Bret Stephens, like many of his ilk on the NY Times' sorry excuse for an op-ed page, continues to find new and more efficient ways to demonstrate why, even on the occasions when that paper manages to not fuck something up, it's just not worth bothering with anymore. At all.
As long as they continue to provide sinecures to lazy thinkers and shitty writers such as Stephens (and Brooks, Dowd, Douthat, Friedman, and several of their primary political stenographers), life continues to be simply too short to wade into the muck. You know what they're gonna say, how they're gonna say it, etc.
There is literally no point in reading such a publication anymore. I couldn't care less about their 1619 project. There are countless academic texts out there covering the same ground, better and more thoroughly. Go to a fucking library once in a while.
By now, if you're in the mix, you already know the broad strokes:
Believe it or not, this is not to lambaste Stephens in particular. Frankly, anyone still reading him or the aforementioned page-monkeys alongside him deserve precisely what they get -- a paucity of any fresh thought or analysis, just the same litany of rearranged buzzwords one would expect from someone whose prime motive in life is to get invited to the elite Hamptons soirees.
Imagine the sort of inherited-wealth douchebag who spends six figures on their wedding and their kids' preschools and all that, and still has the balls to act like they earned every penny, and you have an idea of who Stephens writes for and aspires to hang with and to be.
The people who really run the country and own the assets and the political process; the people who talk enormous amounts of shit about everything and everyone that even mildly affects their eternal goal of permanent excess; the people who routinely refer to the poor and working class as other species, insect and otherwise; the people who immediately get their panties in a wad and pitch a yuuuuge fucking fit the second anyone criticizes them for anything, no matter how accurately.
There are niches within each, of course, but whenever you subject yourself to the unnecessary pain of reading yet another screed from Stephens or Bobo or Modo or Douthat, that is the subtext of the essay, whatever the particular subject on a given day: what does a wealthy, do-nothing swell with an unearned sense of entitlement want to hear? How can I affirm that person's sense of self-regard?
One of the most pernicious ways each of them operates -- and this is simply part of the process of being a Times columnist in the first place -- is to reiterate the tautology that simply being on the op-ed page confers automatic legitimacy, therefore not being on the op-ed page renders critics as automatically illegitimate, worthy of discussion only as a point of refutation, or -- in Karpf's case -- an unwashed, unpedigreed Other, whose impolitic words instantly conjure up visions of 1930s Germany or 1790s France.
Just in the past two weeks, not to mention the last several years, the chief executive of the United States of America has:
No doubt I'm forgetting a few; feel free to remind me in comments. But this is just from the last couple weeks, and August is supposed to be the slow season when everyone is on vacation.
And yet to grossly overpaid idiot gatekeepers such as Bret Stephens, the real problem is all these intolerant liberals, you see, all these would-be Goebbels and Robespierre types who are dehumanizing their political opponents with their rhetoric, and sharpening the guillotine blades. Never mind that the US government is literally dehumanizing people every goddamned day, literally sentencing sick people to die from treatable ailments. Never mind that real honest-to-jeebus white-power types routinely make rape and death threats to (usually female) bloggers and tweeters routinely.
Fuck that "bedbug" shit, there are serious people out there making real threats that have other real people looking over their shoulders every time they leave their houses. Stephens is just a spoiled crybaby who got pissy with an academic, because he was insufficiently deferential to Stephens' gatekeeping greatness.
While you're reading this, while Stephens is writing his next unreadable, bullshit-laden jeremiad, these things are happening. Right now. Oh, look, there goes another one, another scared child raped in a foster home or dropping dead in a hot desert camp. Careful with that guillotine, Robespierre!
As we've been saying in here for a very long time, well before the bewigged gastropod oozed its way into the spotlight, we have to decide what kind of country we're going to be. Either we're the kind of country that shits on immigrants from the "wrong" countries purely as a punitive measure, or we're not. Either we're the kind of country that keeps monstrous demagogues from derailing the nation's collective trajectory, or we just passively sit there and watch it happen. Gee, this sucks.
An integral part of all this can be summed up in the classic kids' nutrition phrase you are what you eat. The New York Times, from its political coverage to its op-ed columnists to its society pages, is a verbatim transcript of smooth-brained establishment elite bullshit. Just because there's occasionally a few kernels of corn here and there doesn't make it any more nutritious if you pick those out and eat them. They think their once-a-year deep-dive coverage on Trump's crooked past (that they could and should have done ten or twenty years earlier) or some such makes up for the other 364 days of shameless hackcess journamalism and their day-care center of tiresome slop-ed failchildren.
