Professor Sowell’s contempt for “intellectuals” is remarkable.  In his telling, intellectuals create and promote ideas that often harm society gravely; they pretend to master subjects on which they have no more expertise than a layman;  they advocate radical societal  changes to whose disastrous consequences they are neither accountable nor susceptible;  they demand society treat their lofty visions “as axioms to be followed, not as hypothesis to be tested”; they are self-righteous narcissists whose primary preoccupation is to gain and maintain moral hegemony over the mass.  In a nutshell, intellectuals are the “enemy of the people”, to quote Mr. Trump. Or in the words of the Dear Leader from another time, they are the filthy ninth (臭老九) who deserve to be condemned to the lowest rung of society and be continually reeducated by proletariat.

While Sowell’s sweeping denunciation apparently applies to all intellectuals, you need not to read between the lines to understand his real target is left-leaning liberals.  Conservative intellectuals—the likes of Friedman and Hayek—are the good ones.  To borrow a cliché from the gun advocates, only the good guys with ideas can stop the bad guys with ideas.

To be sure, Sowell’s harsh critiques of liberals contain more than a grain of truth. However, as a lifetime intellectual himself, his completely lopsided approach is still puzzling, and sometimes feels personal.   Shockingly, Sowell cannot even bring himself to praise liberals’ support for Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination against his fellow African Americans.  “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day” is how he shrugs off the only good thing he has to say about liberals in the book.