That's unlike Vijay Prashad at Counterpunch.
Reality is, Chomsky's not such an anti-Zionist as portrayed. More on that and other things below.
A LOT more. Let's dig in.
That then said, Chris Knight notes, also at Counterpunch, that Noam taught at MIT, which got plenty of military-industrial complex money.
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.
Bingo. Or, sort of. As I note above, I have long seen Chomsky as not being all that radical. And, I've also known for 20 years or more that his linguistic theories are non-scientific and generally overrated. Knight definitely gets into that, below.
Beyond that, Chomsky's association with Epstein has been known since 2023, per a link in Knight's piece.
But, the details are out now.
Jeff St. Clair notes:
The latest batch is very ugly and, I think, indefensible. It’s especially disgusting that Noam saw it necessary to shame the victims as hysterics. When it was first revealed that Chomsky had some kind of relationship with Epstein, I was surprised, but not terribly shocked. I assumed he was trying to pick Epstein’s very deep pockets for money for his MIT projects. Hell, Noam had taken money from the Pentagon, DIA and other unsavory sources in the past. There’s no such thing as clean money.
And follows with:
It’s also very hard to understand how he could have maintained such close ties to someone who was a hardcore Zionist and, if not an Israeli agent himself, certainly an asset whom Israeli intelligence used frequently. It’s baffling. A couple of years ago, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and wrote off his dismissal of Epstein’s predatory sexual behavior as similar to Nader’s stubborn refusal to endorse gay rights during the 2000 campaign, when there were several gay marriage/rights initiatives on state ballots, by saying, “I don’t do gonadal politics.” But this is much more appalling and inexplicable.
That's the thing.
Or not the thing. By the end of his piece, St. Clair goes halfway back in the Chomsky apologetics tank. Jeff, I think you're still giving him too much benefit of the doubt.
So, back to Knight.
Knight follows with more, showing just how bad this is.
Anyone who reads the correspondence between Chomsky and Epstein in the January 2026 release of the Epstein files, however, will now find it difficult to respect Chomsky’s opinions on Gaza or anything else.
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.’
Other documents suggest that Chomsky visited Epstein’s properties not only in New York but also in New Mexico and Paris. The files even show that shortly before Epstein’s arrest and death, in July and August 2019, Chomsky was still intending to be interviewed for a documentary that Epstein was making. It seems that Chomsky really was loyal to Epstein until the end. The question is why.
First, that's bad.
But, again, not surprising to me, per my second paragraph above. (Other than the victim-shaming, which is both surprising and disgusting.)
I'll get back to Knight on his "why" in a minute.
First, my most recent writing about Chomsky, when everybody thought he was dead.
On Zionism or anti-Zionism? He's been chickenshit on BDS, and also opposes the Right of Return. Also per that piece, he reportedly considered living on a kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s and DID live on one in the 1950s.
He's also long been a sheepdogger for the left hand of the duopoly.
Now, back to Knight's "why."
First, he notes that Chomsky was in financial straits of some sort several years ago. So, Epstein bribed him? That said, per the Guardian piece Knight links, the financial issue wasn't THAT bad. And, maybe old Noam was a bit more of a capitalist than he admitted.
On the non-financial side? Knight simply says straight-up he thinks Chomsky had antediluvian views about women in many ways.
He then goes back to the military issue. He says that even Chomsky's once-heralded (but non-scientific and now passé) ideas about linguistics were also focused on military needs. Related? Knight also shows just how non-scientific, if not even pseudoscientific, Chomsky's ideas on language were.
I quote again:
In Chomsky’s view, to talk of language emerging in our species through Darwinian evolution would be like discussing the evolution of the soul. Like the soul, Chomsky says, language is either present or not present – you cannot have half a soul. So it makes no sense to envisage language evolving by degrees.
In response to those of us who have asked him how he thinks language really did emerge, Chomsky has offered little more than what he terms a ‘fairy story’: the brain of a single prehistoric human was ‘rewired, perhaps by some slight mutation’. It all happened suddenly and without building on any evolutionary precursor.