The fact that a significant percentage of the Times' op-ed columnists spend a non-zero amount of time worrying about the tone and civility of a literally powerless opposition should tell you everything you need to know about them -- as thinkers, as writers, as human beings. The problem is not that AOC has effectively coined the term "concentration camps" for those places, the problem is that Bret Stephens, who has a prime spot for commentary and could literally write about any subject he chooses and get it into the national conversation, chooses to write about how unseemly that term is, rather than the operational reality of those places.
Maybe Stephens should go talk to his wife and kids face-to-face about that; if he doesn't have the guts, I'll be happy to drop by and do so, since he's tweeting out invites. I'll even bring a six-pack of whatever beverage he chooses. I won't even drop an f-bomb, I promise. It'll be civil.
So people either support this nonsense with their dollars and their eyeballs, or they don't, period. Even then, even if Stephens were to get even more butthurt and decide to pretend to go out and ply an honest trade, he'd just go and write an unreadable book about his imaginary travails shoveling coal for the nation's flagship newspaper for hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, going on teevee and complaining about his lot in life whenever he chooses to, and having to deal with all those pesky internet Robespierres. Three hundred padded pages of boo-fucking-hoo, and yet another boo-hoo media tour to push that turd good and hard. He's gonna get paid either way, and the Times would just replace him with another interchangeable bedbug. The cycle continues.
But the bottom line really is that the worst possible thing you can do to someone like Bret Stephens is to completely ignore him, and the people who bankroll his crybaby nonsense. So maybe let's all do that. It's not like anyone's going to miss out on anything worthwhile.
As long as they continue to provide sinecures to lazy thinkers and shitty writers such as Stephens (and Brooks, Dowd, Douthat, Friedman, and several of their primary political stenographers), life continues to be simply too short to wade into the muck. You know what they're gonna say, how they're gonna say it, etc.
There is literally no point in reading such a publication anymore. I couldn't care less about their 1619 project. There are countless academic texts out there covering the same ground, better and more thoroughly. Go to a fucking library once in a while.
By now, if you're in the mix, you already know the broad strokes:
- little-known associate professor at GW University refers to Stephens as a "bedbug" in a barely-read tweet;
- Stephens (who is so diligently hard-working, he apparently has time to Google himself for untoward references) happens across the post and summarily challenges Karpf to come to his (Stephens') house and call him that to his face, in front of his wife and children;
- tweet naturally blows up and goes viral because of Stephens' whining;
- Stephens contacts Karpf's boss and tries (unsuccessfully) to get Karpf fired;
- Stephens tops of a week of win with a column so infantile and self-regarding, in a rational universe it would be cause to inform Stephens of his new tax status, and send him on about his way finding honest work.
Believe it or not, this is not to lambaste Stephens in particular. Frankly, anyone still reading him or the aforementioned page-monkeys alongside him deserve precisely what they get -- a paucity of any fresh thought or analysis, just the same litany of rearranged buzzwords one would expect from someone whose prime motive in life is to get invited to the elite Hamptons soirees.
Imagine the sort of inherited-wealth douchebag who spends six figures on their wedding and their kids' preschools and all that, and still has the balls to act like they earned every penny, and you have an idea of who Stephens writes for and aspires to hang with and to be.
The people who really run the country and own the assets and the political process; the people who talk enormous amounts of shit about everything and everyone that even mildly affects their eternal goal of permanent excess; the people who routinely refer to the poor and working class as other species, insect and otherwise; the people who immediately get their panties in a wad and pitch a yuuuuge fucking fit the second anyone criticizes them for anything, no matter how accurately.
There are niches within each, of course, but whenever you subject yourself to the unnecessary pain of reading yet another screed from Stephens or Bobo or Modo or Douthat, that is the subtext of the essay, whatever the particular subject on a given day: what does a wealthy, do-nothing swell with an unearned sense of entitlement want to hear? How can I affirm that person's sense of self-regard?
One of the most pernicious ways each of them operates -- and this is simply part of the process of being a Times columnist in the first place -- is to reiterate the tautology that simply being on the op-ed page confers automatic legitimacy, therefore not being on the op-ed page renders critics as automatically illegitimate, worthy of discussion only as a point of refutation, or -- in Karpf's case -- an unwashed, unpedigreed Other, whose impolitic words instantly conjure up visions of 1930s Germany or 1790s France.
