Noam Chomsky

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“”The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat.

—Noam Chomsky

“”If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

Avram Noam Chomsky (1928–) is an American Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at M.I.T., public intellectual, wobbly, anarcho-syndicalist, libertarian socialist, and political dissident. He is usually identified with the rationalist or nativist tradition in psychology.

As a linguist, Chomsky made his name with his work on syntax, and is considered one of the most important figures in computational linguistics and cognitive science. Over the course of his storied career, Chomsky became increasingly famous as a political writer, perhaps even more than as a linguist, with writings on US imperialism and mass media. Chomsky is notable for his emphasis on domestic accountability for consequences abroad and has been a vocal critic of US excesses in foreign policy. However, he has a history of focusing on US foreign policy to a fault, leading to selective denials of atrocities.

While Chomsky still is one of the favorite boogeymen of the far-right for decades running, not all who dislike, detest or simply disagree with Chomsky are wingnuts.

Linguistics and psychology

Chomsky has made essential contributions to the field of linguistics, most prominently his ideas of generative grammar (in which the grammar of a language is described by sets of rules transforming one grammatical construct into another) and the Chomsky hierarchy, classifying languages based on restrictions imposed upon the form of these rules. Several of the classes of grammar in the Chomsky hierarchy have proven useful in computer science, so next time you write a regular expression, you'll know whom to thank. His work in the philosophy of linguistics and the philosophy of mind made him one of the leading figures of the cognitive revolution. This contributed so much to the field of psychology that he was listed as the 38th most influential figure in the 20th century in the field in the Review of General Psychology despite his specialization in linguistics. Even many who despise Chomsky's work on politics are forced to admit his linguistic work is genius, with one famous 1979 article from The New York Times by Paul Robinson saying:

Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today. He is also a disturbingly divided intellectual. On the one hand there is a large body of revolutionary and highly technical linguistic scholarship, much of it too difficult for anyone but the professional linguist or philosopher; on the other, an equally substantial body of political writings, accessible to any literate person but often maddeningly simple‐minded. The “Chomsky problem” is to explain how these two fit together.

Chomsky argued against the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner on the topic of language acquisition. One of his most famous arguments is the "poverty of the stimulus," i.e., that children acquire language with insufficient input from the environment for language to be learned entirely by a behaviorist stimulus-response mechanism. This argument remains a topic of controversy, especially among psychologists and linguists who take a more empiricist approach. Chomsky posited an innate "language acquisition device," a "mental organ" that allowed for the derivation of syntactical structure and grammatical rules of language. These phenomena were thought to play a central role in a "Universal Grammar." However, Chomsky has subsequently modified some of his arguments, reformulating generative grammar in terms of what became known as the "minimalist program," inspired Imre Lakatos' idea of a research program, an attempt to synthesize the positions of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn.

That Chomsky has significantly dominated his field is reflected in his prominence in the most widely used book in introductory linguistics by Fromkin et al., now in its 10th edition. Additionally, Chomsky heavily influenced linguists and fellow public intellectuals Steven Pinker. Some empiricist critics of Chomsky, such as Michael Tomasello, maintain that language does have a biological basis, but that this basis is in the ability to imitate rather than in any mechanisms designed explicitly for verbal language. Regardless of how you feel about his theories, Chomsky remains perhaps the most influential linguist of all time, and is sometimes referred to as "the father of modern linguistics."

Misunderstandings of his position: The Everett/Chomsky debate

Many have tried to attack Chomsky's linguistics since his rise to fame, primarily due to their disagreement with his politics, however few have actually understood the ideas Chomsky puts forward. The most famous example of this is the Everett/Chomsky debate, first appearing in a 2007 article from The New Yorker, which has given rise to headlines like "Challenging Chomsky: Universal grammar is the most important theory in linguistics. Has the language of one tribe now disproved it?" and "Linguists at War."

Norbert Hornstein & Nathan J. Robinson discuss this situation while reviewing the anti-Chomsky book The Kingdom of Speech, but the basic story goes like this: Noam Chomsky believes all human beings have the ability to learn languages with recursion. However, the Pirahã, a tribe found deep in the Amazon by a linguist named Daniel Everett, does not contain recursion in their language. However, that does not disprove what Chomsky claimed, as he never said all languages have recursion, that is a strawman presented to make Everett's arguments sound more contradictory to Chomsky's positions than they actually are.

