Repeated sweeping attacks on "The media" and Trump's threat to impose stronger "libel laws" against free speech criticizing him are attacks on freedom of speech. This occurs too often and too systematically to be just sloppy criticism of specific journalists or dominant trends among establishment intellectuals. Trump in particular attacks the media with a loutish anti-intellectualism, unable or unwilling to evaluate specific statements or trends in terms of principles.

You should not respect them, but that doesn't make them not intellectuals as long as they are professionally working with ideas. The worst of them are poor journalists, scholars, and thinkers -- and in that sense you can call them pseudo intellectuals and anti-intellectual -- but they are still influencing the culture professionally through ideas. There have been many intellectuals who were anti-intellectual, using ideas to destroy reason.

Most intellectuals today, particularly in the media, have no knowledge of philosophy or the history of its development and influence on society. They have absorbed premises without knowing where they come from or even articulating them coherently, picking them up from what Ayn Rand called the "transmission belts" -- those who disseminate ideas formulated by others, losing track of the source -- and becoming transmitters themselves. Few people know the source of their own ideas and premises.

The orgy of bad principles circulating today and taken for granted as they are put into practice is the result and ongoing state of a culture driven by bad philosophy circulated in many ways. The entire state of the culture is a result of the wrong philosophy spread by intellectuals and then put into destructive practice. Bad ideas should always be rejected, and dishonest and sloppy intellectuals should be denounced. The establishment intellectuals in general must be opposed and identified for what they are doing. The hacks on your local newspaper are the least of it.

But that doesn't mean to denounce "the media" or intellectuals as such. Intellectual argument and dissemination of ideas, and the freedom of thought, speech, and the press, are all we have between us and dictatorship with its censorship. And there are still plenty of reporters and other writers who often do an at least partially decent job against that.

It's not a matter of not "throwing the baby out with the bath water", but replacing the pollution in the tub.