NYT's Bret Stephens says being called a 'bedbug' is reminiscent of 'totalitarian regimes'

Apparently being called a bedbug has a harsher connotation than most people might think.

After news broke Monday that The New York Times' office was infested with bedbugs, George Washington University Professor David Karpf decided to compare the paper's columnist Bret Stephens with the outbreak in a tweet. But Stephens apparently didn't like the joke, and went to Karpf's boss Monday and then to MSNBC on Tuesday morning to provide an outsized reaction.

On Monday, the associate professor tweeted that "The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens," earning nine likes and zero retweets at first, he said. Brooks then emailed not only Karpf, but Karpf's provost at GWU, to say Karpf should "come to my house, meet my wife and kids," and then "call me a 'bedbug' to my face."

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The reaction promptly exploded, but Stephens wasn't done yet. He took to MSNBC the next morning to condemn the tweet as "dehumanizing," but said he "had no intention whatsoever to get [Karpf] in any kind of professional trouble" by notifying his provost of the public tweet. Stephens then said "being analogized to insects ... goes back to a lot of totalitarian regimes in the past."

The tweet that Stephens took such issue with — the one that barely anyone had seen when he noticed it — now has over 21,000 likes.