Whenever these complaints are brought to Chomsky, it is common for him to point out how little this information does to discredit his beliefs. On the notion Everett had debunked him, Chomsky once said "Everett hopes that readers will not understand the difference between UG in the technical sense (the theory of the genetic component of human language) and in the informal sense, which concerns properties common to all languages"

Politics

Lots of people read Chomsky. Some don't.

The Chomsky Rule

“”We Americans are to blame.

—headline of Guardian Chomsky article.

The "Chomsky Rule" is an informal name for the ethical position of prioritizing political criticism of that country (usually where one is a citizen) where one has political influence instead of criticizing other nations where one has little or none. The concept became especially controversial around 2015. The Chomsky quote that generated the rule is:

My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgement. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as condemning atrocities that took place in the 18th century

This is an extension of a belief Chomsky has held since he first entered the realm of politics. Chomsky first got on the map for a 1967 essay in The New York Review of Books called "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," arguing that intellectuals had some blame for the then-ongoing atrocities that the US was creating in Vietnam, primarily through their rationalization of these events.

Activist journalist Glenn Greenwald often invokes the Chomsky rule and has popularized it, which has garnered attacks on both men who are frequently targeted together. In the context of the American and British press's frenzied orgy of condemnations of Ecuador's poor record on press freedoms — prompted by that nation's offer of asylum to Julian Assange — Greenwald writes:

Fixating on the rights abuses of distant governments while largely ignoring those committed by one's own does not only demonstrate the glaring insincerity of the purported beliefs. Far worse, it is an abdication of one's primary duty as a journalist and as a citizen: to oppose, first and foremost, the bad acts of one's own government.

An eagerness to condemn abuses by foreign governments while largely ignoring one's own is not merely cowardly, though it is that. And it's not merely an abdication of the prime journalistic duty, though it is that, too. Worst of all, it's the media behavior that most effectively bolsters state propaganda, as it signals to the citizenry: human rights violations and civil liberties assaults are something those Bad Foreign Governments over there do, but not your own.

Detractors sometimes accuse those invoking the Chomsky Rule of secretly supporting everyone from Putin to Al Qaeda to DAESH. This is fallacious. Criticism is one area does not necessarily imply support for another position. Focusing on the wrongdoing of the world's only superpower and its allies might be a critically missing addition to the public discussion in the country where the wrongdoing can be stopped or reined in by an informed citizenry. Relatedly, whataboutery is commonly deployed against those who follow the Chomsky Rule.

However, it is not always true that a greater positive impact can be achieved by criticizing one's own government. Activists, writers, and journalists can help improve situations and increase pressure on foreign governments, either directly through international media or by influencing their own governments to speak out against human rights violations in other countries. It depends on the circumstances. There is, however, a tendency to ignore human rights violations coming from the U.S. and its allies, and their alleged good intentions are all too often readily accepted and regurgitated by the American media.

Some of Chomsky's supporters have questioned if his decision to criticize his home country to the exclusion of all other nations would be controversial if his home country was anything but the United States. While responding to an attack on Chomsky from Noah Smith, who framed Chomsky as if his worldview was nothing more than the United States being bad, Nathan Robinson says the following:

This would be obvious in any other context. If a Russian or Iranian dissident wrote nothing but books about Russian or Iranian crimes, we would not assume that because they don’t write about other countries, their “worldview” is “Russia bad” or “Iran bad,” or they thought their countries were the source of all the world’s evil. And we would see immediately that anyone who did accuse them of this, rather than responding to their arguments and evidence, was either very, very stupid, or simply trying to smear and discredit them. To talk much more about your own country’s crimes is perfectly legitimate—and, Chomsky would argue, morally obligatory.. Chomsky explained this well in the ’80s to David Frum, who similarly accused him of being less interested in crimes committed by other countries. Frum picked a bad example (the persecution of the Kurds, whom Chomsky had been publicly supportive of for years), but Chomsky pointed out that we should care more about our own crimes, because they are our crimes, and if we are responsible for 2 percent of the world’s violence, because it’s the violence we can most easily stop, it’s okay if it occupies 100 percent of your attention. I’ve always thought that Chomsky should explain this more, because it’s such an important rejoinder to the most common criticism of his work, but he thinks it’s such an elementary, obvious point that it basically shouldn’t even need spelling out. (One of my major differences of opinion with Chomsky, actually, is that I think things that “shouldn’t” need spelling out nevertheless do need spelling out.)

