Congratulations to Greg LaVoy of Kalamazoo College for winning Young America's Foundation's "Exposing Intellectual Morons Essay Contest." Greg chose to write on Noam Chomsky of all the intellectual morons discussed in my book by the same name. You can read his winning essay here. Among other prizes, Greg pocketed $2,500 and a won a trip to the Reagan Ranch.

Chomsky is a serious philosophical thinker who used his deserved reputation as a first rate mind in linguistics to make ignorant political statements. Very few who are familiar with Chomsky's popular views know much about his real accomplishements in linguistics: transformational, universal and generative grammar.

In this regard he is much the same as Bertrand Russell. Russell earned a reptutation as a first rate thinker for his work in philosophy of mathematics. He then proceeded to publicly write and protest against all things conservative.

The sense in which each is an intellectual moron, then, must be hedged by their real intellectual achievments.

That was a great essay. Cheers!

Actually, linguist John Williamson says that Chomsky was no better in linguistics. He makes some good points in Chomsky's Linguistics Refuted including that his linguistcs and his politics are of a piece.