Intellectual = anyone who makes their living with words Fair enough. Sowell missed the boat on this one, first time ever in my recollection. He failed to supply a definition for the term.
To me, an "intellectual" in its derogatory sense is someone who parrots phrases without fully understanding the concepts behind them or the implications of the philosophical underpinnings of those concepts. Or, if they do in fact appreciate the implications, they are morally incapable of evaluating the degree of their goodness or evil. Or finally, they are morally capable, but are just evil.
In other words, they are either robots or degenerates with above-average linguistic abilities
Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
That not how I define it.
Intellectuals are more like a song writer or a musician. All the same words and notes have been used before many times over, but they create a new song, a new thought or idea from them.
That is what they do, and sometimes they are right, and more often they are wrong.
Today, the media as always is the distributor of intellectual thinking although often not attributed. The media as we know is controlled largely by the left and it follows that the left's thinking is widely distributed in the West and other types of thinking in the east and middle east.
Sowell is simply making that case from what I read in the lead paragraph.