Given the United States is essentially the global hegemon and has been for the entire time Chomsky has been writing, criticizing them could be seen as inherently more valuable if only because they are the ones setting the rules. While defending Chomsky in 1985, Christopher Hitchens wrote the following:

Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations— he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction.

Misunderstandings

Although Chomsky has been rather clear regarding what he means in reference to his ethical standards, some still misunderstand what he means. Carl Beijer notes that multiple people have accused Chomsky of simply viewing the United States as the only evil in the world, or have claimed that he only criticizes the United States to the exclusion of all other nations. Nathan Robinson, who had recently completed a book with Chomsky regarding United States foreign policy, notes that he criticized several other nations in his political writings.

Manufacturing consent

Perhaps Chomsky's most famous political book (co-authored with Edward Herman, who Chomsky credits as the man most responsible for the book) is Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, (ISBN 0-375-71449-9) published in 1988, and which many on the left consider "canonical" on the proposition that "what goes viral in the U.S. media...[is] what is politically convenient for the U.S. government." Somewhat surprisingly, the New York Times gave the book a generally positive review, although also stating the book contains "overstatements".

The book shares its title with a documentary film that has become a popular introductory text to Chomsky's work, even though Chomsky finds aspects of it irritating. He has also written dozens of books critical of United States foreign policy.

Chomsky believes that major corporations, investment firms, and the federal government occupy a concentrated political ruling class which owns mainstream media outlets. He believes they operate collectively for their own selfish interest, putting constraint on the breadth of political discourse found in mainstream media. Chomsky states that smaller media outlets follow the lead of larger outlets, and so also play a role in servicing elite interests. To the extent markets play a role in media indoctrination, Chomsky believes that the advertising nature of mass media outlets also skews the content of mass media to serve wealthy interests. Chomsky says this happens because of the higher purchasing power of wealthy Americans.

Chomsky believes the college educated class, for example white collar professionals, are particularly indoctrinated by elite interests. He says this happens because the American ruling class feels they need their consent in political decision making. He also believes that all those outside the college educated class are propagandized instead to not care about political decision making.

He states that the American mainstream media has a rationale to pretend to lean liberal, as they fear liberal progress beyond what they sanction. He suggests this is why American mainstream media appears to have a liberal bias.

The American right-wing has recently reiterated themes present in Chomsky's media analysis. Particularly themes about college student indoctrination and "NPC" society being only supportive of the "current media thing". They depart from the book however in their analysis of this alleged phenomena, instead insinuating that programmed media narratives are there to promote "runaway liberalism" rather than to stifle liberal progress.

Anti-postmodernism

Chomsky is opposed to postmodernism, to put it mildly, going as far as to compare postmodernist critiques of "white male science" to the Deutsche Physik of Nazi Germany and its attack on "Jewish physics". He is, additionally, opposed to Slavoj Žižek. In an interview in 2013, he expands:

It's all very inflated, you know a lot of prestige and so on– it has a terrible effect in the Third World. In the First World, rich countries, it doesn't really matter that much. So if a lot of nonsense goes on in the Paris cafés or Yale comparative literature department – well, okay. On the other hand in the Third World, popular movements really need serious intellectuals to participate. And if they're all ranting postmodernist absurdities… well, they're gone. I've seen real examples – could give them to you.

But –so there is that category. And it’s considered very left wing, very advanced. Well, some of what appears in it, actually make sense. But when you reproduce it in monosyllables, it turns out to be truisms. So yes, it is perfectly true that when you look at scientists in the West, they’re mostly men. And it’s perfectly true that women have had a hard time breaking into the scientific fields. And it’s perfectly true that there are institutional factors determining how science proceeds that reflect power structures. I mean ALL of this can be described literally in monosyllables, and it turns out to be truism when you look at it. On the other hand, you don’t get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms in monosyllables.

