Taking on the right-on with cold, hard facts

THOMAS SOWELL, SENIOR FELLOW AT Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, must be the most distinguished anti-intellectual intellectual alive today. His best-known British opponent might be Aidan Byrne, a senior lecturer in English and Media Studies at Wolver-hampton University. On 26 May 2012, Byrne criticised Sowell’s 2010 study Intellectuals and Society on the London School of Economics Review of Books blog, dismissing it as “a diatribe against sophistication, deliberation and complexity”, repeatedly alluding to the author’s “Tea Party” attitudes. He was not calling Sowell genteel: made up of people who now want to “Make America Great Again”. In Byrne’s eyes, Sowell seemed an angry, vulgar populist — and worse. According to the best-known passage in the review: “Sowell’s racial references are disordered and disturbing ‘dog whistles’ … To him, slavery’s cultural legacy…