Paul Gottfried

His father, Andrew Gottfried, was a furrier in Budapest who fled Hungary after the July Putsch of 1934.

The family relocated to Bridgeport, Connecticut, soon after Paul Gottfried's birth.

Andrew Gottfried had a fur business in Bridgeport and was involved in its Hungarian Jewish community.

Gottfried attended Yeshiva University in New York as an undergraduate.

He returned to Connecticut to attend Yale for graduate school, where he studied under Herbert Marcuse (with whom he disagreed).

Paul Edward Gottfried (born November 21, 1941) is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer.

He is a former Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.

He is editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles.

He is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal.

Gottfried was born in 1941 in the Bronx, New York City.

Gottfried is the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal founded by GRECE in 1968.

Gottfried was expelled as a contributor to National Review in the 1980s; interviewed in 2017, he said National Review "didn’t throw anybody out because they were racist," but alleged that it and the conservative movement had been captured by interests supportive of immigration and multiculturalism.

In the 1980s, he edited the journal Continuity for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which included some neo-Confederate writing.

He helped coin the term paleoconservative in 1986 and alternative right (with Richard Spencer) in 2008. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described him as a "far-right thinker".

He founded the H.L. Mencken Club, which the SPLC considers a white nationalist group.

Although noted for working with far-right and alt-right groups and figures, he has said that he does "not want to be in the same camp with white nationalists" or associated with pro-Nazis, "as somebody whose family barely escaped from the Nazis in the '30s".

With Thomas Fleming in 1986 he coined the term paleoconservative (a term he identifies with), and with Richard Spencer in 2008 he coined alternative right.

He has aimed to revitalize the Old Right to counter neoconservative and neoliberal influence in the conservative movement.

He is a former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.

He was a key advisor in the 1990s to Pat Buchanan, notably during Buchanan's campaign in the 1992 Republican primaries against President George H. W. Bush.

He worked for the journal Telos, which embraced some far-right causes.

He is opposed to nation-building and is a critic of American interventionist foreign policy; he additionally opposes the Zionist movement and the creation of the State of Israel.

He has written that Murray Rothbard was a close friend and influence.

Gottfried is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank.

In 2008, Gottfried founded the H.L. Mencken Club, a group the SPLC has described as white nationalist.

Richard Spencer was a board member.

Gottfried helped coin the term alternative right with a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club in 2008 envisioning a nationalist and populist right-wing movement; it was published by Richard Spencer in Taki's Magazine with the title "The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right". Gottfried has been described as a former intellectual mentor to Spencer.

As of 2010, according to the SPLC, Gottfried was a senior contributing editor at Alternative Right, a website edited by Spencer.

It is named for the famous writer H.L. Mencken; a Village Voice article about the club in 2013 noted Mencken's casual racism.

The Village Voice said the club was "overwhelmingly geriatric" and met in airport hotels near Baltimore.

Marilyn Mayo of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center on Extremism said the ADL did not consider the club a hate group, but that it "attracts a number of white supremacists to their conferences".

Gottfried has spoken at American Renaissance conferences and written essays for VDARE.

He and Spencer co-edited a book in 2015.

Gottfried had written 13 books as of 2016.

He moved to Elizabethtown after his first wife died, and taught at the college until "a school official encouraged his early exit", according to a 2016 article in ''Tablet.

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Gottfried was a friend of Richard Nixon after Nixon resigned from the presidency.

In a 2016 article in the online magazine Tablet titled "The Alt-Right's Jewish Godfather", Gottfried said, "Whenever I look at Richard [Spencer], I see my ideas coming back in a garbled form."

An Intelligencer article about the far right in 2017 summarized Gotfred as a "nativist strategist" who had "spent a career agitating for an ethno-nationalist conservatism that celebrated white Western values and lamented what feminism and multiculturalism had done to dilute them".

In 2018, he joined the Institut des sciences sociales, économiques et politiques (Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences), founded by Marion Maréchal and Thibaut Monnier, in Lyon, France.