Now a lot of the left criticism-so when the left criticism (so-called), I don't consider it left-the left criticism, so-called, happens to be accurate. Well okay, that's fine. So if you point it out, a lot of things, as I mentioned, well that's fine. Point it out. Everybody understands it. Take a look to see if it's true, and so on. On the other hand, a lot of so-called left criticism seems to be pure nonsense. In fact, that's been demonstrated. Conclusively. […refers to Sokal and Bricmont's “Intellectual Impostures” (Fashionable Nonsense)…] where they simply go through the — they happen to concentrate on Paris which is the center of the rot, but it's all over [gestures an explosion]… [He then mentions an example in which a French postmodernist who actually did have a background in science claimed that it would be nonsense to say that an Egyptian pharaoh had died of tuberculosis since the disease had not been categorized in Pharaonic times. As this postmodernist considered everything to be a social construct, such a diagnosis had to be wrong by definition.]

On conspiracies

Chomsky does not accept Illuminati conspiracy theories or the conspiracy theory surrounding the September 11 attacks and regards the Federal Reserve, Trilateral Commission, and Bilderberg Group as organizations of no real significance or threat. This has led to many wingnut conspiracy theorists arguing that Chomsky is, in fact, a tool of the New World Order, being used to brainwash the masses into accepting leftist ideas. Or something like that. A few members of the conspiracy idiot squad We Are Change even once went to the extent of protesting a Chomsky speaking engagement, expressing these sentiments.

Geopolitics and selective genocide denial

When atrocities were done and still happening, Chomsky was reluctant to apply the word "genocide" to the massacres of Srebrenica and Kosovo. He once stated:

The mass slaughter in Srebrenica, for example, is certainly a horror story and major crime, but to call it “genocide” so cheapens the word as to constitute virtual Holocaust denial, in my opinion. It amazes me that intelligent people cannot see that.

The Srebrenica case, in fact, was the first case in which an individual, Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic, was found guilty of the crime of genocide. Chomsky argues that there has been a 'vulgar politicization of the word "genocide"', which is now 'so extreme' that he rarely uses the word at all. Chomsky defended Milosevic from blame for the Srebenica massacre, and he elaborated on his views on the conflict in his 1999 book The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo. This seems to be due to his own use of the aforementioned "Chomsky Rule" in which he blames the U.S. and NATO intervention first and foremost.

In a 2009 interview by George McLeod of The Phnom Penh Post, Chomsky was ambivalent about international trials for perpetrators of the Cambodian Genocide by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (KR), saying "after all, an international trial that doesn’t take into account Henry Kissinger or the other authors of the American bombing and the support of the KR after they were kicked out of the country – that’s just a farce". Chomsky frequently objects to the West — and the United States in particular — not being held accountable for war crimes or crimes against humanity, while less powerful nations are. For instance, the US was a signatory member of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which instituted an international tribune, the ICC, dedicated to prosecuting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The US later withdrew, attempting to shield war criminals and crimes against humanity perpetrated by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the other hand, Chomsky did write shortly after the Vietnam War ended "the record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome", as well as that "When the facts are in, it may turn out that the more extreme condemnations were in fact correct." Whatever responsibility he laid at the feet of the United States, he did not deny that a large atrocity had taken place in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. However, he claims that 1.2 million were killed by the Khmer Rouge and the other 800,000 were killed by American bombings, excavation of mass graves indicates at least 1,386,734 were executed by the Khmer Rouge and outside of those graves 2.18 million were killed by the Khmer Rouge overall and "only" between 30,000 and 500,000 were killed in the U.S. bombing of Cambodia so Chomsky's statistics are still wrong. Chomsky's fans have defended this by claiming that those interred in the mass graves known as Killing Fields could actually have been killed by American bombers. He has been heavily criticized for this, particularly due to downplaying the number of dead long after they had been definitively confirmed.

Freedom of expression and the press

Chomsky's essay, 'Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression', appeared as an introduction to a Holocaust denial book by French writer Robert Faurisson, without Chomsky's knowledge or approval. Responding to a request for comment in a climate of attacks on Faurisson, Chomsky defended Faurisson's right to express and publish his opinions on the grounds that freedom of speech must be extended to all viewpoints, no matter how unpopular or fallacious.

