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.

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.