Saturday, August 31, 2019

First they came for the obscenely wealthy Times pundits, and I said...

Drawing by Eli Valley. Please do not explain in the comments what "awoke from uneasy dreams" refers to. Those who don't recognize the phrase can refresh their memory here.

Shorter Bret Stephens, "World War II and the Ingredients of Slaughter", New York Times, 30 August 2019:
In commemoration of the German invasion of Poland 80 years ago on Sunday, I would like to note, as I often do, how frighteningly similar to those dark days our situation is now: with our rising dictatorships, failure of international organizations to stop them, and Twitter, which is practically the same thing as the Reichs-Rundfunk over which Hitler's propaganda was broadcast to 60 million Germans. Among the more haunting parallels is the dehumanizing rhetoric of infestation, in which people are associated with disease, or compared to bedbugs, of which all the examples I can enumerate seem to come from right-wingers, but I happen to know that the left is even worse.
Or, more precisely,

More of this talk will surely follow, and not just from the right. The American left has become especially promiscuous when it comes to speaking pejoratively about entire categories of disfavored people.
Categories such as, if you hadn't heard, New York Times opinion columnists of a conservative bent like Mr. Bret Stephens, who was mentioned in the place Stephens is very loudly not speaking about anywhere in the column: a tweet by a little known political science professor at George Washington University in connection with the recent report of nonmetaphorical bedbugs found in the Times newsroom on West 42nd St.: "The bedbugs are a metaphor," tweeted the GWU professor, David Karpf, on Monday evening. "The bedbugs are Bret Stephens."

Pretty cute but it didn't have a wide audience (nine likes and zero retweets, said Karpf later). Nevertheless Mr. Bret, apparently googling himself in what may be an unhealthy way, ran into it, obtained the professor's email address, and sent him an angry note (which Karpf quickly posted to Twitter), CCing the university provost:
“I’m often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people — people they’ve never met — on Twitter. I think you’ve set a new standard,” Stephens wrote. “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. That would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your part.”
And the next morning deleted his own Twitter account (as he'd been threatening to do for a couple of years anyway) and appeared on Morning Joe to explain himself:

He also explained why he had copied the provost on the email, saying that he did not want to get Karpf in professional trouble, but that “managers should be aware of the way in which their people, their professors or journalists, interact with the rest of the world.”
Right. I didn't want to get him in professional trouble, I just wanted to get him fired—like Professor Steven Salaita, who was ousted from a tenured post at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and another one at the American University of Beirut when donors and senators objected to tweets he had written that were critical of Israel and who is now driving a schoolbus.

After which he got down to writing a column in which he basically says Dr. Karpf is Himmler, without recounting the incident at all, simply by working the word "bedbug" into his text, with which he got some help from Dr. Google:

I don't want to do the full fisk on the thing, but I do want to note that "especially promiscuous" in the bit quoted up top is exactly the style of dehumanizing rhetoric Stephens himself is fond of deploying, with its suggestion of a left that's uncontrollably lascivious. And he's been less subtle about it too:

Or this, where he gets down to vegetable infestations:
That's not at all what Karpf was doing, as he clarified the vehicle and tenor of his metaphor to WaPo:
“He tends to write pretty lightweight, poorly researched columns about things that I know something about,” Karpf said. “So I’ve always seen him as this person that everyone complains about but we just can’t get rid of. He’s a bedbug.”
It's not about a "class of disfavored people" dehumanized as a group (the promiscuous left, the blood-sucking Palestinians) but a single ridiculously privileged and monumentally intellectually lazy individual.

Also, I'm not making up the thing about the radio:
The (relatively) new technology of the 1930s was the radio. “It is the miracle of radio that it welds 60,000,000 Germans into a single crowd, to be played upon by a single voice,” The Times reported in 1936. This was by design. Among Goebbels’s first efforts after the Nazis came to power was to produce and distribute a cheap radio — the Volksempfänger, or people’s receiver — that could bring the Führer’s voice and message into every home....
Radio then, like Twitter today, was the technology of the id; a channel that could concentrate political fury at a time when there was plenty to go around.
Radio was Roosevelt and Churchill, too, and the Free French in London and the Błyskawica station with a secret transmitter right inside Warsaw, and if the US had its Father Coughlins it also had Mayor La Guardia reading the Sunday funnies during the 1945 newspaper delivery strike (he wasn't crossing a picket line, just thinking of the kids). It was the state monopolies in Germany or the USSR that "concentrated political fury" into "a single voice", not the liberating technology. And Twitter is inconceivably diffuse, though it does have its moments of spontaneous focus, as when the crowd responded with howls of mockery to Stephens's dick move.

The situation was farcical earlier in the week, because Stephens seemed so impotent in his indignation, demanding to speak to Karpf's manager as it were, like a Margaret Dumont character insulted by Harpo. Academic freedom is certainly under threat in our world, but Stephens couldn't really threaten Karpf, a white guy with tenure, could he? Wasn't flouncing his own ass out of the Twitter the biggest thing he could really do?

Now that Stephens has gone full Godwin, treating himself basically as a Holocaust victim, I'm not so sure, especially after what I just learned yesterday about the Salaita case. Clowns have a lot of power right now.

More from Jessica Valenti.

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