What’s Behind Noam Chomsky’s Obituary-Marring Epstein Friendship?

Jacobin’s top story on Noam Chomsky is from 2024: “Let’s Celebrate Noam Chomsky, the Intellectual and Moral Giant.” Following Chomsky’s star turn in the recently released files of child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, this headline in America’s leading socialist magazine hasn’t, as they say, aged well.

Elsewhere, the left is not so sanguine about Chomsky’s communications with Epstein. “I am heartsick,” wrote Vijay Prashad, Chomsky’s friend and co-author, in Counterpunch. Having himself suffered sexual violence as a child, Prashad continues: “There is no defense for this, in my view, no context that can explain this outrage.” Even more direct was a leftist YouTube channel last week: “WTF Was Chomsky THINKING?”

Especially bothersome to followers of Chomsky, the lifelong critic of elites, is an email in which he sympathizes with Epstein, as if the child rapist were not a plunderer of the underclass—the mostly working-class girls upon whom Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell preyed—but a martyr in the crosshairs of lying bitches and hysterical feminists.

That was 2019. Julie K. Brown in the Miami Herald had recently tracked down more than 60 women who said they were abused by Epstein. Bemoaning “the horrible way you’ve been treated by the press and the public,” Chomsky, in the email, advised Epstein to “ignore it.” He continued: “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.”

To extenuate these revelations, Valeria Chomsky, Noam’s wife and late-life caregiver, published a letter citing “Noam’s overly trust[ing] nature” and “severe poor judgment” in letting Epstein “ensnare” him. This explanation is unlikely to put the matter to rest. At a moment when a deposed prince and a former ambassador have both been arrested following revelations in the Epstein files, Chomsky’s tête-à-têtes with Epstein seem worse than naïve. They’re obituary-marring. Chomsky may still be an intellectual giant, but his moral giantism is no longer a done deal. And Chomsky, incapacitated at 97 after a massive 2023 stroke, has little time left for his crew to buff out the stain on his legacy before his epitaph is written.

So, is it a break from Chomsky’s values that he advised Epstein on how to show contempt (“ignore it”) for the underclass survivors of Epstein’s predation? Or is Chomsky’s appearance in the files somehow continuous with his long and legendary career as critic of bloodthirsty elites just like Epstein?

Chris Knight, author of the 2016 biography Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics, has squared the Chomsky circle by claiming there are two Noam Chomskys. There is, he wrote earlier this month, “one working for the U.S. military, in his research job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the other working tirelessly against that same military.”

Indeed, Chomsky got his start in the 1950s at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, which was funded largely by the Pentagon. In the early ’60s, he also worked for the private MITRE Corporation, where he helped develop command-and-control systems for the Air Force. All the while, he taught linguistics, conducted nonmilitary research, and engaged in direct political action as a self-styled “anarcho-syndicalist.”

In 1981, Chomsky was asked to reconcile this internal duality: “What do [your two sides] say to each other when they meet?”

“There is no connection,” Chomsky replied, “apart from some very tenuous relations at an abstract level.” A decade later, Chomsky explained his internal division by citing an “odd talent” that set him apart from his colleagues. “I’ve got sort of buffers in the brain that allow me to shift back and forth from one project to the other.”

This might be garden-variety hypocrisy, but twentieth-century American scientists—notably Einstein—also have a history of sinking their talent into the war machine, only to emerge as staunch critics of it.

Among Chomsky’s American fans, however, he’s famous less for his pacifism than for his exposure of propaganda and the conniving high hats who churn it out. In blockbusters like Manufacturing Consent, The Myth of American Idealism, Necessary Illusions, Understanding Power, and How the World Works, Chomsky seems to speak from the ivory tower to show exactly how much contempt elites have for the public, and how they gas us up with lies.

Perhaps this rambunctious outsider-insider status—rather than the “two Chomskys” theory—explains how Chomsky and Epstein and others in their circle, including Steve Bannon, are connected. They’re all deeply embedded in elite institutions, from Harvard to MIT, Goldman Sachs to the Pentagon. And yet they’re also deeply cynical about their own cohort. To take just one extraordinary example: In one email exchange, Epstein drew out Chomsky on the Iran nuclear deal, only to forward Chomsky’s anti-Israel thoughts to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak with a note: “Thought you might find amusing.”

Chomsky, for his part, especially loved to hate what he called the “imperial command” for holding themselves out as liberal exemplars while condescending to the rest of us. His villains were first depicted as WASPs, and later often as effete or feminized. (Recently in this role: Hillary Clinton.) Earlier in his career, Chomsky especially lit into Reinhold Niebuhr, an influential WASP theologian. While promoting his 1989 book Necessary Illusions, Chomsky used some of Niebuhr’s phrases and even assumed his voice: “Us smart guys—it’s our task to impose ‘necessary illusions’ and ‘emotionally potent oversimplifications’ to keep these poor simpletons on course.”

When I’ve quoted this before, Chomsky fans hasten to point out that he is not speaking for himself; he’s speaking as Niebuhr and his ilk. Fair point. But Chomsky’s slip into first person is significant. The reason Chomsky (Harvard, MIT) is credible as a critic of elites is the same reason Steve Bannon (Harvard, Goldman Sachs) is: They have the résumé for it. They are “us smart guys” and can thus tell us exactly how the evil world works.

And it was this move that explains Chomsky’s appeal to a certain kind of young nonidealist: He made them feel uniquely privy to the evil workings of elites. There is no better way to feel undeceived than to join the circle of the deceivers.

And so Chomsky found himself at home in Epstein’s circle. Having often said that liberals are worse than reactionaries because at least the right is “honest” about its warmongering, Chomsky may also have appreciated how nakedly violent, hawkish, and of course pro-Israel the Epstein class could be.

Then there’s Chomsky’s unsteady feminism. Women in Chomsky’s schema are not welcome among the “smart guys,” but nor are they part of the volk, the working-class men who might—in Chomsky’s accounting—feel feminism has deprived them of patriarchal control. “Maybe the one thing that the white working man can hang onto is that he runs his home?” Chomsky mused in Salon in 2013. With this in mind, it becomes possible for Chomsky to see even traumatized young girls as handmaidens to a feminist elite, who probably put them up to it to destroy downtrodden white men like himself and Epstein.

Chomsky’s story about American power was alluring for decades. But there’s a great deal of water under the bridge now, and mainline Protestant theologians, whose heyday was the 1930s, don’t command much moral authority anymore. The Epstein oligarchy took power from the Niebuhr pulpit. Insidiously, the oligarchy consolidated that power across sectors, and then crushed dissent, notably by direct survivors of Epstein’s cruelty. The fact that Chomsky missed this changing of the guard and found himself on the side of exploitation only proves how right he was about how power consumes its opposition.