a number of not-insane options open to him.
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