Just in the past two weeks, not to mention the last several years, the chief executive of the United States of America has:
- offered to purchase the sovereign territory of an ally, and cancelled a diplomatic visit when the offer was rightly rebuffed;
- referred to himself with divinely-inspired nomenclature ("the chosen one") in reference to his role in an ongoing fiasco with our largest trading partner; if there were an instructional handbook for aspiring dictators, referring to oneself with religious titles would be on page one, right before "renaming the months of the year after one's family";
- "temporarily" shut down the FEC, by making it unable to fill a quorum, and thus carry out its duty of safeguarding elections and ensuring that campaigns abide by the law (that no one enforces anymore anyway);
- committed a securities violation, by falsely stating at last weekend's G7 meeting that China "had called" him, which on the following morning raised the market out of the 800-point funk he had sent it into the previous Friday;
- committed a national-security violation, by tweeting a classified photo from a spy satellite of a failed Iranian missile test, essentially showing the location of the satellite;
- threatened his departing personal assistant, who was fired for bragging that she has a closer relationship to Trump than his own daughters.
No doubt I'm forgetting a few; feel free to remind me in comments. But this is just from the last couple weeks, and August is supposed to be the slow season when everyone is on vacation.
And yet to grossly overpaid idiot gatekeepers such as Bret Stephens, the real problem is all these intolerant liberals, you see, all these would-be Goebbels and Robespierre types who are dehumanizing their political opponents with their rhetoric, and sharpening the guillotine blades. Never mind that the US government is literally dehumanizing people every goddamned day, literally sentencing sick people to die from treatable ailments. Never mind that real honest-to-jeebus white-power types routinely make rape and death threats to (usually female) bloggers and tweeters routinely.
Fuck that "bedbug" shit, there are serious people out there making real threats that have other real people looking over their shoulders every time they leave their houses. Stephens is just a spoiled crybaby who got pissy with an academic, because he was insufficiently deferential to Stephens' gatekeeping greatness.
While you're reading this, while Stephens is writing his next unreadable, bullshit-laden jeremiad, these things are happening. Right now. Oh, look, there goes another one, another scared child raped in a foster home or dropping dead in a hot desert camp. Careful with that guillotine, Robespierre!
As we've been saying in here for a very long time, well before the bewigged gastropod oozed its way into the spotlight, we have to decide what kind of country we're going to be. Either we're the kind of country that shits on immigrants from the "wrong" countries purely as a punitive measure, or we're not. Either we're the kind of country that keeps monstrous demagogues from derailing the nation's collective trajectory, or we just passively sit there and watch it happen. Gee, this sucks.
An integral part of all this can be summed up in the classic kids' nutrition phrase you are what you eat. The New York Times, from its political coverage to its op-ed columnists to its society pages, is a verbatim transcript of smooth-brained establishment elite bullshit. Just because there's occasionally a few kernels of corn here and there doesn't make it any more nutritious if you pick those out and eat them. They think their once-a-year deep-dive coverage on Trump's crooked past (that they could and should have done ten or twenty years earlier) or some such makes up for the other 364 days of shameless hackcess journamalism and their day-care center of tiresome slop-ed failchildren.
The fact that a significant percentage of the Times' op-ed columnists spend a non-zero amount of time worrying about the tone and civility of a literally powerless opposition should tell you everything you need to know about them -- as thinkers, as writers, as human beings. The problem is not that AOC has effectively coined the term "concentration camps" for those places, the problem is that Bret Stephens, who has a prime spot for commentary and could literally write about any subject he chooses and get it into the national conversation, chooses to write about how unseemly that term is, rather than the operational reality of those places.
Maybe Stephens should go talk to his wife and kids face-to-face about that; if he doesn't have the guts, I'll be happy to drop by and do so, since he's tweeting out invites. I'll even bring a six-pack of whatever beverage he chooses. I won't even drop an f-bomb, I promise. It'll be civil.
So people either support this nonsense with their dollars and their eyeballs, or they don't, period. Even then, even if Stephens were to get even more butthurt and decide to pretend to go out and ply an honest trade, he'd just go and write an unreadable book about his imaginary travails shoveling coal for the nation's flagship newspaper for hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, going on teevee and complaining about his lot in life whenever he chooses to, and having to deal with all those pesky internet Robespierres. Three hundred padded pages of boo-fucking-hoo, and yet another boo-hoo media tour to push that turd good and hard. He's gonna get paid either way, and the Times would just replace him with another interchangeable bedbug. The cycle continues.
But the bottom line really is that the worst possible thing you can do to someone like Bret Stephens is to completely ignore him, and the people who bankroll his crybaby nonsense. So maybe let's all do that. It's not like anyone's going to miss out on anything worthwhile.
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