In the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chomsky controversially compared the media and public reactions to those shootings on the one hand, and on the other, the 1999 NATO bombing of Radio Serbia's headquarters during the Kosovo War. Chomsky accused the Western media of hypocrisy for denouncing only the former. But his analysis of media double standards in rallying to the cause of press freedom went well beyond Kosovo:

Anyone with eyes open will quickly notice other rather striking omissions. Thus, prominent among those who face an "enormous challenge" from brutal violence are Palestinians, once again during Israel's vicious assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, in which many journalists were murdered, sometimes in well-marked press cars, along with thousands of others, while the Israeli-run outdoor prison was again reduced to rubble on pretexts that collapse instantly on examination.

Also ignored was the assassination of three more journalists in Latin America in December, bringing the number for the year to 31. There have been more than a dozen journalists killed in Honduras alone since the military coup of 2009 that was effectively recognized by the U.S. (but few others), probably according to post-coup Honduras the per capita championship for the murder of journalists.

Anarchistic pragmatism

Despite his stance as an anarchist, Chomsky has been known to advocate things that make him polarizing within anarchist circles. He for instance opposes the classical left-libertarian position of anti-electoralism in favor of active political involvement with state political systems, believing the best way to an anarchist society is through working with systems of power. This militant adherence to pragmatism has resulted in him supporting some very horrible people which has fueled the polarizing effect he has on other anarchists.

The best illustration of this is Chomsky being a supporter of the regime of Hugo Chávez. His praise didn't go unnoticed as when, during the 2006 UN session, Hugo Chávez recommended Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival as an important text on the subject of American imperialism. The mention helped give the author some renewed publicity. The two later hit it off, with Chomsky traveling to visit Venezuela in 2009 as an honored guest. Even after the death of Chávez, Chomsky still continues to speak highly of him and his government.

While some anarchists disapprove of Chomsky's affinity for people like Chavez — who wasn't an anarchist — Chomsky holds that many political terms are imprecise. Of anarchism, he declares: "It resists any characterization." Moreover, he accepts the need for some pragmatism:

Chomsky also addressed some of the issues confronting anarchist activism, noting that while anarchists stand against the state, they often advocate for state coercion in order to protect people from “the savage beasts” of the capitalists, as he put it. Yet he saw this as not a contradiction, but a streak of pragmatism. “People live and suffer in this world, not one we imagine,” Chomsky explained. “It’s worth remembering that anarchists condemn really existing states instead of idealistic visions of governments ‘of, by and for the people.’”

Another famous example of his pragmatism came when he endorsed Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump after Bernie Sanders lost the primary. He believed in stopping the spread of neo-fascism in America first and foremost because he found fascism to be so dangerous to society that working with the establishment is preferable. Put simply, the Democrats are opportunists who follow the way the wind blows; Republicans are demagogues who work with reactionaries and monsters, so Chomsky, by default, prefers Democrats. Although it should be known that Chomsky only encouraged people to do so if they lived in a swing-state, similarly he said regarding the election of 2008:

I voted green. If I had been in a swing state – this [Massachusetts] is a fixed state – if I had been in a swing state I probably would have held my nose and voted for Obama. Just to keep out the alternative, which is worse. I had no expectations about him and I'm not in the least disillusioned. In fact I wrote about him before the primaries. I thought he was awful.

Chomsky also had some harsh words regarding those who refused to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, saying:

That brings up some memories. In the early 30s in Germany, the communist party, following the Stalinist line at the time, took the position that everybody but us is a social fascist so there's no difference between the social democrats and the Nazis. So therefore we're not going to join with the social democrats to stop the Nazi plague. We know where that led. And there are many other cases like that. And I think we're seeing a rerun of that. So let's take the position "Never Biden, I'm not going to vote for Biden". There is a thing called arithmetic. You can debate a lot of things but not arithmetic. Failure to vote for Biden in this election in a swing state amounts to voting for Trump. It takes one vote away from the opposition, the same as voting for Trump. So if you decide you want to vote for the destruction of organized human life on earth, for a sharp increase in the threat of nuclear war, for stuffing the judiciary with young lawyers who will make it impossible to do anything for a generation, then do it openly, say, "yeah that's what I want". So that's the meaning of "Never Biden".

