Gottfried on Groypers: A Review of The Essential Paul Gottfried

A doorway is defined in Jewish law as a side post and something that goes across it. Many American cities have an “eruv,” a wire tied from pole to pole that stretches around the city. The purpose of the eruv is to allow some Jews to carry items outside of their homes on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. Symbolically, this represents the extension of private space in the public square. The United States and the United Kingdom are the only countries on Earth outside of Israel that have eruvim in most major cities. Belgium, for example, has only one city with an eruv. It is quite a remarkable fact that the are eruvim in this country.

White Americans are going to become a minority in the year 2045 due to Democratic open-border policies, as well as legal migration. Mark Potok, the Jewish head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, has never denied reports that he actively tracked the projected decline in the non-Hispanic white population of the United States from around 89% in 1920 down to about 62% by 2015.

Paul Gottfried, an American political philosopher, historian, and author, also Jewish, is widely credited with coining the term “paleoconservative” in 1986 alongside Thomas Fleming. Gottfried argued that “the pathologization of normal gentile society in The Authoritarian Personality foreshadows today’s coerced political corrections. The social criticism of the Frankfurt School implies the need for a powerful regime of socialist administrators to level inequalities…Macdonald links this call for massive social engineering to characteristically Jewish concerns and anxieties shared by its overwhelmingly Jewish formulators: the gentile other would remain—or so it was assumed—a prowling presence absent reconstruction of the surrounding society.” According to Gottfried, The Authoritarian Personality, written by Theodor Adorno (my favorite writer), set the stage for some to engage in a uniquely Jewish pathologization of the American white Christian majority.

So, what do these three facts mean? They mean that Jews in America have enjoyed, and I hope continue to enjoy, a historically unprecedented level of religious freedom—a type of freedom that most people would deny them. This means that a not insignificant civil rights leader, who was Jewish, reacted to the remarkable hospitality of the Anglo-Germanic Christian people that founded the American nation with a deep hatred that most observers could describe as ethnocidal (imagine if Nicholas Fuentes kept a list for Jews the way Mark Potok kept a list for whites). This also means that one of America’s great Jewish intellectuals, Paul Gottfried, could observe the terrible contrast between Jewish freedom in a gentile state and Jewish hate of gentiles and condemn it. He saw this strange hate for what it was: a petty victimhood smuggled to the new world from the old alongside negative dialectics, that deserved outright condemnation and total war. For the preservation of the remarkable peace, freedom, and precious eruvim the Jews were granted, also meant the preservation of those who granted them the ability to place eruvim. It was not the Constitution that granted this right, but the people to whom the Constitution belonged. And Gottfried wasn’t afraid to say it.

The Essential Paul Gottfried is not a book for everyone. As Gottfried writes, “Those with both youthful energies and the will for this work of restoration are my intended audience. Although my life’s work has had little influence on today’s conservative establishment, it should be of greater use to those who will be rebuilding our Right and dedicating themselves to the task of civilizational renewal."

The Essential Paul Gottfried is for young, right-wing men. I’m a 28-year-old woman. I’m not the target audience. I sleep with the target audience.

Imagine not me: someone who does not love Theodor Adorno, does not believe that a Christian country should allow eruvim, and yet does know about Mark Potok’s list and white minoritization: that is to say, a Groyper. This book is not for them. But the book is a little bit about them. Because the book is a little bit about the Israel Lobby, white America and immigration, the rottenness of the conservative establishment and its legitimate—and often illegitimate, quite pathetic—opponents.

So, the book isn’t for me and not for Groypers, but it does touch on them a little bit. So, who is it for?

Let me paint a picture. My husband's younger brother is a conservative, deeply religious man who is something of a rogue, and a bit too online, too. On bad days, he jokes about holocaust denial. For fun. On good days, he’s at a bar with a priest or visiting a synagogue to speak to a rabbi. His beard goes back and forth from neat and orderly (alongside an ever-disappearing-reappearing buzzcut leftover from his time with an Army program) to an unkempt and wild mess, not like that of a homeless vagrant, but more like that of a penitent monk. He could find something of value in Gottfried’s thoughtful essays on Jews and gentiles and the nature of fascism.

