Chomskyite Hypocrisy on Parade

FrontPageMag has a terrific little expose of the dirtiest little secret of Leftist academia: they're all overpaid, materialistic prima donnas.

Care to hear Noam Chomsky skewer America's soulless, capitalist wealth and privilege? It will set you back $12,000, roughly one-fourth of the average MIT student's tuition. And Chomsky's leftist academics-in-arms have similarly immodest asking prices. Take Princeton's resident race baiter, Cornel West. With an official per-lecture fee of $15,000 plus first-class traveling expenses, West ranks among the priciest academics. Recently he spoke at Denver U. for $35,000. For one hour.

The selfless leaders of the Left don't just speak for the money, of course; there are also the perks. The director of one D.C.-based booking agency tells me her leftist clients require the works from their hosts (usually colleges): a room at one of the area's nicer hotels, meals, travel fare and a car. Lest you think they're all closet high lifers, she helpfully notes that, in some instances, the car "doesn't even have to be a limousine."

One of the primary attributes of the Chomskyite has always been hypocrisy. One who condemns from on high, after all, should not be expected to have to mingle with the proles in the course of their denunciations. This only underlines my belief that any populist rhetoric on the part of the Chomskyites is most certainly of the pseudo variety. They are, in truth, absolute and uncompromising elitists. What they are after is not an egalitarian Utopia but a dictatorship of the intellectuals.