Although he rejects the alt-right label today, Gottfried affixed it to himself in the summer of 2008 when he teamed up with a 30-year-old editor named Richard Spencer to create a conference for right-wingers who regarded Dubya as a warmongering liberal who had betrayed conservatism and surrendered to leftist political correctness.
Gottfried delivered a speech that November to the first meeting of his H.L. Mencken Club titled “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.” It focused on the conflict that occurred in the 1970s and ’80s when many hawkish Democrats had migrated to the Republican Party and began dominating its institutions. The neoconservatives, as they were eventually called, had made a mess of the GOP and America as a whole, Gottfried argued, but their right-wing opponents (he had earlier coined the term “paleoconservatives” in 1986 to describe them) were continually unable to do anything about it because they were so ideologically divided.
According to his address, Gottfried intended to do something to promote collaboration and unity against the common enemy. The alt-right was that something.
Spencer, who later went on to start a (now-defunct) webzine called Alternative Right, played a big part in conference organizing for the nascent group. He also gave addresses at subsequent Mencken Club meetings, but eventually the two men grew apart as Spencer developed more than an academic fascination with fascism and white separatism.
“Richard, I think, has gone on out on a limb to create a more extreme, racialist right,” Gottfried, 75, told Salon in a telephone interview last month. His preferred stance then (and now) was more about “anti-anti-racism” and opposing leftist political correctness, he said.
Another factor in their disaffection was an address that Spencer gave at the Mencken Club’s 2011 meeting, in which he heaped praise upon Madison Grant, an early 20th-century conservationist who was also an advocate of the bogus racial science known as eugenics.
Spencer’s speech was not well-received by the crowd. According to a contemporary account of the conference proceedings, at least one audience member walked out in protest.
“His speech was so embarrassing,” Gottfried said. “I thought it would be a kind of historical presentation but it turned out to be a harangue in favor of Indo-German America or something like this.”
(Despite the Mencken Club’s professed dedication to completely intellectual discussions, the recording of Spencer’s speech about Grant is nowhere to be found in the club’s audio library of speeches from that year’s proceedings.)
…Paradoxically, one ally Hunter had in this regard was Richard Spencer, Gottfried’s former junior partner who has now become synonymous with white supremacy. It was Spencer who gave a speech in Washington, after Trump’s election, in which claimed that only whites could preserve Western civilization. He ended with the English translation of “Sieg Heil,” the infamous phrase Nazis encouraged Germans to use in praise of Adolf Hitler.
In 2008, however, Spencer had not yet fully committed to white nationalism. At the time, he was editing Takimag, a libertarian blog and was under pressure to increase traffic. One strategy suggested by Taki Theodoracopulos, the site’s owner, was to begin publishing essays written by “white advocate” author Jared Taylor.
According to Hunter and Antle, who both wrote for the site at the time, Spencer opposed the idea, even though the site had published Taylor once before. Hunter specifically recalled discussing the matter with Spencer in New York after inviting him to attend a performance of his part-time rock band.
“I had that conversation with Spencer on the sidewalk outside the venue,” Hunter said by email. “He told me he would never run Taylor.” Antle recalled discussing the matter on the telephone with Spencer and said that Spencer discussed the matter with several other contributors as well, who were concerned about whether they would continue to write for the site if it published Taylor’s anti-black and anti-Hispanic articles.
Whether Taylor’s writings were a point of friction between Spencer and his boss, the poor traffic that Takimag attracted did bother Theodoracopulos. Shortly after Spencer was removed as editor in January of 2009, he founded his own independent webzine titled Alternative Right. That was subsequently shuttered after Spencer was hired by publishing heir William Regnery to run his overtly racist think tank, the National Policy Institute.
