Show 512 Dennis Prager talks to Thomas Sowell, widely read syndicated columnist, best selling author and scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book is Intellectuals and Society. The President’s State of the Union Speech is also a topic of discussion. 
 
Thomas Sowell unmasks the intellectuals who exalt themselves by denigrating our society -- and are working to destroy it.
Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
There has probably never been an era in history when intellectuals have played a larger role in society – and yet few Americans know these immensely influential people who are doing so much to steer our nation off course. But now, the latest thought-provoking book from the renowned conservative thinker Thomas Sowell, offers you a unique introduction to the world of intellectuals. Intellectuals and Society introduces you to the thinkers of our society, many of them unknown to the general public, who mold our society and make an impact on people in every walk of life, both for the better and for the worse -- but usually for the worse. Sowell's vision, as expansive as ever, ranges over economics, politics, the media, academia, the law, and even war as he shows the momentous ways in which this small group of people wields a baneful influence upon our nation and Western civilization as a whole.
 
These intellectuals, Sowell says, are surrounded by a huge array of people and groups who disseminate their ideas: journalists, teachers, staffers to legislators, law clerks, and other members of the intelligentsia. Thus their influence on the course of society can be considerable, or even crucial. He shows how intellectuals have -- on issues ranging across the spectrum from housing policies to laws governing organ transplants -- sought to have decision- making discretion taken from those directly involved, who have personal knowledge and a personal stake, and transferred to third parties who have neither, and who pay no price for being wrong.
Sowell shows how intellectuals have filtered information in the media, in the schools, and in academia, to leave out things that threaten their vision of the world. Intellectuals' downplaying of objective reality and objective criteria, says Sowell, extends beyond social, scientific, or economic phenomena into art, music, and philosophy. Above all, he reveals how intellectuals exalt themselves by running America down and turning Americans against each other. Whether the subject is crime, economics, or other matters, intellectuals hold positions that are conspicuously different from those held by society -- while presenting themselves as intellectually and morally superior to ordinary folk.
 
Their vision of the world, Sowell explains, includes a role for themselves as a self-anointed vanguard, leading the ignorant masses toward a better world. They treat those whose ideas or vision are different as unworthy obstacles to progress, nuisances to be disregarded, circumvented, or discredited, rather than as people on the same moral and intellectual plane, whose arguments are to be engaged factually and logically. Sowell points out how college speech codes with subjective criteria and "re-education" provisions for those expressing "benighted" opinions emphasize how intellectuals demonize and marginalize their opponents.
 
Sowell shows how this vision that intellectuals have of themselves as the anointed is a major obstacle preventing examining their opinions in light of evidence and experience. He tears the cover off the ruthlessness with which the anointed assail their conservative opponents, in defiance of ever mounting evidence against their pet theories -- like the "root causes" of crime.
 
 
The wisdom and insight of Thomas Sowell:
 
How intellect is not wisdom, and what the difference is
 
One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals: the free granted to them to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation
 
"Public intellectuals" l