Most other anarchists though reject this kind of approach, holding that consistently working with the establishment actually helps to perpetuate state societies and elitism via complicity rather than demolishing them.

But the most outspoken, needless to say, is much more radical. These include, unsurprisingly, hard green anarchists like John Zerzan who not only dislike Chomsky for working with the establishment but hate him even more for his embrace of technology as a means to improve things, including the environment. The fact Chomsky is himself a green anarchist who is well-known for being a staunch advocate of protecting and fixing Earth's ecology is utterly lost on them, or they don't feel he's radical enough. That's because Zerzan is an anarcho-primitivist, which Chomsky is not.

Chomsky and feminism

One issue that at times has been raised about Chomsky by those who support him (or would otherwise) is his comparably lukewarm attitude towards feminism. Indeed, he's only ever tangentially discussed it in any real sense, much to the chagrin of anarcha-feminists. While it's very safe to say that he is in no way anti-feminist or against feminism, he doesn't seem interested in exploring it to the same degree he has with other movements, whatever connotations that might carry.

Responding to an accusation from a former student of his that he was an "old-fashioned patriarch" and "has never really understood what the feminist movement is about", Chomsky chose to contest the idea that feminism constitutes a single movement. He instead stated that he believes it a multitude of separate movements, each with their own goals, and worthy goals. He also implied he had disinterest in the topic and they he may not be familiar enough with the topic.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as the aspirations and goals of the feminist movement, and I don’t think there’s such a thing as the feminist movement. There are many aspirations and goals of the feminist movement—or the feminist movements, I should say—which I think are timely and proper and important and have had an enormous effect in liberating conscious­ness and thought and making people aware of forms of oppression that they had internalized and not noticed. [...] As to the student’s comment, that could very well be correct, but I’m not the person to judge.

In a Salon piece, Chomsky is quoted as saying that liberal movements of the 1960s had good goals but were poor in carrying many of them out. He implies that racial desegregation and gender equality movements weren't properly thought out in tactics. With regards to feminism, Chomsky states that a removal of the breadwinner role for many white working men should have come with a worthwhile social role to replace it, but instead the relevant men were faced with increased atomization from broader society. He states this atomization is ok with college professors, but not ok for working class solidarity. Chomsky ultimately thinks that the liberalization tactics of the 1960s didn't take into consideration long-term solidarity concerns.

Chomsky on LGBT rights

Chomsky has stated that LGBT rights were pushed through during the Obama years in spite of the initial opinions of Obama and of Republicans. He stated that Obama "evolved" on the topic due to public opinion, and was willing to concede because it's an "easy concession". Chomsky claimed that LGBT rights don't fundamentally challenge elite power, due to an alleged lack of a class component of LGBT rights. Chomsky claims corporations and big business have no fundamental reservations about LGBT rights as a whole. Chomsky called LGBT rights important, but also said someone having commitment to LGBT rights isn't necessarily displaying commitment to overall civil liberties. Chomsky notably sued the Obama administration on constitutional civil liberties matters, for Obama approving indefinite detention of any suspected terrorist without charge or trial.

Chomsky on cancel culture

Noam Chomsky called cancel culture a common mainstream tactic. Chomsky claims that segments of the American left are appropriating these mainstream tactics to censor right-wing speech, and that this aids right-wing causes. Chomsky claims that much of this type of censorship gives unnecessary publicity to the right-wing and gives them a opportunity to present themselves as reasonable via free speech concerns. Chomsky says that, for example, denying a far-right-winger a speaking opportunity on a college campus is essentially giving them a gift. He instead advises those on the left to set up counter-meetings and rationally work through the individual arguments on the right-wing.

In other interviews, Chomsky has stated this tolerance should not extent to tolerance for explicit calls to violence in private households, but other than that, Chomsky generally encourages against censorship of political argumentation.

