(dramatic music) - Hello, news fans! It is time to news! There are a lot of important
things happening in the world. In Hong Kong, protesters
are in a desperate fight for their rights as
they're attacked by police, children are still in cages
at ICE detention centers, and Trump is trying to deport kids with life-threatening illnesses. The Amazon Rainforest is on fire and the Bolsonaro government
is trying to charge forward with deforestation while
trampling on indigenous rights. Radioactive boars are, what's
that, person just off-frame? (gasps) Bret Stephens' feelings were hurt? Well, forget that dumb stuff
we were gonna talk about. Bret Stephens, New York Times columnist, climate-change skeptic, and
champion against safe spaces and college student snowflakes got called a bedbug on Twitter. I repeat, someone was
mean to him on Twitter! Now, this may seem like not news but believe me, it's a
thing that's in the news. So here we go. You see, it all started back in the warm days of late August 2019 when the old New York Times building became infested with bedbugs, or as they liked to call
them back in the day, the Jiminy beetles. Now, one of The New York Times editors, Stuart A. Thompson,
announced through Twitter, "Breaking: there are bedbugs "in the New York Times newsroom." So, the folks of Twitter began
a tweetin' and a hollerin', doing what was known back in the day as a good, old-fashioned dragging. Professor of public affairs at
George Washington University, David Karpf, participated
in this Twitter custom by writing, quoth, "The
bedbugs are a metaphor. "The bedbugs are Bret Stephens." To most, this joke was a
mild razzing of a columnist who gets paid to write about how climate change isn't so bad, how millennials are whiny snowflakes, and how the answer to complex
geopolitics is more nukes. Now, before we get into
the bedbug of it all, a quick rundown of Bret Stephens and his good, good brain
and very nice opinions. He's a right-wing Conservative. No, he changed that brand to moderate, despite agreeing with, well, basically every right-wing policy, whose catch-phrase is essentially, hey, guys, can't we all calm down and just not worry so dang
much about having health care? And that climate change is no big deal, and trying to stop our planet from becoming a withered husk
is being a shrill alarmist. To give you a sense of how
deeply entrenched he is in the idea that we should plow forward with regressive policies, in this op ed, he argues that capitalist growth helps offset climate change, because rich countries survive
natural disasters more. In other words, let's
continue to extract wealth from the rest of the world because after we're done deforesting and mining and burning fossil fuels and exacerbating climate change, even though we'll have screwed
over the rest of the world, we'll be fine here on our pile of riches, because, as he states in his op-ed, every child knows that houses of brick are safer than houses of wood or straw. Duh, climate scientists! Even babies know that bricks
are better than straw. Check and, you know what? Wait, where's, mate! He's a champion against such things as taking sexual assault
accusations seriously. Take for instance, this
op-ed, in which Bret Stephens, the never Trumper, turns out
to be a sometimes Trumper, when it means standing up to alleged victims of sexual assault. That's right, Bret Stephens
was grateful that big-daddy, (groans) I'm sorry, ah. The big bully Trump stood
up to those mean people who believed Christine Blasey Ford might be telling the truth
about Brett Kavanaugh, creating reasonable doubt
about the man's character and perhaps one should choose any of the other thousands of judges available for the highest court in the land, it is also a lifetime appointment. Interestingly, while he's
very cautious when it comes to believing Christine
Blasey Ford's testimony, saying, "I believe Blasey
deserves to be fairly heard, "not automatically believed, "concluding if she can't demonstrate "that her charges are true,
with definitive evidence, "then she will have smeared Kavanaugh." But these harsh standards applied to a potential sexual
assault victim are relaxed when it comes to believing unproven claims by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that Iran is storing atomic materials in a warehouse in Turquz Abad. Though there's no definitive evidence that this is an atomic warehouse, Stephens doesn't demand that Netanyahu needs to demonstrate his charges are true with definitive evidence or
else he will have smeared Iran. So, when Professor David Karpf calls Bret Stephens a bedbug,
isn't that a bit extreme? I mean, Stephens is just a
New York Times columnist. He latches onto an issue, sucks out all the important context and meaningful information, and (bleeps) out columns
like a tiny parasite, like a, it is on the tip of my tongue. Well, anyway, what should have
