“I’ve met all sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.”
~Noam Chomsky
“Chomsky played a part in cultivating the Michael Tracey, Matt Taibbi wing with alt media that defends [Jeffrey] Epstein, & by extension the other forces of ruling-class pedophilia. Remember that all of this comes from the campaign to promote a non-communist left, which Chomsky embodies.”
~Rainer Shea, Substack
That view of Noam Chomsky is something I’ve been chewing on for a long time. While often impressed by his intellectual scholarship and leftist critique, as early as 2010, I noticed something that bothered me.
When asked by a young man about what to do, all he gave was a quippy response that amounted to nothing “Ye slaves, find yer own ways.”
He offered no genuine alternative, solution, or pathway forward. Without articulating a collective project, his ideology has left the individual stranded against forces far beyond us all. He didn’t propose any hope of solidarity, of class or group consciousness.
Though I had a hard time putting my finger on it at the time, I now look back at it with greater knowledge and perspective.
It reminds me of how, during the Cold War, the CIA funded and promoted postmodernists so as to suck out the oxygen from the room of leftist spaces (literary magazines, writer workshops, etc). It was intended to drown out and silence Marxists. It was successful in that postmodernism became so prominent that right-wingers came to complain about it.
Maybe Chomsky’s anarchism has served a similar role for the powers that be. He offers a critique that, if not empty, is impotent. It leads nowhere and so fuels demoralization and helplessness.
“Reading Chomsky’s emails and advice to Epstein, who by then was already known for pleading guilty to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution, is enough. It actually lends more credence to the idea that Chomsky was controlled opposition and a government asset, a herder of leftism to pacify revolutionary tactics and discourage its practice.”
~Rex Eloquens, An Epitaph for Noam Chomsky
Why would he willingly serve this role in crippling the left? And now in his ties to Epstein being proven, why would he destroy his entire reputation and legacy?
“There’s nothing that makes me crazier than when a guy who I know is ten times smarter than me acts like he is dumber than me.”
~Jimmy Dore“While attaining credibility for doing the most basic, human thing for Palestine, he ran in the same circles of Zionists like Epstein who wanted to overthrow Syria, Iran and Russia among others. The same people who wanted to destroy Gaza and have done so. He knew who Epstein was and his affiliations with Zionism; how he wouldn’t have known about his Mossad ties? Was he an idiot? No. More likely an opportunist.”
~Fiorella Isabel, from X
Though presenting himself as an outsider, he has been an insider for his entire career.
And so he wasn’t offering a genuinely outside perspective. But until recently, it wasn’t clear what kind of insider he was or rather exactly what he was inside of. This is the problem with any public figures aligned with the Democratic Party, as was Chomsky.
It’s not to suggest he was consciously part of a conspiracy. It’s simply that, in being drawn into the system of power, he took on the biases of it. One doesn’t have to be among the ruling elite to have one’s imagination and identity constrained by the ideological realism that maintains elite rule.
Chomsky almost certainly began with good intentions, as most people do. And he came to believe in the bullshit of lesser evilism, if we are to give him the benefit of the doubt.
He is a lesson to us all.
The moral decadence inherent to that worldview slowly led him into the gravity of a blackmail pedophilia ring, what seems to have been part of a vast transnational intelligence operation. Likely, all along the way, he stated persuasive reasons for why he did this or that. The transition over time was probably so subtle that he never, at any given point, realized how far he had gone into a world he once would’ve hated.
That is how he ended up as a partisan stooge, in maintaining the bipartisan control of the American Empire.
Democrats aren’t an opposition party but controlled opposition. They operate as part of the gatekeepers. They are the managers of the Overton window who, in consistently attacking the broad left (and silencing the left-liberal supermajority), declare what’s allowable or not: This far left and no further!
Related to this, it’s how we the American public have allowed ourselves to be controlled and manipulated. The following are my thoughts during the presidential campaign season before the 2016 election:
“I’ve always had an oddly optimistic side of my personality. Despite my depression and skepticism, I’m a possibility thinker and I try to gain a larger perspective to see beyond whatever shittiness is going on in any given moment. It’s easy to be cynical, but that seems like a boring way to live if that is a knee-jerk reaction and thoughtless attitude.