Chomsky on antifa

See the main article on this topic: Antifa

Chomsky has called self-described 'antifa' a "miniscule fringe" of the left. He states that self-described antifa groups don't aid in anti-fascism, are "gifts" to the right-wing, and are self-destructive. He's criticized their use of censoring tactics as well as violence. Like his comments on cancel culture, Chomsky believes these tactics are simply playing out right-wing desires, and that the right-wing is exuberant when given the opportunity to present themselves as a more tolerant force. In other interviews, Chomsky has also stated the right-wing is more brutal in their application of violence than the left, and so testing the right-wing on this matter is usually a bad idea. Instead Chomsky advocates that the left appeal to the common populace and use non-violent tactics whenever possible.

Wingnuts who hate Chomsky

Noam Chomsky has been the bête noire of right-wingers for going on five decades. Batshit crazy David Horowitz detests Chomsky, largely because the latter deeply opposes Horowitz's neoconservative and mindlessly pro-Israel positions. Horowitz runs a site called Discover the Network wherein he lists all the evil libruls plotting to destroy All that is Good and True. Chomsky, of course, enjoys an entry. Additionally, Horowitz and his long-timer partner in lunacy, Peter Collier, edited and published a collection of attacks on Chomsky, a set of tracts titled The Anti-Chomsky Reader, published by Collier's own obscure company.

At his Frontpage magazine site, Horowitz hosts his own anti-Chomsky screeds, as well as those of others. To Horowitz, Chomsky is a man of "psychotic hatred," and a paramount danger to America:

Chomsky’s message to his disciples in this country, the young on our college campuses, the radicals in our streets, the moles in our government offices, is a message of action and therefore needs to be attended to, even by those who will never read his rancid works.

Writing with Jacob Laksin, Horowitz feverishly shrieks about "a second Holocaust of the Jews" in which Hezbollah "can count on Muslim support and apparently the support of American radicals as well," which he claims Chomsky is promoting.

Beyond Horowitz's various swamps, there's professional asshole Ben Shapiro, who informs the world that: "A secular humanist, born a Jew, is still a secular humanist. Noam Chomsky is a Jew, but he is also a twisted and evil thinker..." But on a later occasion, Benny denied Chomsky is a Jew, declaring that Chomsky “is not really Jewish,” and is “Jewish in name only.” (A JINO?) Chomsky is also covered in "vainglorious huckster" Dinesh D'Souza's cheesy, jingoistic Propaganda Film "documentary," America.

Radical-minded professors like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky have, through the techniques Saul Alinsky learned from Al Capone, succeeded in making millions of black Americans, Native Americans, poor Americans, and liberal Americans ashamed of the darkest parts of American history.

Bloviating blowhard Bill O'Reilly would have us know that the kids are not all right! For, because of Chomsky, "many of our children grow up steeped in a toxic brew of negativity, ridicule, and downright anti-Americanism."

Not all who dislike, detest or disagree with Chomsky are wingnuts. Mere neoliberal, pro-Israel fanatics also loathe him and his politics, although some give him credit when they believe it due. New Atheists often also detest Chomsky, as one of their leading voices does.

And if that were not enough, some sane people hold St. Noam Chomsky in contempt, or at least disagree with him.

Chomsky and other wingnuts

Osama bin Laden and Chomsky

Osama bin Laden read numerous secular sources he may have disagreed with to better understand American politics, including Chomsky's commentary on American media.

Upon bin Laden's death, Chomsky strongly felt it set a very bad precedent that the murderer had not been given a trial and was instead assassinated. Chomsky stated that while Bin Laden committed a crime, his assassination "violat[ed] elementary norms of international law."

Alex Jones and Chomsky

Alex Jones had a positive view of Chomsky's media analysis, appreciating how it claimed the government and the elite were running the media. He had brought Chomsky on his show at least once to promote Chomsky's books before Jones became fully enmeshed with the Republican Party. However, as Alex doesn't share Chomsky's overall politics and is combative, he disparaged Chomsky after plugging his work.

Critics of Chomsky call Chomsky conspiratorial, while others claim Chomsky is not alleging conspiracy in his media analysis, but rather informal institutional alliances. Defenders of Chomsky claim there is no need for active conspiracy for Chomsky's analyses to be correct.

