I think the guy is right. Sorry, but in my experience, it’s true. Make a list of the great minds of our time, the true intellectuals, and you’ll be forced to agree.
Hayek, Lord Monckton, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams?
Of course, being intelligent doesn’t make a person right. It simply means they are better at reasoning.
I am an engineer. Going through the training that an engineer must gives you the ability to think clearly and reason.
I have found that most liberals, when you sound them out on their positions, employ faulty reasoning almost always.
Of course, when you find a liberal engineer (I work with a couple) you have to question how someone with that training could believe the way they do. The cognitive dissonance must be something terrible.
American liberals (”conservatives”) of the Rush Limbaugh/Sarah Palin/NASCAR variety tend to be suspicious of reasoning, and of educated people. It’s a cultural thing. This is not a criticism; it’s an observation.
Disagree here also. They disagree with pointy headed stupidity gussied up as "reasoning" (to use your words) that doesn't square with their innate common sense. There's nothing "stupid" about that.
Hayek, yes (Nobel Prize, 1974), but the rest: relative lightweights. (I love Lord Monckton, by the way.) Fine people, but in 100 years no one will know those names. Sorry.
The last genuinely conservative intellectual was William F. Buckley, and even he won't make the honor roll of history. Since Darwin, practically all the big names of academe have been associated with the secular-materialist worldview and/or the Revolution in some way. Hegel, Marx, Wells, Freud, Russell, Nietzsche, Wittegenstein, Wilde, Twain, the younger Curies, Oppenheimer, Shapley, von Neumann, Keynes, both Huxleys, Shaw, Sartre, Watson and Crick, Dawkins, Gould, Hawking — hell, even Carl Sagan and Ayn Rand. Up against these names we conservatives have Kipling, Belloc, Chesterton, Kirk, Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis. (Von Neumann converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, but was a materialist for most of his life. Ditto Wilde.) The last heavyweight intellectual on our team was Pasteur — probably the most brilliant man of the 19th Century. Since then, a lot of good people, but no one whose name is likely to ring down the halls of history.