been a one-off Twitter joke has become something of a imbroglio, a kerfuffle, a brouhaha, a snake eating its own tail and vomiting up into its own butt. Bret Stephens then wrote a
letter to Professor Karpf, ccing Karpf's boss, the
provost of the university. You see, Bret Millennials Are
Whiny Snowflakes Stephens, was a tad offended by the
Twitter joke, and wrote, "Someone just pointed out
a tweet you wrote about me, "calling me a bedbug. "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. "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." He added, "That would
take some genuine courage "and intellectual integrity on your part. "I promise to be courteous no
matter what you have to say." End quote. Okay, so this is a bit hypocritical of the man who once wrote, "These younger generations that specialize "in histrionic self-pity and
moral self-righteousness." Who railed against those who, "Recklessly participate in the
search-and-destroy missions "of the call-out culture." He's the man who bravely
stands against those who, "Have figured out that the quickest way "to acquire and exercise
power is to take offense." Is he being hypocritical? Yes. Is it hilarious that the
champion against safe-spaces quit Twitter after being mocked for tattling on Professor Karpf? Yes. But who cares? We're all hypocritical at times, probably. I mean, we don't all have
New York Times columns in which we relentlessly
bash younger generations and scoff at people who
care too much about things. But okay, he can dish it
out and he can't take it. At least in that email he
wrote to that professor, and the professor's boss, that he promised to be courteous no matter what you have to say. At least he didn't backtrack
on that promise by, I don't know, saying
something ridiculous like comparing the professor to Goebbels or... (pen clatters) Okay, well there it is. In the world's first
ever New York Times op-ed that sub-tweeted someone and
compared him to Goebbels, Bret Stephens makes it very clear that being called a bedbug
for his terrible op-eds is just as bad as the viciously
anti-Semitic, nationalist, and genocidal rhetoric
of Nazi, Joseph Goebbels. In Bret Stephens' piece, the modern-day victims of
this rhetoric are centrists, quote, "The unpopular
political figures of our day "are the people who seem to convey "less than 100% true belief:
the moderate conservative, "the skeptical liberal,
the centrist wobbler." Of course, he briefly mentions that migrants are targeted
by racist rhetoric, sparing 11 words on the
subject out of a total of 909. Although he doesn't go as
far as to mention the fact that children are still
in concentration camps on the US border, a
slightly more pressing issue than people disliking coffee man Howard Schultz's presidential campaign. In fact, this lip service to migrants is just a vehicle to his real point, that him getting called a
bedbug for his bad op-eds is the same thing as fascist propaganda. Now, you may be thinking, look, Cody, that's a pretty cynical take! And sure, maybe I'm
jumping to conclusions, or maybe Bret Stephens
just searched for, quote, "Jews as bedbugs." and used the first result he found without actually checking to see if his source supported his point. Apparently, the link in his article takes you to a Google book
with the term Jews as bedbugs still entered into the search field. And his own source
undermines his point, saying, "Professor Jerzy Tomaszewski "believes that the bedbugs are burning "should be taken literally. "There was an infestation of
bedbugs in Warsaw at the time." The New York Times claims that
the link was added by editors before publication to
give readers a reference, to which this very smart and also extremely cool guy pointed out, "Why did editors at The New York Times "search for the phrase Jews as bedbugs "instead of for the specific
quote cited in the column?" That stupidity and obvious lie from The New York Times
aside, in case it's not clear, here's the difference between the genocidal
fascist rhetoric of Goebbels and a joke on Twitter about
Bret Stephens being a bedbug. The prior sought to label all Jews and communists as enemies of the state, as dangerous subhuman criminals and aimed to bait Jews and
communists into conflict, then claim this violence was a reason to have the government crack
down on these very groups. He used his position of power
and control of the media to censor any opposition to Hitler, and to control all aspects of
culture and intellectualism. Meanwhile, Bret Stephens, a guy with his own New York Times column, was called a bedbug for his op-eds by an associate professor of media and public affairs at GWU. Bret Stephens then used his
platform of millions of readers to call the Jewish professor a Nazi. This is actually a pretty
interesting fascist move on Stephens' part, self-victimization from
positions of power. But anyway, why is this important? Why are we talking about this? After all, the planet is
