Noam Chomsky, Apologist for Pol Pot, Called Jeffrey Epstein His ‘Best Friend’
“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Johnny Rotten famously asked at the end of the final Sex Pistols concert during their late-1970s run.
Noam Chomsky might as well have asked the American Left the same question as the curtain falls on his life.
His emails to Jeffrey Epstein, in which he laments “the horrible way you are being treated in the press and the public” and notes the “torture and distress” of the ordeal endured by Epstein, certainly overturn the public perception that the MIT professor cultivated in such essays as “The Responsibility of the Intellectuals.”
“For a privileged minority,” Chomsky wrote therein, “Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.”
Chomsky clearly did nothing of the sort regarding his benefactor, Jeffrey Epstein, who sexually abused dozens of girls — with one alleged victim just 9 years old.
“What the vultures dearly want is a public response, which then provides a public opening for an onslaught of venomous attacks, many from just publicity seekers or cranks of all sorts — which are impossible to answer (how do you prove that you are not a neo-Nazi who wants to kill the Jews, or a rapist, or whatever charge comes along?),” Chomsky counseled Epstein. “That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.”
A 97-year-old Chomsky, rendered disabled and incommunicado from a stroke, lies, like Epstein, the dead man he called his “best friend,” beyond any “reckoning” — a word favored by those calling public figures to account for their real and imagined misdeeds.
But what of his bootlicking admirers on the American Left?
Prospect magazine listed Chomsky as the world’s top public intellectual, according to its poll, in 2005. Based on a record of scholarly sources from 1980 through 1992, Chomsky ranked as the most cited living intellectual and the eighth most cited source of all time, ahead of Cicero and Hegel but not, his acolytes lamented, Shakespeare, Aristotle, and the Bible.
Biographer Robert Barsky, a professor at Vanderbilt Law, wrote of his subject: “Chomsky is one of this century’s most important figures, and has been described as one who will be for future generations what Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Mozart, or Picasso have been for ours.” Robin Williams even name-dropped Chomsky and his book Manufacturing Consent in Good Will Hunting.
As Michael Moore reflected of his first time seeing Chomsky in person, “It was just so mind-blowing listening to him as a young person.” He added: “I remember feeling so valued.”
A shocked, shocked Left reacts to Chomsky’s cozying up to such a questionable character as though it were out of character for him. It’s not. Because of that, what stands trial here is not Chomsky’s long-discredited judgment but the judgment of his many fawning admirers.
For many decades, Chomsky did not “seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest.” Instead, he approached events and people the same way he approached the Jeffrey Epstein controversy: depicting his rooting interest as on the side of righteousness and truth.
Consider the Khmer Rouge, whose extermination of more than a million Cambodians Chomsky depicted with a co-author as a “creation” of the New York Times and its sometime reporter Robert Moss. He wrote in a June 1977 issue of The Nation that “analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing.”
During the Reagan administration, Chomsky compared the Cuban standard of living favorably to the American standard of living. An Overseas Development Council study fantastically described the inhabitants of the two countries as equals in terms of quality of life. Chomsky disagreed. He claimed that the quality of life in Cuba was “actually better than the United States if we consider its more egalitarian character, thus with lower infant mortality rates than Chicago and far lower rates than the Navajo reservation.”
In the wake of 9/11, Chomsky judged the case against Osama bin Laden “surprisingly thin.” He reflexively recast the United States as not the victim of the attacks but instead “in the midst of apparently trying to murder three or four million people.” Within a week of the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, Chomsky depicted it as a “silent genocide.”
Michael Moore and others hailed Chomsky as a genius for peddling what men of Chomsky’s father’s generation called “claptrap,” “codswallop,” and “hogwash,” but we now describe with a compound word that begins with “bull” and ends with a syllable that rhymes with “fit.” He reverted to the norm in reflexively defending Epstein (as he had reflexively defended Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and others on his ideological team).
His followers somehow express confusion that Chomsky would run interference for an evil man.