So here at Current Affairs Magazine, we have always enjoyed poking fun at people who have an inflated sense of their own importance.

And political pundits are particularly satisfying targets for mockery because they have tiny little brains, but enormous egos.

And so we laughed and we laughed when New York Times columnist Brett Stevens

erupted in high dudgeon after someone on the internet once called him a bed bug.

A professor at George Washington University described me as a bedbug or a metaphorical bedbug

just in the context of the New York Times having a bedbug problem in our building.

And I think that kind of rhetoric is dehumanizing and totally unacceptable, no matter where it comes from.

And we doubled over in Merriment when Barry Weiss announced that she was leaving the New York Times,

in part because people posted nasty emojis about her

in the company Slack. And one of the reasons that pundits and public intellectuals are funny,

is that so many of them are thin-skinned and easy to annoy. Witness Ben Shapiro storming off

a television show after receiving some critical questions.

You book claims that society is turning its back on Judeo-Christian values.

What are the values that's turning its back on?

I, you know, I'm not inclined to continue an interview with a person as badly motivated as you,

as an interviewer. So I think we're done here. I appreciate your time.

All right. Well, thank you for you time and for showing that anger is not part of American

political discourse. Now, Mr. Shapiro, we'll say goodbye.

Or Jordan Peterson losing his temper, or pro-Israel tablet writer, Eve Barlow, writing an entire column complaining that

people on Twitter call her Eve Fartlow, an act of oppression she compared to a pogrom.

So in current affairs, we've lampooned these types of media and political people. We've done it in

cartoons, we've written parodies of their

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