Why is a progressive mega-donor funding right-wing ideas?

Last June, in London, the Open Society Foundations (OSF) convened a meeting of small publications from around the world. Editors traveled from South Africa, Nigeria, Mexico, Argentina, the United States and elsewhere. The previous year, the foundations, now under the presidency of George Sorosson of Alexander, had unleashed what seemed like a flood of funding into the small-budget world of small magazines. Among the luminaries of American leftist magazines drawn across the pond were The New York Review of Books publisher Emily Greenhouse, dissent co-editor Natasha Lewis, n+1 co-editor and editor Mark Krotov, The Baffler editor in chief Matthew Shen Goodman, Jewish currents editor in chief Angel Arielle, i luxury editor in chief Sarah Leonard. Many, but not all, of the publications represented, incl The New York Review of Books, Dissent, The Baffler, Jewish Currents, i Luxury, had ever received funds from OSF.

Being apart from other Americans Sohrab Ahmari, an editor of the online magazine Compact and the former opinion editor of the New York Post. The political drift of his magazine—which The New York Times‘ Michelle Goldberg described as “a mostly reactionary publication with a strong authoritarian streak”—confronted with that of the others. It also diverged from the central liberal tenets of the OSF, which supports public spheres where discourse is not hindered by authoritarian obstacles. Perhaps the only thing Ahmari shared with many of the other attendees is that his journal is a recipient of OSF funding. The tension in London was palpable.

“It was weird for me the whole damn time,” said one attendee who, like others in this story, asked to speak anonymously because of funding issues. “You go out to smoke and you find yourself smoking a cigarette with Sohrab Ahmari, who had many. It’s like Peter Thiel it has a whole budget of the Parliament”.

Ahmari founded Compact in 2022 with Matthew Schmitz, a fellow conservative editor, and Edwin Aponte, a Marxist who left the project due to irreconcilable political differences, Salon reported, and broke off contact with Ahmari and Schmitz. Its initial mission was to promote “a strong social democratic state that defends the community—local and national, family and religious—against a libertarian left and a libertarian right.” Despite the bipartisan framing, its most prominent start-up funders belonged to the right. According to Aponte, they included Thiel, the right-wing tech investor and JD Vance mentor and chairman of the board of the Claremont Institute Thomas Klingenstein– both, according to Aponte, “should be robbed of all their money by a multitude of poor people”. (When Salon first reported on Thiel’s funding of Compact, it noted, “a source close to Thiel denied that Thiel had directly funded Compact, but could not rule out the possibility that an entity that funds Thiel may have given to his back to the magazine.” Klingenstein did not respond to a request for comment.)

It’s not Compact’s involvement with right-wing billionaires that makes the magazine an odd recipient of OSF funding. In 2019, The Boston Globe reported that George Soros’ OSF and the libertarian mega-donor Charles KochThe eponymous foundation contributed half a million dollars each to launch the Quincy Institute, a Washington think tank with the goal of moving American foreign policy away from endless wars, a common cause in this case. Likewise, Soros has previously funded people who opposed his project, including the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who was seen primarily as a supporter of democracy at the time.

Compact, on the other hand, has consistently amplified perspectives that would seem to undermine the foundations’ liberal project. Particularly noteworthy is the magazine’s favorable coverage of Orbán current authoritarian incarnation, a prominent feature of which is his “Stop Soros” crackdown that led OSF to shut down all its operations in Soros’ native Budapest.

While Ahmari has not criticized the open society itself, he has expressed distaste for the “open society” ethos of the West in general, writing in a 2022 article that it is characterized by “censorship and censorship”. His words also linked to a post by Richard Hanania, which some have labeled white supremacist. (Hanania has acknowledged that she previously wrote racist posts, but said she no longer supports extremist ideas.) However, the year after Compact published that article, OSF awarded her $200,000.

For Aponte, none of these contradictions is particularly surprising. “I would agree with their sinister theory of brain horseshoe politics if they got OSF money,” he said. “You should never expect fascists to follow conventional political wisdom. It’s what makes them dangerous.” Ahmari and Schmitz did not respond to specific questions about their right-wing funders, their involvement with OSF or the characterization of their co-founder as fascists. However, they shared a statement: “Compact publishes a wide range of opinions and we are proud to partner with an equally diverse array of supporters (right, left and center) to advance our work.”

