If you don’t know who he was, Joe Sobran was a writer for National Review for something like twenty years. According to publisher Jack Fowler, Sobran passed away today at 64.

I never knew the man but I knew about him. And William F. Buckley said quite a bit when the two parted ways years back. Most of what I know, admittedly, can be found with a quick Google search and my longtime reading of NR.

Sobran, who considered himself a paleoconservative, outed himself as an anti-semite over the years. He would speak at conferences organized by David Irving, the notorious Holocaust denier. Indeed, he was involved with the “Institute for Historical Review” — a group dedicated to denying the Holocaust.

He thought America was “obsessed” with Israel and would go on to blame the 9/11 attacks on the policies of “Jewish-Zionist powers” in the United States. There were apparently few things that Sobran couldn’t blame on the United States, Jews, or a mixture of the two.

So, despite him having been part of the right for a good chunk of my life, I feel no pity for the man outside the fact he was a human being with a family. Maybe those close to Sobran saw a different person. But for those of us outside the circle, we saw an anti-semite who should be held up as the prime example of a conservative-gone-bad.