The book is for another type of young man, the kind I meet at little events in D.C. Of them, there are two types.

The first type is a warrior, forced to hide their “power level” in so many ways by a world that would eat them. Flyers on the road, yellow and black, popping out against the dull-grey electrolyzed steel of streetlamps, offer bounties for screenshots of their “MAGA NAZI group chats.” High schools punished them for any display of the fighting and cruelty needed to make boys into tough men who have what it takes to succeed in life. In college, the Soviets hunted through their emails for wrongthink while inspectors scrounged their essays for dangerous ideas. Since they were born, the world has sought to troon them out or purge them. They’ve had no place but that which they’ve taken for themselves, uncastrated, unbent, unbroken.

At the Charlie Kirk Memorial at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Karoline Leavitt got on stage and declared the old Republican establishment dead. Then, the crowd on the main floor, mostly working-class white people who had driven in from Maryland and Virginia, and Evangelicals with beautiful children in tow, broke into an unexpected applause. Karoline was visibly stunned for a moment. She let the crowd cheer. But above the crowd, on the balcony seating, much more nicely dressed, sat the old donors and members of Congress. They clapped limply. Why applaud that you’re hated? Beside them stood their staffers, young and brave, thunderously applauding with the people below. I wondered how it felt to be a donor and watch your own staff applaud, with the vast masses of poor white America, your own destruction. The staffers, these young sons of America, were drafted in 2016 and will soon, alongside their erstwhile Millennial and Gen X allies, take on the mantle of leadership of the Republican Party. Who knows what the world has in store for them? I love one of them. I sometimes think about how Ian Thomas was a beloved fighter pilot in 1944. How fast things can change. Gottfried’s essays are notes from his war and skirmishes with Con. Inc., and so these warriors should read him like Homer.

Over his long career, Gottfried fought with almost every single institution and organization that has given us the disaster in which we now live. He was there first. He was there first on the strange way in which some American Jews insist upon a double standard of ethnic solidarity for me and forced diversity for thee. He was there on the cultural decay in middle America. He was there to defend traditional life. He was there on immigration. The warriors are there now, too. They stand in a trench that Gottfried helped dig. And they don't even know his name. They have puzzled out by nature what he knew by experience.

The second type, not a warrior, is a sort of relic. A soft young man with baby rosy cheeks from a wealthy WASP family who is conservative because that’s how he was raised. There is a shadow of the mid-Atlantic accent in these young men, in the way they say abor-shun rather than abor-shin. I find them adorable. They are usually wandering around at some event in a little bow tie. And they are hopelessly outgunned. These Yankee-doodle dandies were not born to be in a war. They are unlike the middle-American war-boys of fent-slumped Mexican high schools. These young men have never set foot in Azunumerica.

But in a way, they are already there, in wealthy, all-white enclaves scattered around the country. Rhodesia is a hidden cove within the Patuxent Research Refuge. These sensitive young men, increasingly relics of old America, need a guide on how to be, and why to be, a warrior—and why not to be a part of Con. Inc. This book is a guide. Mostly, their hearts are in the right place. But they are tender and naïve. They are unaware that a war is underway. Gottfried writes of battles with foes, insurgency, trenches, lines of engagement, assault, and retreat. This is the way young men must learn to think.

The younger you are, the better the book will be. If you’re 18 and think being a libertarian is silly, but you’re not entirely sure what to believe, I suggest reading The Essential Paul Gottfried. It’s informative, fair, and radical in just the right way: unflinching on what matters, considerate of what does not, judicious in treatment of political enemies, and critical of allies when they should be criticized. Gottfried is an old man now, a boomer even, and that’s why I like his writing. You can tell he came of age when a literary scene existed, when writers were paid for writing, when essays and magazines were something more than paywalled memes. He is eminently reasonable, fair, and yet fierce.