The intellectual who hates intellectuals

One of the most common misconceptions about Chomsky concerns his view of intellectuals. In 2016, Caitlin Flanagan wrote an article for The New York Times which said the following about Chomsky:

Much that is distasteful — and, at worst, fraudulent — about the American university system can be traced, ultimately, to “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” It allowed every plodding English department adjunct and uninspired life sciences prof to imagine themselves not as instructors but as “intellectuals,” people whose opinions on American foreign policy were inherently more valuable than those of the common men and women whom, ironically, they claimed to champion. Merely by avowing — loudly — ­every doctrinaire opinion of the left, such a person could transform him- or herself into a modern-day Zola, vitally needed as the conscience of the nation. Set aside the onerous task of grading 55 lackluster essays on “Huck Finn.” Grinding out a ­virtue-signaling HuffPo piece is much more important — to your career, ­Amerika and (oh yeah, them) your ­students.

Nathan Robinson later wrote an article responding to these claims in Current Affairs, pointing out how anybody who has engaged in Chomsky's writing can find numerous examples of him saying the exact opposite. Not only that, but it's clear his issue with intellectuals is that they commonly have gone beyond their means and have instead decided to do the thing Flanagan is pretending Chomsky allowed them to do. He even makes note of Chomsky acknowledging that hatred of intellectuals in the United States is one of the things he most admires about this nation:

I think one of the healthy things about the United States is precisely this: there’s very little respect for intellectuals as such. And there shouldn’t be. What’s there to respect? I mean, in France if you’re part of the intellectual elite and you cough, there’s a front page story in Le Monde. That’s one of the reasons why French intellectual culture is so farcical- it’s like Hollywood… My suspicion is that plenty of people in the crafts, auto mechanics and so on, probably do as much or more intellectual work as plenty of people in universities… So if by “intellectual” you mean people who are using their minds, then it’s all over the society. If by “intellectual” you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts… they’re really more of a secular priesthood… and the population should be anti-intellectual in that respect, I think that’s a healthy reaction.

Much of Chomsky's writing about Vietnam is filled with nothing but distaste at the intellectual class for somehow tricking itself into thinking what he views as an atrocity can be justified. On one occasion, he wrote that he didn't feel he needed to defend his position on Vietnam "just as I would not take the trouble to justify my belief that one should assist a child being attacked by a rabid dog." His 1969 book American Power and the New Mandarins similarly sees him being nothing short of confused as to why he has to explain his objection to Vietnam, writing:

By entering into the arena of argument and counterargu­ment, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and cita­tions, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one’s humanity. This is the feeling I find almost impossible to repress when going through the motions of building a case against the American war in Vietnam. Anyone who puts a fraction of his mind to the task can construct a case that is overwhelming; surely this is now obvious. In an important way, by doing so he degrades himself, and insults beyond measure the victims of our violence and our moral blindness. There may have been a time when American policy in Vietnam was a debatable matter. This time is long past. [...] The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction - all of us who would have remained silent, had stability and order been secured.

Chomsky and email

Part of Chomsky's appeal is that he answers email from just about anyone and has been doing so for decades. This has led to people sending in various pranks and odd questions into Chomsky's inbox over the years, which hasn't deterred Chomsky much from answering emails. Due to Chomsky occasionally stating a politically incorrect or unanticipated opinion in emails about topical issues, the leaders of reddit.com/r/chomsky have at times banned circulation of email responses from Chomsky.

Chomsky and Epstein

In April 2023, Jeffrey Epstein's private calendar was revealed to the public, with several high profile individuals revealed to have scheduling meetings with Epstein, such as Woody Allen (film director who is now the epitome of "washed-up has-been") and Ehud Barak (the former prime minister of Israel). Chomsky was also one of the names revealed to be scheduled meeting with Epstein. When asked about this by WSJ reporters, Chomsky responded by email: "first response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally."

Chomsky reported that he had asked Epstein for financial advice after his (Chomsky's) first wife died, which resulted in Epstein transferring $270,000 between several bank accounts for Chomsky.

See also

• William Blum, a critic who, like Chomsky, sees US foreign policy in terms of imperialism.

Further reading

• Bernard Comrie (1989). Language Universals & Linguistic Typology. The University of Chicago Press. 
• Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams (2014). An Introduction to Language. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. 
• Pieter A. M. Seuren (2004). Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction. Blackwell Publishing. 

External links

• chomsky.info
• Chomsky meets Ali G