Noam Chomsky is seen with Jeffrey Epstein in this undated photo released by House Oversight Committee Democrats on December 18, 2025.

Although celebrated linguist, foreign policy critic, and leftist icon Noam Chomsky had previously acknowledged his relationship with child rapist and serial sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, it was the recent release of photos of the two engaged in seemingly pleasant conversation on Epstein’s private jet that exploded on social media.

In her meditation on the power of images, the late Susan Sontag wrote that the “ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say, ‘There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks that way.’”

The photos illustrate what Chomsky himself confirmed was an unapologetic association with Epstein—for which, he told the Harvard Crimson in 2023, he had no regrets. They immediately drew powerful insights into what that reality must have been like. Author Cryn Johannsen writes that she found it “deeply disturbing that so many men seem to overlook this relationship and continue to defend the now disgraced leftist intellectual.”

Women’s rights activist and professor Kavita Krishnan was equally disturbed, and took issue with Chomsky’s statement that Epstein had “served his time” and therefore had a clean slate. She asked whether Chomsky would have issued a similar rationale for a wealthy CEO trafficking working class children to perform dangerous work. She concluded that “the rules seem different when the working-class children in question are girls, trafficked and enslaved not for factory labour but for sex work. In Chomsky’s political world, these individual survivors of sexual predation are invisible.”

Miriam Markowitz, the former deputy literary editor of The Nation (a touchstone liberal-left publication in print since the end of the US Civil War), had for months before the photo release challenged colleagues and online followers to centre the Epstein survivors. Her calls were amplified last week by United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, who highlighted Markowitz’s reminder that “the elite plan is clear: slavery… We are all swimming in a sea of misogyny so gigantic we only notice when there’s a shipwreck, and usually not even then. See: the survivors.”

Then emerged a classic rejoinder from The Nation that appeared hauntingly familiar to anyone who had read and understood the propaganda model at the core of Chomsky and Edward Herman’s classic text, Manufacturing Consent. Written in the magazine’s........

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