I think the ideal way to read the book is to take it slow and read an essay or two a week, or open the index and flip to whatever interests you. This is a compendium, not a narrative, so the order does not really matter. For example, this week I skipped over about two-thirds of the book to go straight to “Mopping up the Israel Lobby,” which contains great insight into goy-bashing, the causes of WWI, AIPAC’s venomous arrogance, and what a legitimate, fair, and affectionate relationship between the U.S. and Israel might look like. I felt that I had washed my mind of some of the muck and filth of X and groupchats, that some wise old man gave me a little bit of normalcy, without being a fucking retarded boomer blowing a shofar.

By chance, my husband walked by. I handed him the essential Paul Gottfried and asked him to read “The Rise of the Post-Paleos." As a once self-described paleocon and admirer of Nixon, he had never even heard of Paul Gottfried; that’s how successfully the mainstream conservative establishment killed him off.

He reads for a moment, laughs, and says, “I’ve been to an AEI event. I was the most based guy in the room. I only went there for Deneen.” Responding, of course, to Gottfried’s line that the post-paleocons should, if they find themselves at an AEI event, only go to find information to later deploy in their war of attrition.

“I took a picture of the last paragraph for the boys,” he says, the “ture” in “picture” drawn out soft and long in the Southern way, like a vowel is something fragile. He hands the book back to me, “They’ll enjoy it,” he laughs, “I hate when they’re praising Martin Luther King. He’s a piece of shit. He’s a commie.” He pauses for a moment, stands, and thinks, then says, “We all know this instinctively, by the way." He laughs and texts the boys. One of them texts back, “goated.” Like react. Credit to Gottfried that an essay he wrote in 2008 is goated in 2025.

The boys would enjoy The Essential Paul Gottfried. This might even be the best time to read him, given the skirmishes taking place just outside.

Criticism

I began this review with the eruvim and becoming a white minority because they are unusual facts of American life, ones that are particularly striking in light of our history. The eruv is a newcomer to American cities, barely a century old. White minoritization is also relatively new. It hasn’t even happened yet. And God help us if it does. You think woke is bad now? Wait until Congress is majority white and the population is minority white. Did you know your home can simply be taken from you? Ian Thomas was shot down over Italy.

These facts raise questions, questions that demand answers, answers that are not present in the book, but hinted at and nodded to.

What does being American mean on the verge of white minoritization? What do we do when Harvard is discriminating against white men and will not stop? What is the place of Christianity in America if we cannot have the Ten Commandments at school, but an eruv can be strung up around D.C.? What is the place of white Americans in America as a minority, and how might Jewish Americans and white Americans relate to each other once white Americans are a minority? How do Christians and Jews belong in the same political coalition when some members in both groups have ethnocidal intent towards the other? How do we manage this tension while implementing remigration, which will only make more salient questions of ethnos and intent? How do we get our grandparents to stop blowing the shofar and thinking about reforming Social Security? How do you explain to Rod Dreher that one of the reasons so many people on the right react strongly to Israel is because grandma and grandpa were convinced that they should care more about Zion than legal immigration, and so out of envy, rather than hate, some become enemies of Israel, and even antisemites?

Like the eruv and white minoritization, the Evangelical shofar is a peculiar fact of American life, that a critical mind can deeply explore. Gottfried is the kind of man to write about it. I hope that someone succeeds him. These are the sorts of issues and questions that, when left unanswered, or even worse, are punished for being asked, give rise to Groypers. Gottfried is rational and reasonable. He answered these sorts of questions for years. I can’t help but feel that the most important things he could say are things he has yet to write. I would have enjoyed the book more if there had been some fresh writing on these topics—but perhaps that’s better saved for another project?