Harpers magazine - trash pretending to be intellectual ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Sunday, September 07, 2025

Harpers magazine - trash pretending to be intellectual

I don't remember why I started getting Harpers in the mail, but it is an astoundingly bad magazine. And of course it is doctrinally anti-Israel.

In the current issue there are three articles that feature Israel of Jews.

The first employs a typical Harpers trick, usually seen in its "Harpers Index" section: take a bunch of facts and position them, out of context, to create a narrative.

The impression they want to give is Bibi has been lying about Iran's nuclear program for decades. It doesn't bother mentioning that the IAEA, US and European intelligence as well as records seized by Israel show that Iran has been acting completely consistently with an offensive nuclear program non-stop.

Then they use initial leaked intel to pretend that the US strikes on Iran did little damage, had no purpose, and in fact makes Iran more dangerous:

The fact is that no one knows yet how much damage occurred. But it is several months later and we are not seeing indications that Iran is rushing to enrich lots more uranium so quick.

The third article was a review of a book about antisemitism, written by an editor of the far-left Jewish Currents. Its last paragraph suggests that the real victims of antisemitism nowadays are Arabs, while the rest of the article claims that Zionists are weaponizing the claim - exactly how Hamas looks at antisemitism.

But even the rest of the magazine is pseudo-intellectual. A long article about owning cats, a condescending article about Christian schools, another long piece about naked women talking in a sauna. This is all pretending that these self-centered readers are expanding their horizons by pruriently gazing at parts of the world that they want no part of but that they want to pretend to show interest in. To Harpers, the world is a series of museum exhibits of strange peoples under glass and then the viewers can call themselves cultured for even knowing they exist.

The Harpers Index and the similar last page "Findings" give a series of random-sounding facts that are in fact highly curated to ensure that the magazine's readers are not exposed to any facts that might make them uncomfortable - anything conservative is positioned as Neanderthal if it is mentioned at all.

I don't care so much about today's intellectuals acting condescending - they always have. But Harpers represents how people who pretend to be elite are just as ignorant, just as prone to conspiracy theories and just as closed-minded as the people they despise.