Bret Stephens: A Real Upper Class Asshole - and Journalism Fraud and Liar Too

Bret Stephens in 2008 photo, when he’d worked his way up from the ranks of the Mexican peasantry to become an esteemed Wall Street Journal columnist. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.

Even by the lofty standards established by top competitors like Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, and David Brooks, Bret Stephens reigns supreme as the biggest idiot and intellectual fraud among New York Times op-ed writers, so if given a choice between reading one of his columns and eating a bowl of strychnine-laced ALPO Chop House in Gourmet Gravy Wet Dog Food™, well, pass me the can and a spoon and I’ll get to work. However, I caved after seeing Stephens relentlessly mocked on social media for his column that ran yesterday headlined “Brian Thompson, Not Luigi Mangione, Is the Real Working-Class Hero,” and deeply regret I can’t travel back in time and dig into a delicious bowl of ALPO Chop House instead, because that couldn’t possibly produce more nausea than reading his column did.

Thompson grew up in a working-class family in a farming community in Iowa and spent his childhood killing weeds in the fields with a knife, Stephens wrote, recounting factoids from a Times story that ran on December 10 which he called “one of the more moving stories” he’d read in the newspaper all week. Mangione, on the other hand, was the sinister “scion” of a wealthy and prominent family who’d been “educated at an elite private school.”

“It’s a familiar type,” Stephens continued in his column, which was written eight days after Mangione killed the UnitedHealthcare CEO:

Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, was a lawyer’s son whose mother moved him to London before he went on to become an international terrorist. Osama bin Laden came from immense wealth. Angry rich kids jacked up on radical, nihilistic philosophies can cause a lot of harm, not least to the working-class folks whose interests they pretend to champion.

These penetrating insights were all “worth bearing in mind as some people seek to cast [Thompson’s] killing as a tale of justified, or at least understandable, fury against faceless corporate greed, Stephens added. What wasn’t worth keeping in mind, or worthy of mention at all, was that Thompson got paid $10 million a year to head a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group with the highest rate of denied claims — almost one-third — in the entire health insurance industry. [Correction: This sentence previously ended by saying "Mangione was one of the company’s victims,” which is incorrect.]

Nor was it important to note that the American Hospital Association wrote an open letter to Thompson three years ago over “a plan to start denying payment for what [were] deemed non-critical visits to hospital emergency rooms,” or that UnitedHealthcare “more than doubled the rate of denials for care following hospital stays between 2020 and 2022 as it implemented machine-assisted technology to automate the process.” In fact, for Stephens, “the suggestion that Thompson’s murder should be an occasion to discuss Americans’ supposed rage at private health insurers” was too absurd to waste time contemplating.

The proof: “A 2023 survey from the nonpartisan health policy research institute KFF found that 81 percent of insured adults gave their health insurance plans a rating of ‘excellent’ or ‘good.’ Even a majority of those who say their health is ‘fair’ or ‘poor’ still broadly like their health insurance.”

St. Brian of Iowa, the Patron Saint of Jungle Capitalism. Every man for himself and God against all.

One of the few poses Stephens could strike that would be more laughable than “Rich Guy Champion of Working-Class Folks” would be “Downtrodden Mexican Peasant,” yet he put that suit on a few years back too, as David Klion noted in a 2019 story in The New Republic. In response to one of the many previous drubbings Stephens has received on social media, this one set off by his writing that “ordinary” Americans were bothered by people who speak Spanish, he replied, “Fwiw, my late father was from Mexico. My mother was a refugee. I grew up in the DF.”

Technically, that’s (mostly) true, but Stephens, like Mangione, was the scion of a wealthy family who attended elite private schools. His father inherited General Products, a chemical company in Mexico, and his mother was born in Italy to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany at the start of World War II, so they were refugees but their daughter wasn’t, and she certainly didn’t spend any time in camps for displaced persons as Stephens tried to suggest.