literally burning right now. Well, the reason that I wanted
to talk about Bret Stephens and media figures like him is that he latches onto
the public consciousness and sucks attention away
from more important issues, like a parasitic creature,
it's on the tip of my tongue. Anyways, his writings on how complacency is
equivalent to reasonableness, and that somehow caring too much about the world and the
environment is irrational, embed themselves into the
media by rebranding centrism and moderation as the radical viewpoint. They assuage readers, who may be anxious about
the state of the world, say, global warming or wealth inequality, that actually, everything's okay, that it's fine to be ambivalent, or perhaps even noble to be. That if someone tries to tell you that something needs to be done, that the situation is dire,
they're a shrill alarmist, and you can meet them with a
cool, rational indifference. This kind of philosophy
is a mental sedative, blocking critical thinking in favor of this is fine, everything's fine, even if your skin is itching all over and you're noticing bite marks everywhere. It's the kind of philosophy
that is so seductive, it entrenches itself deeply
under the skin of our culture, that it's almost impossible to remove, like a small creature that,
I'm sure I will think of. Okay, I will think of it. I will think of the word. Anyway, after getting called a bedbug, Bret Stephens has made a
number of media appearances about the op-ed where he
sub-tweets the guy he's mad at and continues to have
his gigantic platform. And this isn't the first time that he's used his position of power to punch down at his critics on Twitter. Last month, he compared mean tweets to him to the French Reign of Terror! He starts his piece out
with this touching anecdote. "I was walking through an airport terminal "trying to catch a connecting
flight last Saturday "when I spotted a writer I had never met "but whose work I admire. "He greeted me with a
look of fatherly concern, "'Sorry about what's
happening to you on Twitter.'" The writer told Bret. His op-ed was about how he
was attacked by Reza Aslan, a writer who said, "Holy moly. "Bret Stephens jumps out "of the white nationalist closet here "with all his they are not us (bleeps) "Wowzers." Stephens found this to be Orwellian, and that he, owner of his
own New York Times column and guest on MSNBC and CNN, was one of the many victims of the self-silencing of much of America. I mean, okay, Mr.
Compare-My-Critics-To-Goebbels is being a tad hypocritical, but I don't think the
discussion should end at how Stephens is a hypocrite. Although the extent to which
he is a massive hypocrite is kinda funny, he had a whole
column defending bad tweets, and says, "Let he who
is without a bad tweet "cast the first stone." Of course, unless you're attacking him, in which case, you're a Goebbels or an Orwellian horseman
of the apocalypse. The issue is that Bret Stephens, with all his talk of discourse and his screeds on free speech and his rants on speech we shouldn't have because I don't like it,
work as a smokescreen, a way to shift the argument from whether his opinions are bad to how he's the brave
canary in a coalmine, vanguard of the public discourse. But this valiant champion of civility and raising the bar of public commentary, is actually, himself, a pretty rude boy whose New York Times published sermons about being reasonable all boil down to how we shouldn't care
about certain people. Take Reza Aslan's commentary
on how Bret Stephens jumped out of the white
nationalist closet. Is that an inflammatory tweet? Absolutely. And that's where Bret Stephens wants the conversation to huddle around. But let's actually take a look at that op-ed Aslan is referring to. The opinion piece is about
the first Democratic debate, and he has some reservations. It starts with a phrase
written in Spanish, which he glibly translates. This will be important later. Then, he starts talking about the problems with the Democratic party, namely, that they are, "A party that
makes too many Americans "feel like strangers in their own country. "A party that puts more of its faith, "and invests most of its
efforts in them instead of us." Emphasis not mine. Who's them? Who's us? Well, as Stephens continues, "They speak Spanish, we don't." And boom goes the racist dynamite, the worst kind of dynamite. Yes, we, the ordinary
Americans, read, true Americans, are not the same as them,
the people who speak Spanish! Dora The Explorer, you
are not welcome here. Stephens isn't done though. "They are not US citizens
or legal residents. "We are. "They broke the rules to
get into this country. "We didn't. "They pay few or no taxes. "We already pay most of those taxes. "They willingly got themselves into debt. "We're asked to write it off. "They don't pay the premiums
for private health insurance. "We're supposed to give up ours "in exchange for some VA-type nightmare. "They didn't start enterprises "that create employment
