I teach classes in strategic political communication. Every week, for the last seven years, I have begun each class session with a simple question: “What happened in the news this week?” The idea is to draw out lessons about how strategy and power work in the digital age. I often joke that it is my job to have a professional opinion about the latest Twitter storm.

But then Bret Stephens, a New York Times columnist, emailed me on Monday night, cc’ing my university provost, to scold me over a milquetoast joke I had made on Twitter about bedbugs at the Times. I’ve never been a fan of Stephens, so when I saw the news about bedbugs at the newspaper and everyone joking about it, I contributed a joke about Stephens. His email was a bizarre overreaction (he was offended that I called him a metaphorical bedbug) — my joke had gotten no traction on social media, and was pretty tame — so I posted about his response on Twitter. Something clicked, and the story went immediately viral. The original joke had zero retweets and nine likes. It now has 4,700 retweets and 31,200 likes. I have spent the past two days in the center of the viral media controversy, instead of observing with interest from the sidelines.

(People are calling me the bedbug professor. I really hope that name doesn’t stick.)

Naturally, I’ll be talking with my class about it this week. When the dust settles on this silly episode, here are three lessons I think we can take from it:


This was never about civility; it was about power. Bret Stephens cc’d my provost because he wanted to impose a social penalty on me for making jokes about him online. That isn’t a call for polite, civil, rational discourse. It’s an exercise of power. He wanted me and my employer to realize that I had offended an important voice at the paper of record. When powerful people demand civility from those with less power, what they are really saying is that they expect obedience from their lessers

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-08-28/bedbug-bret-stephens-twitter-speech-civility-new-york-times.