NEW YORK, NY – March 30 (DPI) – Three young men with eclectic political leanings have started a site dedicated to commentary, a development dutifully announced and promoted by a New York Times reporter this week.

The site, called Compact (at compactmag.com), is barely a week old, but for some reason the NYT has decided its trio of Manhattan-hip contributors – Matthew Schmitz, Sohrab Ahmari and Edwin Aponte – warranted a plug now. The report includes not one but two photos of the trio posing in the Manhattan bar where they allegedly hatched their venture. It was written by a reporter by the name of Jennifer Schuessler, whose beat, according to the Times site, is “intellectual life and the world of ideas,” and according to insiders at the Times, has long known the subjects of her report.

Readers, to their credit, saw the gushing promotion for what it was , and skewered the subjects and their all-over-the-place politics. In fact, the NYT shut down the comment section after a paltry 74 comments appeared. Nearly all the comments ranged from dismissive to snarkily hostile.

The most popular:

Just reading this article exhausted me. I wish I thought their endeavor was anything other than the attempt to dress up “traditional values” but I don’t. It boils down to the usual: men uncomfortable and probably angry with female freedom.

This article is remiss in not delving into what Compact actually represents: a red-brown alliance, meaning authoritarian elements of the far left and far right finding common cause despite their ideological differences. The fact that Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey – writers often considered leftist but who have frequently flirted with the far right, including outright pandering to white nationalism – are listed as contributors says everything. If you’re going to cover these guys, you need to make sure you’re not laundering fascism.

No thank you. My head is spinning from the many “-isms” and other points of view thrown around in the article. It almost sounds like the politics have been determined by a magazine niche the founders wished to carve out rather than an authentic point of view that might forward society. As for Schmitz’ apparent agreement that ‘lockdowns, vaccine passports and other policies were a smoke screen for “a brutal reorganization of labor”’, give me a break! Why aren’t these policies and proposals — there never were any such passports in the US — merely honest if for some undesirable responses to a brutal virus whose behavior was and still is difficult to predict, understand, and control? Well meaning public health officials were trying to save lives! If they didn’t fully succeed, blame those who profited politically from facile opposition to anything that might control the virus.

An article that provides conclusive proof that the number of distinctions without a difference is infinite.

I took a read. It’s right wing garbage wrapped up as some kind of deep thought. Dear Compact, I am a heterosexual white man in 2022 and I don’t feel threatened.

It is hard for me to take anyone’s intellectual bona fides seriously if they allow themselves to be photographed in a bar with ice in their up glass.

All three sound like people I would not want to drink with.