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Michael Joseph Sobran Jr. (/ˈsoʊbræn/; February 23, 1946 – September 30, 2010) was a paleoconservative American journalist. He wrote for the National Review magazine and was a syndicated columnist. During the 1970s, he frequently used the byline M. J. Sobran.

In his columns, Sobran was moralistic, opposed to big government, and an isolationist critic of U.S. foreign policy. When he fired Sobran from his longtime job at National Review in 1993, publisher William F. Buckley termed some of Sobran's writings "contextually anti-Semitic". In the early 2000s, Sobran was a speaker for a Holocaust denial group.

Early life

Sobran was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, into a Roman Catholic family. He graduated in 1969 from Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He studied for a Master of English degree with a concentration on Shakespearean studies. In the late 1960s, Sobran lectured on Shakespeare and English on a fellowship with Eastern Michigan.

Columnist

In 1972, while at Eastern Michigan, Sobran published rebuttals of criticisms from other faculty of an upcoming campus visit by William F. Buckley Jr., publisher of the National Review and a prominent conservative. After reading Sobran's comments, Buckley hired him as a columnist at the National Review. After three years, Buckley promoted Sobran to senior editor. They had a long friendship.

Aside from his work at National Review, Sobran spent 21 years as a commentator on the CBS Radio Spectrum program series. He was a syndicated columnist, first with the Los Angeles Times and later with the Universal Press Syndicate. From 1988 to 2007, he wrote the column "Washington Watch" for the traditionalist lay Catholic weekly The Wanderer. He also wrote a monthly column for the traditionalist Catholic Family News (a publication considered anti-Semitic by the Southern Poverty Law Center) and the "Bare Bodkin" column for Chronicles magazine. He was a media fellow of the Mises Institute.

Firing from National Review

In 1993, in a column in The Wanderer, Sobran attacked Buckley for his support of the 1991 Gulf War. Already unhappy with Sobran's columns on Israel and anti-Semitism, Buckley was reportedly angered that Sobran had used information from their private conversations and decided to fire him as senior editor. Buckley said he considered some of Sobran's columns to be "... contextually anti-Semitic. By this I mean that if he had been talking, let us say, about the lobbying interests of the Arabs or of the Chinese, he would not have raised eyebrows as an anti-Arab or an anti-Chinese". In response to his firing, Sobran claimed that Buckley told him to "stop antagonizing the Zionist crowd" and accused him of libel and moral incapacitation.[9] In his own assessment, Columnist Norman Podhoretz wrote that Sobran's columns were "anti-Semitic in themselves, and not merely 'contextually'".

In 1994, he founded "Sobran’s: The Real News of the Month", a newsletter that published until 2007. Sobran was named the Constitution Party's vice presidential nominee in 2000, but withdrew later that year due to scheduling conflicts.

Institute for Historical Research

In 2001, Pat Buchanan offered Sobran a column in Buchanan's new magazine The American Conservative. (After Sobran's death, Buchanan called him "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation".) However, the magazine's editor, Scott McConnell, withdrew the offer when Sobran refused to cancel his appearance before the Institute for Historical Review, a leading Holocaust-denying group.

In 2001 and 2003, Sobran spoke at conferences organized by David Irving and shared the podium with Paul Fromm, Charles D. Provan, and Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review. In 2002, he spoke at the Institute for Historical Review's annual conference. Referring to Sobran's appearance at the conferences, historian Deborah Lipstadt wrote: "Mr. Sobran may not have been an unequivocal [Holocaust] denier, but he gave support and comfort to the worst of them". Writing in National Review, Matthew Scully said: "His appearance before that sorry outfit a few years ago [...] remains impossible to explain, at least if you're trying to absolve him".

In the 2008 presidential election, Sobran endorsed Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin.

Death and legacy

Sobran was twice married and divorced. He had four children. Sobran died in a nursing home in Fairfax, Virginia, on September 30, 2010, of kidney failure due to diabetes.

Courtesy – Wikipedia
- JOSEPH SOBRAN, US Journalist

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