“Yet the political left supporting someone so horrific as Clinton is snuffing out what hope I’ve held onto all these years. I’m shocked by how few people comprehend how far gone is our society. It’s long past the time of playing these kinds of games. I don’t want to give up on this country, but so many Americans have already given up by default of the choices they’re making. Fighting the good fight is seemingly ever more pointless as time goes on.
“I’m starting to think we’re just going to have to let the situation go beyond redemption and then rebuild out of the rubble. We will collectively take our problems seriously when there is no other choice left, after we’ve wasted all other opportunities and have backed ourselves into a corner. That is a sad conclusion to come to.”
It reminds one of the old quote, often attributed to Winston Churchill: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” If we haven’t yet quite tried everything else, one suspects we’re getting close to that point. It would be nice for the American people to finally move onto the final stage of doing the right thing.
My above words were from the comments section at one of my earlier writings, The Chomsky Problem (2016).
“Noam Chomsky’s life and work cannot be understood without taking into account his militarily-funded linguistics research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There were, I believe, always two ‘Noam Chomskys’ – one working for the US military and the other working tirelessly against that same military. This contradiction cannot explain every aspect of Chomsky’s puzzling friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. But it is the underlying contradiction that helps us understand why someone as radical as Chomsky ended up being involved with someone as reactionary as Epstein.”
~Chris Knight, The Chomsky/Epstein Puzzle
I’ve long complained about Chomsky, such as his repeatedly acting as a sheepdog for the corporate Democrats.
But in my linked piece, I clarified that it’s a deeper problem, as he long ago was mired in Pentagon money and hence a part of the military-industrial complex, something he rationalized away as he did with Epstein’s crimes (Chomsky subreddit, Noam & Valeria Chomsky’s reactions to Epstein’s sex trafficking charges). Working at MIT, it was simply the water he swam in.
For all his outward opposition to capitalism, in the end, Chomsky was part of the capitalist system. And he protected it, if he may not have realized how he was being duped and used.
But it’s also telling how, strangely as it seemed in the past, he was always ready to dismiss ‘conspiracy theories’. What made this strange was precisely that his political scholarship described conspiracies in great detail. He provided the undeniable and irrefutable proof that so-called conspiracy theories were conspiracy facts. He couldn’t recognize it, though; or he couldn’t allow it into his awareness.
Maybe his reluctance to openly speak of conspiracies was because, in a sense, he realized he was part of one.
“There is no ethical way to be a billionaire. Literally, having that much money and power destroys your brain, destroys your morality to the point where it’s clear from these files that Epstein and others considered themselves completely above the law and held any sort of value for human life. And that’s what really comes out of these things, that the billionaire class that rules us has to be destroyed and overthrown.”
~Alan MacLeod
One might add that neither is there an ethical way to be associated with the billionaire class.
Many of Chomsky’s fans and supporters are now shocked to find him in the Epstein files. It turns out he was a close friend and adviser of Jeffrey Epstein.
“One email from Chomsky and his second wife Valeria describes the couple’s friendship with Epstein as ‘deep and sincere and everlasting’. Another from Valeria describes Epstein as: ‘our best friend. I mean “the” one.’ Meanwhile other messages – signed only by Chomsky himself – are equally generous to the convicted sex offender, saying, for example, ‘we’re with you all the way’ and ‘you’re constantly with us in spirit and in our thoughts.’”
~Chris Knight, The Chomsky/Epstein Puzzle
He helped Epstein to launder his reputation after his horrendous crimes were revealed. That is to say Chomsky gave advice on how to manufacture consent, by managing his public image. In return, Epstein gave Chomsky financial advice, along with paying for his flights and hotel rooms, and basically funding a life of luxury. Chomsky even flew on the infamous Lolita Express.
To the very end of Epstein’s life, Chomsky continued to defend him in the press. But he forgot to mention his financial ties to Epstein.
Sadly, cynical as I’ve become, I was unsurprised. I knew there was something off about Chomsky long ago, if it required more careful analysis to figure it out back then. But now it’s become obvious how corrupted and complicit he has been. This is why we should avoid hero worship.
“He gave a confirmed rapist advice on how to dodge the latest allegations against him.”
~Anna Kasparian
More importantly, this demonstrates how bad things have gotten when even many of the leading critics of the system of power are themselves implicated in what they criticized. It’s a broader problem. There is a reason to speak of it being systemic, as it’s not only about individual bad actors.
But we also must come to more than a mere intellectual understanding.
