After Epstein controversy, how should US philosopher Noam Chomsky’s ideas be judged? |
It came as a shock to many to discover that the prominent US philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky was also within convicted child-sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s slowly surfacing circle of confidantes.
Since he shot into the public eye with his trenchant opposition to the Vietnam war in the 1960s, Chomsky has been one of the most trenchant critics of US neo-imperialism and its unaccountable elite.
As a consequence, many of his admirers struggled to understand how Chomsky had also been friends for over a decade with Epstein – a relationship whose contours became clear with the recent release by US authorities of an enormous stash of emails, videos and other material detailing the sex offender’s activities and the extent of his social networks.
The so-called Epstein Files show that Chomsky had sought Epstein’s advice on financial matters. The activist, on his part, had offered Epstein counsel on handling the “putrid” allegations against him.
In light of this, some are asking how Chomsky’s ideas are to be judged. Chomsky suffered a stroke in 2023 and has been unable to address these revelations himself. Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in 2019.
However, both those who believe Chomsky’s intellectual legacy is unshaken, as well as those who now question it would benefit from clarifying just what he stood for.
Noam Chomsky's wife acknowledges "serious errors in judgment" in the wake of new revelations about the couple's ties to Jeffrey Epstein. https://t.co/As0aMU61vY— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 12, 2026
Noam Chomsky's wife acknowledges "serious errors in judgment" in the wake of new revelations about the couple's ties to Jeffrey Epstein. https://t.co/As0aMU61vY
Within US academia, which during the Cold War was part of the “military-industrial complex” formed by the US military and defence companies, few successful scholars got away with criticising US foreign policy. Chomsky was a rare exception.
Chomsky also argued that domestic politics was superseded by a “permanent government” pursuing its own interests– an idea that has become popular as the “deep state”. Whether a Democratic or a Republican government was in power, pure force, for maximum profit, was the plain and obvious rule. Whether at home or abroad, common people faced the same problem, of an unaccountable elite.
Despite his popularity, Chomsky was never interviewed on any of the major American television networks. Perhaps this is because he had analysed the key role that mass media played in “manufacturing consent” for the status quo. Ironically, most consumers of US mass media viewer may know nothing about Chomsky other than that he was a leftist who befriended Epstein.
But how and why Epstein?
Chomsky grew up in Zionist socialist circles in Philadelphia that created lasting and complex attachments to ideas of anarchist and socialist cooperation as well as to the idea of Israel.
Chomsky had difficulty in acknowledging the evidence unearthed by the historian Ilan Pappé, that ethnic cleansing was inseparable from the idea of Israel from its very start. This suggested that he shared with Epstein an attachment to Israel that he could not explain.
The attachment to a version of Zionism was not the only formative bond that Chomsky’s intellectual framework left unexamined. There was another, perhaps deeper, one – not to a political community but to a way of knowing and doing research.
He acquired this at Harvard and MIT, universities, at the heart of “the military industrial complex” that US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 had warned the American people against. Research universities were a key part of this compact during the Cold War. Scholars in the so-called free world were groomed to believe they were the intellectual leaders and saviors of democracy. Even those such as Chomsky who opposed the triumphalist politics of the US could succumb to such intellectual elitism.
With World War II, the US changed from a provincial power, confined largely to the western hemisphere, to the most powerful nation and model for the world to imitate. Its experts were sent all over the world to help other countries achieve this aim.
Chomsky rejected Cold War politics, but subscribed to the most subtle and influential aspects of the intellectual training of his time, of expertise as a privilege, an identity and a way of knowing. His own position remained unexamined: it was a one-way lens that could expose power everywhere except in the conditions of its own production.
Noam Chomsky advised Jeffrey Epstein to “ignore” public scrutiny of his sex crimes, according to newly unsealed files which appear to show a close friendship between the two men.Chomsky’s exchanges with the late paedophile financier, which span several years, are contained in a… pic.twitter.com/mBXMN57l1L— Novara Media (@novaramedia) February 2, 2026
Noam Chomsky advised Jeffrey Epstein to “ignore” public scrutiny of his sex crimes, according to newly unsealed files which appear to show a close friendship between the two men.Chomsky’s exchanges with the late paedophile financier, which span several years, are contained in a… pic.twitter.com/mBXMN57l1L
Over the decades, Chomsky stood out as a solitary anti-imperialist figure over the decades. But his solitude was chosen. He refused to acknowledge that there were crucial thinkers on these issues elsewhere in the world, who often had other perceptive ways to explain the changing character of US influence worldwide. From Althusser to Castoriadis to Zizek (from A to Z, we might say), he rejected them all as irrational or unscientific.
Moreover, the world Chomsky described was changing, in part due to the very forces that he had analysed. Dissent was absorbed into the media landscape. Practices of cherry-picking information for self-help and wellness, were reinforced by algorithmic feeds that cocooned users from their environments. Emotion and reason blended together to induce attachments that could defy reason, and, if the culture industry had its way, they did.
This is what the Epstein dinner table finally made visible. The anarchist from the Philadelphia Zionist youth groups, seated at dinner beside former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the invitation of a convicted sex trafficker – the scene is not merely scandalous but symptomatic. Dissent became décor – proof that the powerful are so confident, they can afford to seat their critics at the table.
In a moment when the United States has shed the pretense of liberal internationalism, when the very vocabulary of media criticism has been captured by the nationalist right and when the tradition of American anti-imperialism that Chomsky represented faces its severest test, the task is not to discard his legacy but to ask how to further it.
What shape would an anti-imperialist movement take, when mass immigration has complicated almost every nation’s demographics and when surveillance is all-encompassing? The analytical gaze that Chomsky so powerfully directed outward at the world could be directed inward, to help build collective movements and institutional forms that no solitary intellectual – no matter how brilliant some believe him to be – can substitute for.
Arvind Rajagopal is Professor, Media Studies at New York University.