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.
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. 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.
That said, tankies are elsewhere than r/Chomsky. 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.
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.