and drive innovation. "We're expected to join the candidates "in demonizing the job-creators, "breaking up their businesses
and taxing them to the hilt." Us, them! Us good, they bad! He even talks about the Third
World-ization of America. And remember that part of the intro? That snide Spanish translation? He's essentially parroting
the xenophobic rhetoric of white supremacists, the white genocide, the fear that scary brown
people will take over America and transform it into
a Third World country, i.e., one that isn't dominantly white. This is eerily similar
to the great replacement and the white genocide rhetoric of full-blown white supremacists. (dramatic music) Now, aside from all of that, there are some slight factual inaccuracies in what he's saying. "They broke the rules to
get into this country." Well, sometimes migrants come to apply for asylum in
The US, which is allowed, and we're actually breaking
the rules by turning them away. Also, when he says, "We
didn't break the rules." What does he mean? There were no rules to even
break back before the 1880s and the Chinese Exclusion Act which was a way to keep
Chinese people out of The U.S. because we've always
been kind of super racist and our country is built
on white supremacy. And if by rules he means rules of native people living in
the land, as in the rule not to kill the native
people living here, whoops! Then he says, "They pay few or no taxes." Well, first of all, undocumented immigrants pay
taxes just like citizens do. About six million undocumented
immigrants pay income taxes. Undocumented immigrants often
pay social security benefits into citizen's accounts whose social security
numbers they're using. And all immigrants pay sales taxes. So, that's more than few or no taxes. And hey, many more undocumented immigrants would pay taxes if we
didn't terrorize them with ICE deportation raids. He also says, "They willingly
got themselves into debt." and now he's just being
silly, and hey, racist too. Now he's ascribing
personality faults to them, human beings that he wants us to think willingly would
get themselves into debt, something no reasonable person would do, because Stephens doesn't want us to think of them as reasonable people. He continues, "They
didn't start enterprises "that create employment
and drive innovation." Again, this could be found
straight from storm front, the idea that because
they, the brown immigrants, haven't built civilization,
that we, white people, did, ignoring our history of destroying and colonizing
other civilizations, cough, cough, Native Americans, ignoring our very recent history of funding coups and selling
arms in South America, causing violence and poverty in regions where immigrants are fleeing from. Also, he implies that they will never be capable
of starting enterprises, that nobody coming from Mexico and South America could be innovators. In other words, they are inferior to us, they are leeches on our society, which is, it's kinda white supremacist, rebranded to be about
legality and illegality, even though white collar criminals, those rich people who start enterprises that create employment
and drive innovation, are not dehumanized in the same way. So maybe it's not a stretch
to say this op-ed is evocative of white supremacist rhetoric. Maybe, instead, Bret Stephens is couching his abhorrent opinions under the banner of
self-declared civility, using it as a mask to
hide his ugly message. Then, he turns around
and calls out someone making a joke about him being a bedbug as being like Goebbels! But him? Portraying migrants as despicable, lazy, and indolent others? No, that's polite, civil writing. Bret Stephens would probably
hand wave this criticism away by claiming that in this op-ed, he was merely referencing what he thinks other people are thinking, the so-called ordinary Americans. In his response piece, where he compares his critics to Robespierre's Reign of Terror, he says, "Reza Aslan, who had accused me of jumping "out of the white nationalist closet "for a column that attempted "to channel the negative
way ordinary people "might have viewed last
week's Democratic debates." So, either he's saying that he believes that most ordinary people hold racist, white-supremacist views, or he's just using weasel words to shield himself from any
criticism of his racist writing. But hey, (speaks in foreign language). (dramatic music) Bret Stephens probably does think that the silent majority holds
racist views, and so does he. Because once he slipped up
and forgot to use the whole, (grunting) everybody else
is thinking it smokescreen. In 2016, he wrote an op-ed
for The Wall Street Journal in which he decried the disease
of the Arab mind, writing, "So long as an Arab athlete
can't pay his Israeli opposite "the courtesy of a handshake,
the disease of the Arab mind "and the misfortunes of
