Sticking Out

James Howard Kunstler over at Clusterfuck Nation is busy being a bitter pill, which is why I read him, but this is a truly baffling sentence:

One of the stupidest assumptions made by the educated salient of adults these days is that we are guaranteed a smooth transition between the cancerous hypertrophy of our current economic environment and the harsher conditions that we are barreling toward.

The "educated salient of adults"?

"Salient" is usually an adjective, but it also serves as a noun from time to time: it's not usual, but, just as "salient" the adjective means "prominent: projecting outwards", "salient" the noun means "something which projects outwards"--usually a physical object such as the outcropping of a mountain.

And so I have absolutely no idea, none whatever, what Kunstler could mean by "educated salient of adults". It sort of sounds as if he means part of a graph--a bell curve of the population, say, from completely unlettered to highly educated--but the whole point of a bell curve is that there wouldn't be any salients, that it would be smooth.

It seems to me that he means to say "...made by educated adults..." or perhaps even "made by the intelligentsia". I wish I knew what that word "salient" was doing in there.