Why Is a Progressive Mega-Donor Funding Right-Wing Ideas?

This past 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. In the preceding year, the foundations, now under the chairmanship of George Soros’s son Alexander, had unleashed what felt like a flood of funding in the small-budget world of little magazines. Among the American lefty magazine luminaries drawn across the pond were The New York Review of Books editor Emily Greenhouse, Dissent coeditor Natasha Lewis, n+1 coeditor and publisher Mark Krotov, The Baffler editor in chief Matthew Shen Goodman, Jewish Currents editor in chief Arielle Angel, and Lux editor in chief Sarah Leonard. Many, but not all, of the represented publications, including The New York Review of Books, Dissent, The Baffler, Jewish Currents, and Lux, had at one time received funds from OSF.

Standing apart from the other Americans was Sohrab Ahmari, an editor of the online magazine Compact and the former op-ed editor of the New York Post. The political drift of his magazine—which The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg described as “mostly a reactionary publication with a strong authoritarian streak”—clashed with the others’. It also diverged from the central liberal tenets of OSF, which supports public spheres where discourse is unobstructed by authoritarian roadblocks. Perhaps the only thing Ahmari shared with many of the other attendees is that his magazine is a recipient of OSF funding. The tension in London was palpable.

“It was weird to me the whole fucking time,” said one attendee who, like others in this story, asked to speak anonymously because of funding concerns. “You would go out for a cigarette and you’d find yourself having a cigarette with Sohrab Ahmari, who had a lot of cigarettes. It’s like Peter Thiel has an entire Parliament budget.”

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 mission at the outset was to promote “a strong social-democratic state that defends community—local and national, familial and religious—against a libertine left and a libertarian right.” Despite the bipartisan framing, their 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 of whom, in Aponte’s view, “should be robbed of all of their money by a mob of poor people.” (When Salon first reported Thiel’s funding of Compact, it noted, “a source close to Thiel denied that Thiel has directly funded Compact, but couldn’t rule out the possibility that an entity Thiel funds has in turn donated to the magazine.” Klingenstein didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

It’s not Compact’s involvement with right-wing billionaires that makes the magazine an odd recipient for OSF funding. In 2019, The Boston Globe reported that George Soros’s OSF and libertarian mega-donor Charles Koch’s eponymous foundation each contributed half a million dollars to start the Quincy Institute, a Washington think tank aimed at shifting American foreign policy away from endless wars—a common cause in that instance. Likewise, Soros has previously funded people who came to oppose his project, including 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. Of particular note is the magazine’s favorable coverage of Orbán’s current authoritarian incarnation, a prominent feature of which is his “Stop Soros” crackdown that led to OSF closing down all of its operations in Soros’s native Budapest.

While Ahmari has not criticized Open Society itself, he has expressed distaste for the West’s “open society” ethos writ large, writing in a 2022 article that it’s characterized by “censure and censorship.” His words also hyperlinked to a post by Richard Hanania, who some have labeled as a white supremacist. (Hanania has acknowledged that he previously wrote racist posts, but said he no longer supports extremist ideas.) Nevertheless, the year after Compact published that article, OSF awarded it $200,000.

To Aponte, none of these contradictions are especially surprising. “It would be in keeping with their sinister big brain horseshoe theory of politics if they were getting money from OSF,” 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 their cofounder’s characterization of them as fascists. They did, however, share 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.”

Presiding over the meeting in London was Leonard Benardo, OSF’s senior vice president, known to most as Lenny. The agenda “was really focused around Lenny’s interests,” said an attendee. “The conversation was really staged for his benefit.” The 58-year-old Bronx-raised Brooklynite’s interest in little magazines first sparked as an undergrad at the University of Michigan. By his 30s, it had flamed into an obsession. He started collecting old issues of Partisan Review and reading every memoir of the quintessential midcentury 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 started working for Soros’s foundation in Russia in the mid-’90s. Over the years, his brief expanded to cover all of Eurasia, and by 2008, he had founded the Open Society Fellowship, originating the sort of work he does today. “That was about identifying people who take positions that are orthogonal to ours,” he said, “helping us widen the aperture of our thinking.”

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

The workshop’s primary interest is not, Benardo clarified, “in media and how to make the sector continue to sustain itself in a time when, obviously, things are quite vulnerable for different media organizations. Our interest is in ensuring that magazines of different stripes, but not large publications, have the ability to offer elements of critique 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 forward an important set of critiques. “There’s a real progressive commitment to a strong state and a state that itself is undergirded by commitments toward fair distribution of wealth. At the same time, there’s a cultural conservatism that goes with that, that had not really ever been put 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 right, from Slavoj Žižek, an advocate of “moderately conservative Communism,” to Curtis Yarvin, race theorist, advocate of “benevolent” dictatorship, and New Right blogger. But there are aspects of both these ideological poles that cut against OSF’s values, such as antiauthoritarianism and multiculturalism. Benardo, for his part, waved away this apparent tension: “It is not relevant to me whether I agree with 5% or 50% of what is published within Compact,” he said. “The Ideas Workshop’s support of Compact is because they have offered a set of perspectives that are important to grapple with in the context of contemporary, not just American, but global politics.”

Emily Tamkin, author of The Influence of Soros, suggested that Benardo’s appetite for intellectual diversity gels with Geroge Soros’s penchant for pluralism. “The famous example of his early work in Hungary is the [distribution of] photocopy machines, letting more people disseminate information. You can see a direct line from that to funding a publication that has lots of different partners. The whole point is that no one person has a grip or a grasp on what gets to be said. So in this one way, it’s very much of a piece with their long-standing philanthropic efforts.”

“On the other hand,” she noted, “if you are funding pluralistic efforts and some of the people involved are themselves not proponents of pluralism, you have to ask, does the logic collapse in on itself?”

Benardo’s contact with the right has extended beyond Compact’s founders. For example, he’s personally rubbed shoulders with Yarvin. “I haven’t solicited or received any funding from OSF,” Yarvin said over email, but noted, “He introduced me to [OSF board member] Ivan Krastev, who I liked a lot.” Benardo declined to comment on Yarvin, but none of the small-magazine editors who spoke with this reporter found their meeting inconsistent with their understanding of Benardo. They chalked it up to his interest in the free exchange of ideas. “I think it’s gross,” said one, but noted that nothing about the conversations they’d had with Benardo reflected any sympathy with Yarvin.

Compact, unlike other projects, Benardo argues, is worthy of support because it offers challenging ideas while meeting his expectations of rigor. “I am uninterested in what I will call ideas that are beyond the pale, ideas that simply are, for example, of a generally racist or denialist character,” he said. “But ideas that I disagree with, ideas that I find fault with, ideas that trouble me, if they have particular standards of reasonability and decency, I would want to ensure that there is a proper hearing so that we can, in the broader marketplace of ideas, contend with them accordingly.”