Again like the soul – if we are to believe Chomsky – language has no special connection with communication. It can be used for communication ‘as can anything people do’ but, Chomsky says, ‘language is not properly regarded as a system of communication’. He then adds the still stranger claim that the concepts we use in language, such as ‘book’ or ‘carburettor’, have existed in the human brain since the emergence of our species tens of millennia before real books or carburettors even existed.
To claim that language did not evolve for communication, or that prehistoric humans were hardwired with such concepts as ‘book’ or ‘carburettor’, simply makes no sense. For this and other reasons, many contemporary linguists have now concluded that Chomsky’s theories are completely unworkable, having reached what the eminent evolutionary psychologist Michael Tomasello calls ‘a final impasse’. But the question remains, why did someone as intelligent as Chomsky so consistently espouse such ideas?
In my own book on this topic, I argue that by equating language with something like the soul, Chomsky was able to slip unnoticeably from real science to a kind of scientistic theology, insulating his linguistics from any possible military use.
There you are.
It also shows how tenuous of a grasp Chomsky had on the whole idea of evolution by natural descent. Substitute “eyeball” for “language” and a creationist or “Intelligent Design” person would say, and has said, exactly what Chomsky does.
In reality? A “partial language” would be of just as much value, relatively, as a planarium’s light-sensor spot is.
Seriously? At this point, I say, not only is Chomsky wrong about language AND not so real a leftist, he’s not so much the genius he has long been anointed as being. Let’s kick him off his pedestal in general.
Knight has a book on the origins of language coming out himself later this year, in a side note.
Piling on? Chomsky was crafting a psychology-based response to B.F. Skinner and his behaviorism when he created his views on the origins of language. I note above he did no research.
Let me add this. The suck-ups were out in force on the r/chomsky subreddit. No surprise, from my previous experience there.
And tankies are in other spots. Here's a Chomsky tankie on Instagram,
claiming the photo of him with Steve Bannon, as well as Chomsky's
emails to Epstein, aren't genuine. Wow; AI framed Chomsky. When I first
wrote this, that would have been the lamest excuse, but I'm putting the
"mark" in No. 1 now.
==
NEW SINCE ORIGINAL POST, and I'll eventually do a second one.
It's gotten worse, like this guy citing Michael Tracey on Shitter as a defense of Chomsky. (Tracey goes on to claim that call-outs of Chomsky are antisemitic.)
I'm going to quote all of Tracey's original Shit, rather than embed the Shit:
The slander against Noam Chomsky is utterly outrageous. And the refusal of certain people to defend him against this torrent of defamatory slime is sickening cowardice.
Perversely, it's become one of the most repellent aspects of the entire Epstein saga.
The man is 97 years old, had a stroke a few years ago, and cannot even defend himself as he's being tarnished as some sort of depraved pedo enabler.
It's pure, unvarnished Salem Witch Trial-style hysteria.
Anyone perpetuating it has no standing to chuckle at the feeble-minded townsfolk in Colonial Massachusetts who thought they were being terrorized by literal witches.
Chomsky did nothing wrong. [Emphasis added.] Epstein helped him with some unfortunate financial problems stemming from his first wife's death. They also occasionally socialized and maintained an email correspondence.
WHO GIVES A FUCK?
The supposedly damning PR advice that Chomsky gave Epstein also happened to be substantively correct. He was right that trying to use antiquated concepts like "reason" and "facts" in the public arena was totally pointless when it comes to hallucinated Pedo Panic theories.
Most ironic of all, Chomsky has been demonstrably harmed by this fiasco far more than most of the supposed "victims" who took a luxury vacation to the US Virgin Islands in the early 2000s and then years later decided to call it "trafficking" so they could collect millions of tax-free settlement money and proclaim themselves "survivors."
There you are.
But, it gets worse. There's an agreement Shit by a Cheryl Hudson with a respondent that says:
I haven't seen much of this but increasingly this whole saga has such a flavour of antisemitism about it.
And Tracey's agreement.
Yeah, I noticed...
Yes. So, per Tracey, who's not a leftist or even a librul, but a quasi-Greenwald type, calling out genocide in Gaza would also be antisemitic.
But, let's get past the first Shit.
