AOC Derides NYT Columnist Bret Stephens for Whining About Twitter Bedbug Jibes: 'My Own Friends Roast Me Harder Than That'

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday evening was incredulous over the behavior of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens in response to an innocuous tweet mocking him as a metaphorical bedbug infesting the Times offices. 

On Monday, after news broke of the Times “infestation,” George Washington University digital communications professor David Karpf joked that the bedbugs represented Stephens. That prompted Stephens to send an email to Karpf—cc-ing the university’s provost—asking Karpf to come to Stephens’ home and say it to his face. 

“He cc-ed my provost, which is an offensive power move,” Karpf told Splinter writer Rebecca Fishbein. “So I felt the most appropriate thing to do was to share on Twitter, ‘Look, a thin-skinned writer at The New York Times didn’t like a tweet that I wrote that got 0 retweets and 9 likes, and he cc-ed the provost, and now here we are.'”

“Imagine being on Twitter and having the worst thing you’re called in a given day is ‘bedbug,'” said Ocasio-Cortez. “My own friends roast me harder than that.”

The New York Democrat added parenthetically that Stephens’ actions after finding the tweet, which, as Karpf revealed in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, included emailing Karpf’s director, were “pretty concerning” in the context of Stephens “creating a career defending vile language as a sacred freedom and deriding people organizing for basic human dignity as ‘snowflakes.'”

Ocasio-Cortez’s comments came after a morning appearance by Stephens on MSNBC wherein the beleagured opinion writer claimed that Karpf’s language was reminiscent of authoritarian regimes using dehumanizing language to refer to scapegoated communities. It was a claim that was roundly mocked by observers. 

“I was going to joke, ‘When will Bari Weiss write a column about how comparing Bret Stephens to a bedbug is a sign of the anti-Semitism of the left?,'” tweeted Boston-based activist Jonathan Cohn, “but he seems to already be running with that himself.”