For his part, Stephens spent his early years in Mexico but as a teenager attended boarding school at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts – current tuition per academic year: $75,475 – and went on to received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and his master's at the London School of Economics. In 2005, 31-year-old Stephens was named to the Forum of Young Global Leaders, a group run from Switzerland by the World Economic Forum whose selection committee is chaired by Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, and whose other US members have included a motley assortment of budding political grifters, corporate oligarchs, war criminals, and pretend journalists such as Bill and Chelsea Clinton, Samantha Power, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg.

By then, Richie Rich had been an assistant editor at the dreadful Zionist rag Commentary, a Wall Street Journal op-ed editor and columnist, an editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post – who stated when he was hired that his goal was to “help Israel” by “getting the story right” – and returned to the Journal to write a global affairs column that rarely deviated from his neocon view of the world. It was the perfect career path to become a right-wing columnist at the Times, which is where Stephens landed in 2017.

I don’t know what Stephens gets paid to deliver his multi-weekly drivel to the newspaper’s readers because the salaries of op-ed writers at the Times are as closely guarded as anything in the CIA’s vault of secrets, but Business Insider reported two years ago that the newspaper was hiring assistant editors for its Opinion pages to start at $181,376 a year, so it’s safe to say he earns a lot more than that. I also don’t know what Stephens’s net worth is, but given the dynastic wealth he inherited, he’s clearly a multimillionaire.

What’s most objectionable about Stephens, though, isn’t his wealth or political opinions, it’s the abysmal quality and mendacity of his work. For example, I didn’t catch this at first glance, but upon further review I noted he was citing a poll from last year – in fact, from last June, so 18 months ago – as evidence that most Americans were happy with the country’s privately-run health care system, unlike what Osama bin Mangione and his deluded supporters would have you believe, which was the central point of his December 12 column. Weren’t there more recent relevant polls than that one, I wondered?

Yes, as a matter of fact there were, but they contradicted the conclusion Stephens was determined to make from the outset, so he ignored the newer surveys in favor of the one he cited so he could maintain support his pre-written grand finale. Even then, he had to crudely distort the one he used for a crutch in order to make it ostensibly serve as the evidence he needed.

The June 15, 2023 poll Stephens cherry-picked did indeed find that 81 percent of respondents gave “their health insurance an overall rating of ‘excellent’ or ‘good’,” just as he reported, which was part of Point No. 1 of KFF’s summary of the “Key Findings.” What he didn’t report were Key Findings 2 to 6 – and I would urge you to read the full summary to appreciate the fraud Stephens pulled on his readers – which were:

—Despite rating their insurance positively, most insured adults report experiencing problems using their health coverage; people in poorer health are more likely to report problems.

—Nearly half of insured adults who had insurance problems were unable to satisfactorily resolve them, with some reporting serious consequences.

—Among those with the greatest mental health needs, many adults across insurance types find their coverage lacking and report forgoing needed care.

—Affordability of premiums and out-of-pocket costs are a concern, particularly for those with private health coverage, and for some, contributed to not getting care.

—Insured adults overwhelmingly support public policies to make insurance simpler to understand and to help them avoid or resolve insurance problems.

Overall, about 55 percent of adults with Marketplace plans “rate their insurance negatively when it comes to premiums,” twice as high as the share of those on Medicare or Medicaid – the closest thing the country has to a public healthcare system – who were by far the healthiest and happiest group of respondents. Forty percent said they had skipped or delayed some type of care in the past year due to cost, and large numbers, including 43 percent of respondents with mental health health problems, said they didn’t get services or medication they believed they needed.

But why go back to June of 2023 anyway? I assume Stephens did so because he ran roughly the same online searches I did and discovered he had to because more recent data was far worse.

A Gallup-West Health poll released December 6, six days before Stephens wrote his column and two days after Mangione murdered Thompson, showed Americans viewed the quality of the country’s healthcare system more negatively than they had in 24 years. Only 44 percent called the quality of healthcare excellent or good, a figure that had “steadily eroded” every year since 2020. Fifty-four percent rated it as fair or poor.

