And that’s the point. It’s not that any of these social commentators (or many others—the specific examples are not important) are not original thinkers in and of themselves, or that they are not intelligent, educated, and live by the courage of their convictions (they are all of these things and more); it is that when you strap on an ideological belief you slot yourself into a set pattern of specific positions within that belief and parrot those back to your social group—the audience, in the case of public intellectuals—who listen mostly in order to have their own ideological beliefs
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