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.