The tone-deafness of claiming that Chomsky has been hurt worse by the revelations and how people are handling them than Epstein's victims would be laughable if it were tone-deafness. It's not. It's a deliberate smear campaign.
The rest of it is flat lies. They did more than "occasionally socialize." Chomsky's PR campaign advice was more than throwaway. The handwaving and gaslighting about his stroke tries to hide that the Chomsky-Epstein ties go back more than a decade and also are deeper than previously thought.
There's other sites that also feature Chomsky tankie-dom. I found two at a place called "Counter Currents." This one is the worse of the two. Justin Brown claims Noam was a "mark." That's the lamest excuse for him yet.
Let's get into "interesting" stuff. Back to R/Chomsky, here's a commenter claiming Wittgenstein is the antidote to Chomsky. Not really, sir. He was a Platonist, and like Chomsky, a Platonist on linguistics.
But wait, this gets better! /s
Aaron Mate has posted in full a statement by Valeria Chomsky on his Substack. I saw it on r/Chomsky. My thought?
As stated there, and in restacking Aaron's Substack, since he has not limited comments to paid subscribers but has turned them off, period?
This doesn't talk about Noam's PR advice to Epstein and other things. At a minimum, it looks like a degree of whataboutism or hand-waving. In maximum, it walks, talks and quacks in the neighborhood of gaslighting. And shock me that Aaron has disabled comments on his Substack.
Gack.
That said, some specifics of the "gack."
First:
As is widely known, one of Noam’s characteristics is to believe in the good faith of people. Noam’s overly trust[ing] nature, in this specific case, led to severe poor judgment on both our parts.
Really? The author of "Manufacturing Consent" was too trusting?
And this:
Epstein began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities for interesting discussions in areas Noam has been working on extensively. We regret that we did not perceive this as a strategy to ensnare us and to try to undermine the causes Noam stands for.
Valeria, you yourself called Epstein "the one." In 2017.
Then, some possible selective amnesia, or handwaving further, or more gaslighting, with this:
Noam and I were introduced to Epstein at the same time, during one of Noam’s professional events in 2015, when Epstein’s 2008 conviction in the State of Florida was known by very few people, while most of the public – including Noam and I – was unaware of it. That only changed after the November 2018 report by Miami Herald.
In reality, a quick teh Google shows the Daily Mail published an interview with Virginia Giuffre in 2011. Gawker published his "little black book" in 2015. (Sidebar: The Peter Thiel-funded lawsuits against Gawker hit the fan a year later.)
As for the insinuation that the Chomskys cut their ties and their losses after that 2018 reportage? A late 2025 piece from the same Miami Herald begs to differ:
With Jeffrey Epstein’s reputation in tatters following a 2018 Miami Herald investigation into his sex crimes – and how he evaded serious consequences – the financier hit on a plan: He would produce a documentary to present himself in a favorable light. He had several ideas about who could appear on it and provide favorable testimonies, emails and phone messages show. And one of the first friends to allegedly give Epstein the thumbs up was famed left-wing academic Noam Chomsky. “Spoke to Chomsky, he’s all in,” Epstein wrote in a text message to an undisclosed associate.
Pretty straightforward. If that's not enough? This:
[T]he Herald’s findings reveal that Chomsky continued to correspond with him at least until the summer of 2019, even after the Herald’s series led to widespread outcry and the Justice Department publicly announced a fresh probe.
Straightforward.
In reality, per Chris Knight's piece, Chomsky surely knew that the oleaginous Alan Dershowitz negotiated getting 2006 charges against Epstein dropped, as far as the Chomskys taking the issues seriously. And, Epstein also met Dersh at Harvard as well as Chomsky. At the same time, as Harvard Crimson admits, the university refused to return Epstein's money in 2006.
So, this idea that Noam would assume that because Epstein had "done his time," he was rehabilitated, is also bullshit. That's bullshit on his part, though, not Valeria's. As for the rich and powerful's ability to get matters criminal squashed, Noam is, once again, a fake leftist if he doesn't take that into account and hasn't done so before.
As for Valéria’s insinuation that she and Noam are all alone in the darkness?
She was quick and hot to react two years ago when certain leftists like Yanis Varoufakis were rushing like good little online-world tribalists to be “first” or nearly so to talk about Noam’s alleged death and how close they were to him.
