Bret Stephens and Frank Bruni with Thane Rosenbaum

15:33
viewers and listeners you know one
lesson I learned when I was the editor
of The Jerusalem Post is that the most
stereotyped people in the world and I by
stereotype people I don’t mean Jews or
Palestinians I mean this kind of Jew or
that kind of Palestinian they’re always
going to font they’re always going to
surprise you if you actually practice
journalism you will
go and meet settlers who are also like
hippie stoners and you know you think oh
the settlers they’re all these
right-wing fanatics but there’s always a
flip side you will meet Palestinians
including Palestinians affiliated with
radical organizations that also have
their surprises and journalism at its
best always has to make large allowances
for the capacity to be surprised by the
people that you are otherwise most eager
to stereotype I think where we go wrong
in big ways is when we fall prey to
those stereotypes I mean why was for
instance the the story about UVA the
rape hoax at UVA why was that so readily
believed because so many prejudices that
we had or at least segments of the media
had about white entitled frat kids at
UVA behaving in certain ways all of them
seem to be confirmed by that by that
narrative so people jumped on and said
well this has got to be right because
this is the classic the classic UVA frat
boy and this is how you might expect
they would behave and of course this
turned out to be one of the big egg on
your faces story that not only nevermind
damaged the journalists in question or
Rolling Stone magazine I think damaged
the profession as a whole and it also by
the way damaged victims of rape because
they would always have to live under the
burden well you never know because there
was that there was that UVA story and I
think this is this is true not simply as
journalists but as human beings you
always have to look at someone and say
I’m expecting this I have to I have to
there has to be some large allowance in
my mind that they will not be the people
who will conform to the stereotype that
I had about them and I might add going
to the times destroyed a great many
stereotypes I had harbored when I was at
The Wall Street Journal good about the
kind of people are at the times good you
know and to add to what Brett’s saying I
mean some of the most stereotyped some
of the most stereotyped people in
America by journalists are Trump voters
and
some of the stereotypes hold true but
some Donen I mean I remember him it’s
one of the reasons why it’s important to
get out there I remember going to an
early Trump rally in South Carolina just
before its primary and spending a couple
of hours there interviewing the voters
who’d come and each of those people
their take on reality wasn’t the same as
mine it wouldn’t have been the same as
Brett Caesar but each of them had a
specific and thought out reason why they
found Donald Trump attractive and none
of those reasons fit neatly into the
stereotype of Trump voters and I think I
mean I’ve always been under the under
the position if we want to under if we
want to get beyond Donald Trump we have
to understand in a real way and not a
superficial stereotypical way what made
him so appealing to so many voters
because we’re not going to reach those
voters with someone else unless we
understand that well sorry Brett you may
remember that when you were on Bill
Maher a year ago you responded to this
point exactly that there is a kind of
liberal blue state prejudice about a
Trump voter and that in fact there’s
other ways to see them and understand
him and there’s the very point that
Frank is making I’m gonna get back to
that Innes and later hopefully I want to
talk about what you think that the cause
of Trump how he became our president
we’ll get to that in a moment but I want
to first go back since we talked about
two of your columns I want to get to one
of yours that just came out today wasn’t
actually a column it was a much more
extended essay and and wanted I think he
very frequently read and because this is
the Y M H a people in this room might
care about this essay in particular and
this is really about progressive
liberalism and the politics that is not
unfamiliar to Frank and its obsession
with Israel the deemed Immunization
deluded the legitimacy of Israel and how
that oftentimes this kind of woke nests
progressiveness also slides into
anti-semitism and why is it that those
people who are who feel most strongly