Chomsky is one of the greatest living leftist intellectuals. Yet his keen mind and vast knowledge didn’t protect him. That’s likely because he lacked social science understanding, in spite of being an expert in linguistics. Though talking about systems, and though somewhat understanding how the system invades the mind through media rhetoric, apparently he didn’t fully grasp how this operated psychologically, couldn’t see it happening to himself.
Self-awareness is often a weak point in human nature. That is all the more reason to carefully study the so-called soft sciences.
There are some leftist critics, though, who have maintained their moral commitment and principles. Another Jewish public intellectual, Norman Finkelstein, was also personally invited into Epstein’s social circle. But he refused and basically told them to fuck off. He is one of the harshest voices against Zionist Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Maybe that is what allowed Finkelstein to see the Epstein group for what it was. Then again, he didn’t have any knowledge that wasn’t also possessed by Chomsky, as the latter was likewise anti-Zionist. But in the end, one has to want to see.
[As a side note, there is another earlier piece (Anarchists Not In Universities) where I wrote about Chomsky and academia, specifically in terms of power and compromise. I used the anarchist David Graeber as a contrast.
That analysis was from 8 years ago. My other writings on the topic mentioned above were even earlier from 2010 and 2016. So, off and on, this has been on my mind long before any known connections to Epstein. Just some things kept bothering me about Chomsky.]
“My guess is, if Epstein put your daughter at age 15 in such a position, you wouldn’t publicly describe him as a ‘friend’ and person of ‘integrity’. In fact, I would hope that you’d promptly throttle both Epstein and Dershowitz.”
~Norman Finkelstein
As a citizenry, we need to learn to discern between the likes of Chomsky and the likes of Finkelstein. Outwardly, they may appear to be similar as public intellectuals. But we should always be wary when someone like Chomsky, though a boring intellectual as a supposed anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, was a guest on corporate MSM more often than one would expect.
There probably is good reason Finkelstein, on the other hand, has remained largely unseen in the legacy media and been kept unknown to most Americans. He has refused to play nicely with the powerful, has refused to tone down his harsh message of righteous denunciation.
We need to recognize such people as Chomsky for who they are without requiring a massive conspiracy reveal like the Epstein files. All the evidence was available long ago to mistrust Chomsky for those who wanted to understand. We must develop the moral courage to look at what’s uncomfortable, including and especially about those we perceive as being on our side.
This requires, though, to have that aforementioned self-awareness. It’s not only Chomsky who can fool himself. We all have that capacity.
With all the craziness going on right now, it’s hard to feel excited that so much is being forced to the surface. It shouldn’t ever have been allowed to go so far, to get this bad.
Democrats could’ve stopped it. Any number of political leaders, government figures, bureaucratic officials, and influential elites could’ve stopped it. But they all knew what was happening, knew where it was going, and complicitly did nothing (A Deep Dive Into the Deep State; & Who Are the Distractors and Who Is the Distraction?); or sometimes actively did the worst, such as Democrats always willing to vote in support of the next GOP bill to fund ICE, Israel, etc.
It’s tiresome to be one of the individuals to see it all coming and yet unable to stop it or even get many others to pay attention.
“But the Epstein files reveal more than personal loyalty between him and Noam Chomsky. They expose political coordination.
“In emails with Epstein, Chomsky discussed the war in Syria, specifically the use of armed Salafi and Wahhabi groups to overthrow the Syrian government. Chomsky acknowledged that US and allied efforts against President Bashar al-Assad relied heavily on extremist factions including al-Muser front and ISIS.
“Rather than rejecting the strategy outright, Chomsky framed the rise of these groups as an unfortunate but tolerable consequence of a broader campaign for regime change. Privately expressing views that sharply contrasted with his public opposition to US interventionism.”
~Mnar Adley
If I made complaints of Chomsky even a month ago, many (most?) leftists would’ve ignored it or defended him. Why did it take the partial release — maybe 1% — of the Epstein files for more people to be capable of demanding and hard-hitting critical thought? Why do we have to let things turn so dark and destructive before we no longer can ignore them?
If democracy is ever to be possible, we’re going to have to become better as a people. Sadly, in many ways, we do get the leaders we deserve in that we get what we accept and allow. Too many Americans want to be lied to, want to be told a nice story.
As such, it was easier to listen to Chomsky’s words than to look at his history of actions, to research and study his background. What is not spoken may say more.