its world will continue." He's so fond of this idea of the Arab mind and how it's diseased, he
repeated it on PragerU, a fake university, in 2017, saying, "The Arab world's problems "are a problem of an Arab mindset, "with this handy anatomical
diagram of the Arab brain." Yes, that is in fact an illustration of a bearded man wearing
a white taqiyah hat, typically worn by Muslims, with his brain helpfully
labeled Arab mindset, with an arrow pointing
to it labeled problem. Side note, anyone willfully
appearing in a PragerU video shouldn't be taken seriously regardless of anything
else they've ever done. And this isn't the only instance of Bret Stephens'
racist, violent rhetoric. Back in 2017, before any
of this bedbug drama, Adam Johnson wrote an
article for In These Times in which he contends that,
far from being a moderate, Bret Stephens holds far-right views. Johnson summarizes some of
Stephens' opinions, writing, "Stephens has referred to antisemitism "as the disease of the Arab mind, "insisted Palestinians have a
blood fetish and blood lust, "said Black Lives Matter was a lie "based on the myth of victimization, "labeled institutionalized
racism another imaginary enemy, "called climate change hysteria
and a religion without God, "and, in a piece subtly headlined, "I Am Not Sorry the CIA Waterboarded", "contended Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "in fact, waterboarded himself "by not being truthful with his captors." So, Bret Stephens labels himself as a civil, reasonable person, sneaking into the comfortable
sheets of The New York Times, laying in wait until
an unsuspecting person untucks those sheets, at which point he bores under their skin, embedding his far-right racist opinions within the pretext of reasonableness, like some kind of tiny, biting
bug one might find in sheets. (groans) What is it? All right. The point of this piece isn't
to just rip on Bret Stephens, although he definitely deserves it, and it's definitely funny. It's to really examine the practice of batting away criticism with one hand, yelling civility, civility! While with the other hand,
calling immigrants lazy leeches, and talking about the
disease of the Arab mind. There's also another point
that often gets lost. The pearl clutching over
how mean Twitter is to him, and seeing this as a cultural shift towards over-sensitivity,
an Orwellian nightmare, as Stephens puts it. He even compares Twitter to
Hitler's use of the radio, saying, "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." Here's the thing about Twitter. In many cases, it can absolutely
be a troll-filled hellhole with real harassment like
calling people ethnic slurs and threatening violence but it's also filled with
millions of other people who have opinions that aren't harassment. For instance, calling out an op-ed writer for his egregious (bleeps). It's also one of the few
places where the general public can directly address the statements of those with powerful platforms. So it's not so much that the public has become hypersensitive to blowhards like Bret
Stephens, but that now, people can actually directly communicate with these towering media giants, voicing their concerns in
what is known as a ratio. Anyways, Bret Stephens, who
has likely grown accustomed to not being called on his
petty, hateful crap, clearly, as his editors don't seem to be going, hey, Bret, maybe don't
use The New York Times to sub-tweet some guy you're mad at. So when he's finally
called on his bad opinions, it feels like he's under attack. It really gets under his skin like a tiny creature that feeds on human. Bret bugs, that's what they're called! Bret, no, sorry, bedbugs! Sorry. You're a bedbug, Bret! Please don't email my boss
because it's technically me. Katy?
- Me. - Our patrons, I guess. Here are our patrons' names. Roll the credits. (dramatic music) Oh no, I've got a case of The
New York Times columnists. Thanks for watching, Bret
Stephens, specifically. Please email my boss or me. It would be very funny. And thanks for everybody
else for watching. You're the real heroes. Do all the YouTube stuff. Like and subscribe and so on. Make sure to listen to our
podcast "Even More News". Check out our Patreon.com/SomeMoreNews if you'd like to support us. And also, we've got merch which is linked. It's a TeePublic kinda thing. Honestly, hi! Hello.
That was some good nazi-orwellian fun.
If anyone else gets an ad for the Epoch Times, skip it. They're a rather famous pro-Trump publication, even claiming that Trump himself reads them daily.
https://medium.com/@Meerakaulofficial/who-is-epoch-times-and-why-are-they-supporting-trump-ce9acf4c46f1
Yet another data point supporting the theory that right-wing arguments are entirely constructed out of hypocrisy and wild projection.
Best show on youtube.
That was wonderful!
Very minor annoyance, Goebbels, no r:s.
I’m surprised this is the first time I’ve heard someone be called a bedbug. Very underused insult.