The numbers were significantly worse when respondents were asked to rate coverage provided by health insurance companies. Only 28 percent rated coverage as excellent or good, well below the 41 percent who did in 2012, which was the all-time high point.

Other findings from the survey – and I’m quoting here from a summary on a KFF news website, so it’s hard to see how an enterprising reporter like Stephens could have missed it – were that “only 19 percent of Americans are satisfied with the costs of healthcare” and 62 percent, the highest share in more than a decade,” said it was “the federal government’s responsibility to ensure all Americans have healthcare coverage” and 46 percent favored a government-run healthcare system while 49 percent supported the current private health insurance system, a steep decline in favorability towards the latter in recent years.

More than half of respondents also worried about “affording the cost of often hidden healthcare fees, increasingly pervasive charges that could add hundreds or even thousands of dollars to their medical bills.” Almost eight in 10, “including majorities of both Democrats and Republicans, supported federal legislation to limit when and how much hospital systems can charge for facility fees.”

OK, Bret had to scrap that one, but how about the December 5 YouGov poll about related matters. Surely would have served his purposes better. Actually, it wouldn’t have.

“Most Americans are happy with their own health insurance, but when it comes to the overall health care system, that’s a different story, new polling reveals,” said a story about the YouGov survey, and keep in mind I found this this story by a McClatchy reporter ran on an industry website. As the story put it, the YouGov poll “found widespread dissatisfaction with the way health care is administered in America.”

Specifically, 49 percent of respondents had “a very or somewhat unfavorable view of the system, while a smaller share, 42 percent, said they have a very or somewhat favorable view.” Forty-six percent said “government-subsidized health insurance” should be expanded versus 19 percent who said it should remain as is and 13 percent who said it should be reduced.

Poor Bret. OK, let’s move on. Here we go, I found a readily available online report from October 9 that was co-written by a KFF researcher…oh my, this won’t do at all. “Despite spending nearly twice as much per capita on healthcare compared to similarly large and wealthy nations, the United States has a lower life expectancy than peer nations and has seen worsening measures of health outcomes since the COVID-19 pandemic,” the report began, and it was all downhill from there:

Generally, the US performs worse in long-term health outcomes measures (such as life expectancy), certain treatment outcomes (such as maternal mortality and congestive heart failure hospital admissions), some patient safety measures (such as obstetric trauma with instrument and medication or treatment errors), and patient experiences of not getting care due to cost...In 2020, the share of the population (as measured by rate per 100 patients) reporting missing a consultation due to cost was 26.8 percent in the US, compared to and average of 7 percent among comparable countries.

Whether Mangione’s murder of Thompson was justified or not is an interesting question, though I can see why the former thought it was if he suffered from excruciating back pain that resulted from improper practices of “parasites” in the healthcare system, as the handwritten note found after his arrest suggests. If that’s true, I for one would consider what he did to be less of a moral outrage than what UnitedHealthcare — and other insurers — does on a daily basis by willfully inflicting pain and misery on customers so the executive corps can be rewarded with even more obscene salaries. Whether justified or not, Mangione’s act was “at least understandable” as an expression of “fury against faceless corporate greed.”

But like other 1 percenters who have no clue about how much of the country lives, or know very well and are content to keep things the way they are because it ensures they can continue to live far better, Stephens was so horrified by the distant call for the guillotines triggered by Thompson’s murder that he felt compelled to use his platform to put the peasantry in its place. That’s the God-given right he enjoys as a Times columnist.

But the newspaper’s obligation, presumably, is to make sure his work “is rigorously fact-checked and edited,” as Stephens put it himself in his corporate bio, so either the Times’s entire factcheck team called in sick on December 12 or its much vaunted quality control system is highly overrated. I’m pretty sure I know which is the correct answer.