“If Chomsky’s defining intellectual contribution was the naming of structural violence — the unseen forms of harm produced by political and economic systems — then what we see here is its fraternal twin: structural silence.”
~Richard S. Pinner, Structural Silence: Chomsky, Epstein, and the Architecture of Elite Immunity
It’s a welcome change that this situation is forcing awake more Americans, left and right. But it doesn’t change the basic problem. The moment it slips out of public awareness again, as new scandals and catastrophes replace it, what will stop Americans from forgetting about it and falling back to sleep?
That has been my worry.
Trump will eventually be forced out of office. He’ll be voted out, he’ll get impeached, he’ll die, or dementia will finally catch up with him. Then what? Will we go back to the lesser evil voting that constantly brought us to greater evil? As a cartoonish supervillain for the public to organize against, Trump may represent our last opportunity to finally and fully destroy the corrupt system.
We can’t let big money Democrats step in to normalize it again, as they’ve done in the past. That is what happened with Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Democrats helped to establish George W. Bush’s imperial presidency as a precedent and so set the stage for Trump’s MAGA fascism by, after twice having regained the presidency, having refused to enact democratic reforms.
The answer to fascism isn’t to make it kinder and gentler, more hidden so that creeping authoritarianism can operate unseen. Then the rot will have set in, the cancer would be terminal.
That would be the worst outcome possible. If we don’t deal with the problem now, the next wannabe dictator is likely to be far worse than Trump and far more successful. We the American citizenry have a narrow window in which to do the right thing, finally.
* * * *
Further sources about Chomsky and Epstein:
“He was not fooled by Epstein. He was seduced. His association with Epstein is a terrible and, to many, unforgivable stain. It irreparably tarnishes his legacy.”
~Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Epstein and the Politics of Betrayal“Since Noam cannot speak or write and explain his relationship with Epstein, the matter is fraught. There is nothing to say on his behalf. When the photos and emails appeared, I was immediately disgusted by Epstein’s paedophilia, and so by Noam’s friendship with him. There is no defence for this, in my view, no context that can explain this outrage.”
~Vijay Prashad, On the Emails Between Jeffrey Epstein and Noam Chomsky
Beyond the Clickbait: Epstein, Chomsky, Trump & Hero Worship in the Age of Digital Disinfo
by Fiorella Isabel & Vanessa Belley
A Note on Chomsky and Epstein
by Jeffrey St. Clair
Jeffrey Epstein thought he was mostly innocent. So did Noam Chomsky.
by P. Z. Myers
Noam Chomsky involved in dealings with Jeffrey Epstein.
by Tendance Coatsey
Noam Chomsky’s Epstein Problem
by Deniz Karabacak
When a Critic of Empire Sits at the Table of an Abuser of Power
by Emily
Unravelling the connection of Noam Chomsky with convicted pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein
by Robin Westenra
Noam Chomsky Was Devoted To Epstein To The End
from Violet News
“By staying at MIT, Chomsky chose to maintain his career, in relative proximity to the centers of power he would later become an icon for denouncing. However, it shows that Chomsky, from this time onward, began to make some choices that undermined his radicalism to an extent. Chomsky may have rationalized his decision to stay at MIT in the 1960s because it gave him a better platform from which to espouse his political and anti-war views. It is not unheard of for prominent public figures to make such compromises. However, in light of the recent Epstein revelations and what they appear to signal, it seems that Chomsky, particularly in his later years, may have become too comfortable and too willing to make these types of compromises – ones that a much younger Chomsky would have surely rejected.“
~Whitney Webb, Unraveling the Epstein-Chomsky Relationship“A crucial principle I learned from Chomsky: to understand power, you have to follow the money. And that’s still true. Except — what Chomsky fails to consider — is that he himself is part of the system of power that he claims to unravel. In assuming academic objectivity, he took himself out of the system without any justification.
“Because, if you do follow the money, some pathways run through him, whether in his prestigious and privileged position at MIT, or, a $1,400-a-night suite in Manhattan, paid for by Epstein. That’s where he stays. And that’s where we are. […]
“What did Chomsky give in exchange for Epstein’s favors? Was it his position disfavoring BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel while it commits apartheid and genocide in Palestine? Or is it his loyal support for a “two-state solution” 20 years after Israel has paved over that idea’s grave with the Apartheid Wall? Don’t we have a right to ask?”
~Ramsey Hanhan, Epstein Academy
Marmalade 