Noam Chomsky: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
An honest assessment of an intellectual heavyweight
In 1959, a young linguist changed psychology forever. Noam Chomsky dealt a knockout blow to the reigning champ at that time: arch-behaviorist B. F. Skinner. Chomsky deserves enormous credit for this feat, mainly as he wrote when most academics were still overwhelmingly into the science of stimulus-response and the mind as a black box.
With Verbal Behavior (1957), Skinner came out swinging with the idea that people are more or less the products of external stimuli. Language acquisition, thought Skinner, is an entirely learned (and reinforced) phenomenon. This model of the psyche animated much of Skinner’s work, as behaviorism requires ignoring the reality of internal mental states and heritable traits.
But genetics was already disrupting the biological sciences. Chomsky decided it was time to rebel.
In his critique, Chomsky appeals to heritable characteristics that mark animal development and maturation. There’s no reason similar inborn traits should not influence human development, too. Such might strike readers as obvious today. But at the time, Chomsky’s critique not only opened the door to his theory of “deep structure” – syntactic properties of language we’re all born with – it spawned entirely new subdisciplines.
In many ways, this clash of heavyweights anticipated the nature/nurture debates dominating the last quarter of the twentieth century. At the very least, Chomsky’s critique sent behaviorism back on its hills, ushering in the cognitive revolution. This paradigm, dominated by cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology, still reigns.
Arguably, Chomsky’s work should have killed the tabula rasa mind virus that persists in today’s radical ‘I-identify-as’ culture, unmoored as it is from reality. Alas, it did not. But at least Chomsky helped bring down theories of human tropism, in which we are to understand ourselves merely as sophisticated versions of dogs salivating at the sounds of bells.
When we click out an order of magnitude, Chomsky’s critique of Skinner reminds us just how crucial vigorous debate and open inquiry are to the scientific enterprise.
The Good
When Chomsky signed the now-famous Harper’s letter in defense of open debate, he must have understood that it was under such conditions he was able to upend a dominant psychological paradigm. It reads:
“The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.”
Chomsky, along with other well-known signatories, is fighting to preserve the practices of open inquiry that are vital to human progress. These also happen to be the conditions under which a lay person, young scholar, or old curmudgeon might unseat a more influential thinker in the pursuit of truth. Chomsky knows full well that, had he been born in different circumstances, he would have had to express himself in Samizdat.
By advocating for open inquiry, Chomsky resists more militant strains of social justice ideology. They, like behaviorism, depend on blanket denials of “essentialism.” They also seek to shame and silence dissent. Chomsky understands that—far from dismantling unhealthy hierarchies—radical social justice activists seek to install their proxies at the highest echelons of power. But Chomsky is not interested in preserving feudal hierarchies, much less staffing them with less competent hierarchs. He’s simply averse to hierarchies–particularly those that oppress ordinary people.
Recently, Chomsky received a backlash due to his skepticism of the West’s involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict—i. e. America and its client states. Ironically, this contrived war footing is a textbook example of “manufacturing consent.” Chomsky and colleague Edward Herman published the textbook in 1988.
The authors argue:
Media companies depend on ad revenue, so their outlets focus on stories that will benefit advertisers. Advertisers tend to be – or are at least closely associated with – ruling elites.
Far from speaking truth to power, media elites regurgitate the “truths” of the powerful. In other words, most media cover events in ways that favor the objectives of ruling elites.
Experts and authorities offer takes that allow elites to control the media through money or guarantees of high-level access. Power and media share a coital bed.
Attempt to push back, and you’ll get flack. If your story is inconvenient for the powerful, you will be pushed to the margins. Corporate-state platforms will shut you down faster than you can say ‘Hunter Biden’s laptop.’
Otherwise, you’ll often find media peddling a ‘common enemy,’ some scapegoat that will help corral people around the elite opinion.
When it comes to Manufacturing Consent, I used to think Chomsky was full of shit. I was wrong. Living through a series of crises has shown me that Chomsky and Herman were right.
Some commenters argue the internet has changed the dynamics around elites controlling information. And it has. But “gated, institutional narratives” persist, and the Blue Church/Grey Lady has fought mightily to reconstitute itself despite the onslaught of more decentralized, “insurgent” sources among the Dissident Left, the Reactionary Right, and the Heterodox Center. Captured mainstream media sources routinely call dissident media disinformation, and many of those sources now police social media for wrongthink. Put delicately: Instead of questioning the machinations of the powerful, most journalists have become bootlickers and propagandists. Americans will recall “brought to you by Pfizer” ads on the MSM during the COVID pandemic. And as the Russia-Ukraine conflict drags on, defense contractors are licking their chops, lining up to underwrite the MSM who will mindlessly amplify ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ and Zelensky-is-Churchill stories to keep us pliant.
The Mixed
I know. I broke the trope with a brief detour into “mixed.” But Chomsky’s foreign policy positions are good and bad, depending on one’s perspective.