Chairing the meeting in London was Leonard Benardo, The Senior Vice President of OSF, known to most as Lenny. The agenda “was really focused on Lenny’s interests,” an aide said. “The conversation was really organized for his benefit.” The 58-year-old Brooklynite’s interest in small magazines first sparked when he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. By his 30s, it had become an obsession. He began to collect old subjects Partisan review and read all the memoirs of the quintessential mid-century little magazine. His collection is impressive, but not complete. “I have some gaps in the 40s and some gaps in the mid-70s,” he said, “but it’s pretty good.” He began working for the Soros Foundation in Russia in the mid-1990s. Over the years, his reporting expanded to cover all of Eurasia, and by 2008 he had founded the Open Society Fellowship, originating the kind of work that ago today “It was about identifying people who take positions orthogonal to ours,” he said, “helping us expand the openness of our thinking.”

Now, as head of OSF’s Ideas Workshop, which began about 20 months ago, Benardo is the face of this flood of funding to small publications. “Lenny is quite a different presence,” said a small magazine editor. “You can imagine someone who wants to throw a lot of money around and doesn’t know shit. That’s definitely not the case here. (OSF) is pretty sensitive to the fact that this is an important world, that it’s a world under a lot of pressure different, and that they are in this rather unusual position to be able to rectify it, at least temporarily.”

The main interest of the workshop is not, Benardo clarified, “in the media and how to make the sector continue to sustain itself at a time when, obviously, things are quite vulnerable for the different media. Our interest is to ensure that magazines of different stripes, but not the big publications, have the ability to offer elements of criticism in the world of ideas and imagination”.

And that world apparently includes Compact, which Benardo believes is gathering a new mix of ideas and bringing a significant body of criticism. “There is a real and progressive commitment to a strong state and a state that is underpinned by commitments to a fair distribution of wealth. At the same time, there’s a cultural conservatism that goes with it, which has never really come together under one ideological roof,” he noted, suggesting that Compact straddles the line. Indeed, the magazine has published writers whose intellectual origins lie on the left and on the right, from Slavoj Žižek, a proponent of “moderately conservative communism.” Curtis Yarvin, race theorist, defender of the “benevolent” dictatorship and New Right blogger. But there are aspects of these two ideological poles that intersect OSF’s values, such as anti-authoritarianism and multiculturalism. Benardo, for his part, deflected that apparent tension: “It’s not relevant to me whether I agree with 5% or 50% of what’s published in Compact,” he said. “The Ideas Workshop’s support of Compact is because they have offered a set of perspectives that are important to address in the context of contemporary politics, not just American, but global.”

Emily Tamkin, author of The influence of Soros, suggested that Benardo’s appetite for intellectual diversity fits Geroge Soros’ penchant for pluralism. “The famous example of his early work in Hungary is the (distribution of) photocopies, which allow more people to spread information. You can see a hotline from funding a publication that has many different partners. The point is that no one has an opinion on what is being said. So in that way, it’s very much of a piece with his long-standing philanthropic efforts.”

“On the other hand,” he noted, “if you fund pluralist efforts and some of the people involved are not themselves advocates of pluralism, you have to ask yourself, does the logic collapse in on itself?”

Benardo’s contact with the right has extended beyond the founders of Compact. For example, he has personally fallen out with Yarvin. “I have not applied for or received any funding from OSF,” Yarvin said via email, but noted, “I was introduced by (OSF board member) Ivan Krastev, which I liked very much”. Benardo declined to comment on Yarvin, but none of the small magazine editors who spoke to this reporter found their meeting inconsistent with their understanding of Benardo. They attributed this to their interest in the free exchange of ideas. “I think it’s gross,” one said, but noted that nothing in the conversations they’d had with Benardo reflected any sympathy for Yarvin.

The compact, unlike other projects, Benardo argues, is worthy of support because it offers challenging ideas while meeting its expectations of rigor. “I’m not interested in what I’ll call ideas that are beyond the pale, ideas that are simply, for example, generally racist or denialist in nature,” he said. “But ideas that I don’t agree with, ideas that I find fault with, ideas that I’m concerned about, if they have particular standards of reasonableness and decency, I want to make sure that there’s an appropriate audience so that we can, in the market more wide range of ideas, fight accordingly.”