Let's now, since he was mentioned above, move on to Glennwald!
Having now looked at a 2023 email from Noam Chomsky to Glenn Greenwald, in a note where Glenn not only turned off comments from non-subscribers but did the same on restacks, I’m not sure what’s worst — Noam’s hypocrisy, Noam’s gaslighting, Noam’s flat lying, or Glennwald’s passive-aggressive pontificating cant.
But, let’s look at the key part:
"Moral panic" is right. The country has been sex-obsessed since the Puritans. I then told her I'd be glad to tell her about a close friend who spent decades in prison, but had a clean slate after release according to the laws and norms they are supposed to honor — all that was known about Jeffrey Epstein at the time.
There you are. (Unknown who the "her" is.)
Gaslighting? Claiming this is about Puritan sexual mores.
Lying? Epstein never spent “decades” in prison (sadly).
Hypocrisy? Linguistic mathematics in this case. Gaslighting x lying = hypocrisy.
Glennwald’s passive-aggressive pontificating cant?
I’m not endorsing or rejecting it.
As for turning off restacks, not just comments, except for subscribers, don’t forget that when Aaron Mate posted Valéria’s comments Feb. 7, he turned off comments entirely.
The passive-aggressive pontificating cant continues when called out:
I’m a journalist. The idea that one is “picking a side” merely by allowing a person at the center of a controversy to speak for themselves is absurd, especially when they can’t speak for themselves directly.
Noam was speaking for himself at the time he wrote that. Did you give him a pass then as well? Silence and survey says yes.
This is also from the Glennwald whose always been a columnist journalist above all else. You could have said something then, or today. You chose not to.
That said, that fits with your own long history of sexism. (It also, of course, fits with Chomsky's own apparent history of sexism, which, as we already know, in correspondence to Epstein, includes dismissing the "MeToo" movement.)
It’s also fun to watch one person complaining in a comment saying Glenn never was like this before.
Ahh, the suckers getting burned.
I will be doing a part 3 post over at Substack on Chomsky now, clearly. And here it is.
And I intend a part 4.
That's now up, and goes more into Noam's militarism, and tying it to Zionism, and wondering if he would be either a hypocrite or a denialist, if he were able to speak to us, over the Iran war.
==
New since Parts 2 and 3 at Substack.
Beyond Chomsky's presuppositions about Epstein's rehabilitation? Which I will tackle in more detail there.
Per Valéria, on this Substack, he may have gotten a bit bigger financial mess of pottage from Epstein than many people realize. $290K cash plus the plane flights plus the stays at Epstein sites.
Chomsky's signing of that infamous 2020 Harper's letter, discussed here, tied with his mischaracterization of what that letter is actually about, and (willful?) ignorance of the background to that letter, should tell us that, whether due to general aging or whatever, that he was already getting intellectually lazy, at the most charitable of interpretations, or that, for both its better and its worse sides, he simply could not — and WOULD not — accept identitarian culture leftism. I think that less charitable interpretation is more likely. Or I can go maximalist and say that this shows he's such a squish on Zionism he willingly signed off on the original cancel culture idea that partially backgrounded the letter.
While I've noted above that r/Chomsky is full of Chomsky tankies, credit to this guy, r/Doppelercloud, for going to far as to call Chomsky a "liberal tankie." He elsewhere calls Chomsky "corrupt." He also says he disagrees with Chris Knight's claim that Chomsky's use of his linguistics ideas was an act of academic resistance. I don't totally agree with all of his takes on Noam. But kudos to him in general on battling the Chomsky tankies.
In part 3 of my Substack series, I called Chomsky a liar. Chris Knight does so in this piece at his website calling out Chomsky's defense of militarists among academic fellows at MIT in Vietnam days. Via r/Chomsky, Knight notes that his co-edited 2019 book, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," based on Chomsky's 1969 book of that name, included what he calls an "intemperate response" from Chomsky over the callout. He notes near top:
It is the responsibility of intellectuals to tell the truth. By this standard, Noam towers above most of his peers. But one thing he finds difficult. He just cannot and will not tell the truth about the US military’s intimate involvement with his own academic institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That's not all.
