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Last week's bedbug controversy lives on, with The New York Times’ Bret Stephens dedicating his most recent column to how Nazis and other anti-Semites have compared Jews to “bedbugs” and “lice” over time. David Karpf, a tenured scholar of political communication at George Washington University, had previously been somewhat amused about last week's bedbug-related skirmish with Stephens over Twitter. But he said in weekend tweets that the episode "stopped being funny" as Stephens had doubled down on linking Karpf’s original bedbug comment to historical precedents for calling Jews insects. Stephens had already raised this point on MSNBC when he defended his decision to copy Karpf’s provost on an email complaining that Karpf tweeted that Stephens was the Times' metaphorical bedbug while its newsroom battled real ones.
Many commenters remarked that it had only taken a week for Stephens to powerfully demonstrate both the Streisand effect, in unintentionally amplifying Karpf’s original tweet by seeking an apology for it, and Godwin’s law, in suggesting that Karpf had used Nazi rhetoric. Karpf is Jewish. He said last week that he didn’t know Stephens also was Jewish when he made his bedbug joke, and that he meant nothing by it except that Stephens -- who is a climate change skeptic and otherwise irks many academics -- is annoying.
