Report: Soros Funds Sohrab Ahmari's "Conservative" Outlet Compact Magazine

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
Oct. 25, 2024

George Soros and his son Alex Soros' Open Society Foundations is funding the Israel First conservative outlet Compact Magazine, according to a new report from Vanity Fair.


From Vanity Fair, "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 weird at all: he funds controlled opposition on both sides to guide the left and right.

One day after this news came out, Chris Rufo -- who works for the Paul Singer-funded Manhattan Institute -- had a column published in Compact Magazine lamenting free speech on X and the "disappearance of gatekeepers" leading to surging "anti-Semitism" on the right.

Chris Brunet, who Rufo and Conservatism Inc have been trying to cancel for criticizing Israel, blew the story up on X.



Rufo wrote in his piece, "Against Racialism, Left and Right":
On X, many right-wing accounts espouse open anti-Semitism, often posting allegedly ironic memes about Adolf Hitler. I once posted something about critical race theory, and was told by one of these accounts, "Well, you know that critical race theory was invented by Jews." Though this kind of right-wing conspiratorial thinking is nothing new, the fact that it has become so commonplace on online platforms like X is an alarming novelty that merits our concern.

The growing distrust of mainstream institutions that is characteristic of today's right can't be written off completely. This sentiment—ushered in by figures like Donald Trump—swept away the broken establishment Republican consensus, yet it has failed to fill the ideological vacuum it has created. Trump tried to fill it with partisan politics but lacked an adequate intellectual framework. Those who retrofitted their ideologies to Trump attempted to create an intellectual substructure for his presidency, in some cases ushering in a kind of chaotic element. To be sure, chaos can create space for creativity. But it always comes with a downside.

This ideological vacuum is compounded with relaxed censorship policies on platforms like X, thanks to its new owner, Elon Musk. To be sure, this has allowed more space to express legitimate viewpoints and is preferable to the old censorship system. But it has also allowed conspiratorial thinking to gain traction. Worse, it has opened the door to alt-right influencers and the so-called Groypers, who have taken politics as a method of garnering attention and then monetizing it either on or off their platforms. This has all been exacerbated by the disappearance of gatekeepers and overall quality control within the post-establishmentarian right.
"The Woke Right™️ loves censorship," Brunet commented.




Brunet also highlighted how Rufo is using the same tactics he condemned the ADL and SPLC over:


The shills came out of the woodwork to run cover for their influence operation:


Contrary to the above claims, George Soros was never banned from Israel and Alex Soros is the one who made the decision to invest in Compact Magazine.

George Soros spent his whole life constructing elaborate stories about how his activism was motivated by high-minded ideals from Karl Popper about "open societies" and "inclusive democracies" but his idiot son Alex gave the game away in an interview with New York Times Magazine in 2018:
Alex told me that for many years, his father had not been eager to advertise his Judaism because "this was something he was almost killed for." But he had always "identified firstly as a Jew," and his philanthropy was ultimately an expression of his Jewish identity, in that he felt a solidarity with other minority groups and also because he recognized that a Jew could only truly be safe in a world in which all minorities were protected. Explaining his father's motives, he said, "The reason you fight for an open society is because that's the only society that you can live in, as a Jew -- unless you become a nationalist and only fight for your own rights in your own state."
Fortunately, Alex doesn't have anywhere near the intelligence or cunning of his predecessor.



The controlled opposition guiding the right is suffering from the same issue.

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