Never mind "public", can any one explain why Chomsky's regarded as "an intellectual"?
As near as I can figure, it was because he was a leftist against the Vietnam conflict, and supported murderous totalitarian regimes at the same time.
Whether you’re a butterfly scientist claiming universal truth about population bombs or, in Chomsky’s case, a 1950 linguistics professor who became a famous anarchist leftist who loved every totalitarian regime he could find, Noam is just another campus leftist that has ruined world discourse for six years.