All columnists have their hobbyhorses—topics they obsessively ride at the risk of testing the patience of their readers. For Bret Stephens of The New York Times, the spécialité de la maison is academic freedom and the supposed threat to robust debate posed by politically correct students huddling in safe spaces. In a 2017 commencement address at Hampden-Sydney College, he defined safe spaces as places “where like-minded people—often sharing the same race, gender, sexual orientation or political outlook—can spend time together without having to encounter the expression of any ideas or opinions that they do not endorse.”

Stephens’s frequent huffing and puffing on this topic made him an easy and deserving target of derision when it was revealed that the columnist tried to get a professor in trouble for the trivial offense of insulting him. On Monday, David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, tweeted out a link to an article reporting that the New York Times newsroom suffered from bedbugs. “The bedbugs are a metaphor,” Karpf joked. “The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”