Knight busts Chomsky selling out for Pentagon money even in 2021!
That said, in reference to this piece, his 2019 book and his 2016 book, I don't know why he continues to cut Noam semi-blank checks on this issue. On the Counterpunch piece earlier this month, he posited two Chomskys. I'd rather go with the idea that more and more of us are saying maybe this is more of the real Noam and always has been, and that we need to give him at least as much, if not more, skeptical scrutiny than Knight.
Beyond Knight, Noam is hoist by his own petard, especially with the new war against Iran and it being a proxy war for Israel. I reference one of his most famous statements, from 1990:
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. By violation of the Nuremberg laws I mean the same kind of crimes for which people were hanged in Nuremberg.
Does that not apply to you, too?
That then said, Knight's Wiki page notes that Noam was already dismissive of that 2016 book, "Decoding Chomsky." And, per his Wiki, while he's not as well known as Chomsky, he might have a similar degree of intellect.
Or let's note, from my own past reading, Michael Corballis. In his book, "The Truth about Language," he says early on that he knew he would butt heads with Noam, but hoists him by his own petard, even. As part of that, while not explicitly calling Chomsky a Platonist, he draws the picture that can lead to that conclusion. (Re-reading my review, it's clear now.)
But, Noam is stubborn not only on defending militarism but on defending his non-scientific, even pseudoscientific, ideas on linguistics. Go to the 1- and 2-star reviews of "Why Only Us: Language and Evolution," co-written with Robert Berwick, to see how, just within the last decade or so, when massive modularity of the mind had been kicked to the curb, the brain working like a massive computer shoved aside, and so forth, how Chomsky and his coauthors could still trot out such nonsense. (Actually, the 1-star halfway defends him, but is largely devoted to claims of plagiarism against his co-author, claiming this is why Chomsky was roped in. If true, Noam again failed the responsibility of a public intellectual.)
To summarize Knight's presentation here, from the 1960s up to maybe the mid-1990s or so (I didn't check exact dates in footnotes) Chomsky basically compartmentalized his relationship with militarism at MIT. After that, he started lying, which in some ways, per his hypocrisy on the responsibility of an intellectual, is more intellectually honest than compartmentalizing. I'm not totally sure what triggered the switch, but by the tentative timeline, affairs in the Balkans after the breakup of Yugoslavia could be the key.
===
Let's get back to Noam being a squish on Zionism. Multiple meetings with Epstein also included
former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Yes, Barak has had some mild
callouts of Bibi Netanyahu on how Israel responded to Oct. 7, 2023. But,
that's been around the edges. In addition, Barak went to Little Saint
James, per Wiki.
Let's add in, per Joe Costello, what Slick Willie might talk about to Congress, given Epstein funded the Clinton Global Initiative.
I want to wrap up by going back to Counterpunch, though.
First a detour, via a piece I wrote a month ago. Counterpunch had its own resident tankie, Michael Albert, do the hand-waving back then. Among other things, he says Chomsky would abhor systems but try to look graciously at individuals. Got it. So. Epstein's system wasn't created by Epstein. Like Nazism wasn't created by Adolf Hitler, but just evolved in a system from the Dolstochgestabbe. Got it.
Now, back to the February, current, Counterpunch.
St. Clair's piece looks like he hoped, a month ago, that the initial Chomsky-Epstein news would be it and this would go away, or even get swept under the rug. Maybe he's a bit of a tankie himself. Per his new piece, I think he's definitely a tankie for Ralph Nader, welcoming him to write more for Counterpunch in 2024 even when, or maybe I should say especially when, he started sheepdogging for the left hand of the duopoly.
As for Knight's "two Chomsky" angle? Maybe the one was simply a "public facing" Chomsky, at least in part. Something he was surfing like a wave after getting all the kudos for apparently hauling down language origin theories of the generally illiberal behavioralism.
Many leftists who had "pedestaled" Chomsky need to de-pedestal him.
Or, per this guest piece at Counterpunch, be like Norman Finkelstein:
It appears Noam Chomsky contains a sales tag while Norman Finkelstein told Epstein to go piss up a golden rope line.
There you go.