Agree with him or not, Chomsky has always spoken out against military adventurism and the imperial ambitions of great powers. In America, he doesn’t care which party is being bellicose. Both the Left and Right dragged Americans into Vietnam. The Right spearheaded the War on Terror, which after twenty years has culminated in lost civil liberties at home and trillions spent abroad. Leaving matériel and Bagram to the Taliban was a symbolic end to incoherent interventionism. No matter, says Chomsky:
“The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 was criminal.” This is a really tough case to make, even with the benefit of hindsight.
The Democratic Party, having jumped into the coital bed with the deep state, is concerned with saving face after manufacturing multiple vaporous narratives about Trump-Russia collusion, which the Durham Report has now conclusively dried up. Now they have to double down on ‘I Stand with Ukraine’ bumper stickers, economic sanctions, and billions in debt spending to export weapons of war while Americans suffer record inflation and deepening debt. The American Left, once generally antiwar, now follows hawkish Clintonistas into a potential NATO conflict with Russia.
Chomsky warns that proxy wars and games of nuclear chicken are far too risky. But his calls for de-escalation have gotten him branded a Putin stooge by those who have sacrificed their antiwar bona fides to partisan expedience. Proxy wars are still wars, Chomsky thinks. And wars are horrors to be avoided.
Chomsky’s critics have called him everything from an apologist for Pol Pot’s genocide to one who is far too permissive of Islamic terrorism. Maybe such accusations are justified. But Chomsky has always struggled against the commission of atrocities by his government and that of its client states. Otherwise, he generally seeks peace over war. Whatever one thinks of such a dovish foreign policy, Chomsky is at least consistent. To the extent Chomsky has withheld certain criticisms, it might be that he has a soft spot for socialist regimes. Otherwise, he is far less authoritarian in his outlook, which sets him apart from many on today’s American Left.
The Bad
One should resist the temptation to call Noam Chomsky a communist, though that label is not entirely inapt. It’s imprecise. Part of that imprecision lies in critics’ failure to understand the ideological landscape on the far Left since Marx. But some of that imprecision originates with Chomsky and others who know they don’t like privately-owned corporations, yet don’t see exactly how to operationalize their ideals.
“I mean, I don’t think you can lay it out in detail–” says Chomsky in an interview, “nobody’s smart enough to design a society; you’ve got to experiment.”
He’s right that no one is smart enough to design a society, but he needs at least to point to processes and protocols likely to give rise to his ideals. For example, without secure property rights or private capital, how is anyone to experiment? How is one experiment distinguished from another? Does his system include profits and losses for a given syndicate? And if not, who determines which experiments are successful and which are failures? Who pays for failure? And who benefits from successful risk-taking?
Chomsky’s specific term of art is “anarcho-syndicalist,” which, to the unwashed, sounds like someone who throws Molotov cocktails by night and writes indie columns by day. But anarcho-syndicalism has a storied history as a splinter-faction of communism. Adherents focus on the conditions of workers and the goals of labor movements. Syndicalisme is, after all, a French term for trade unionism. So, anarcho-syndicalists tend to view labor unions as a force for revolutionary change that they hope will replace both capitalism and the state with a society managed by voting workers organized in syndicates.
“Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under capitalism,” writes Chomsky, “to create ‘free associations of free producers’ that would engage in militant struggle and prepare to take over the organization of production on a democratic basis.”
The most obvious problem with anarcho-syndicalism is that majoritarian systems are not anarchist, at least not fundamentally. Anarchy means without rulers, not many rulers. Yet democracy terminates in systems that facilitate the rule of majorities over minorities, i.e., “the domination of man over man,” which Chomsky claims to reject. Even if Chomsky supports more localized democratic efforts, which can help smaller groups get closer to unanimity, defaulting to worker-centric voting systems achieved through militant expropriation only closes the gap between the preferences of rulers (majority) over those of the ruled (minority). It does not eliminate it. Moreover, democracy introduces injustice, as voters will inevitably seek to override fair distributions based on unequal contribution–that is, fairness as proportionality. It’s too easy to vote for equal salaries, despite unequal talent and effort.
Chomsky bristles at Soviet-style communism with its reliance on bloody-cum-bureaucratic management of the socio-economy. Stalinism, therefore, is not syndicalism. What the CCP instantiates is closer to fascism. Still, one wonders why no Marxist-adjacent experiment yet devised comes close to realizing anarcho-syndicalists’ more idealized form. A few strange exceptions work in Chomsky’s favor, such as the worker cooperative, the Israeli Kibbutz, and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)—an anti-statist separatist group led by Abdullah Ocalan. But we must ask whether even these smaller, more cellular systems would be chosen or have to be imposed. In Israel, for example, only about five percent of the population lives in a kibbutz. Chomsky seems hostile to the idea of compelling people to live within a certain system. Still, we have to ask whether any form of anarcho-syndicalism can be operationalized and scaled without compulsion.
In the United States, there is a long history of intentional communities and democratically governed worker-owned cooperatives. These corporate forms exist and are perfectly legal, but they have never been terribly popular. If these forms offered profound benefits, wouldn’t they be more widely adopted? Not only do many co-ops suffer from the pathologies of democratic governance, but they aren’t highly competitive against other forms, including traditional firms. Chomsky might respond that cooperatives can’t compete in environments dominated by capitalist firms, so they would fare better in their absence. But again, Chomsky has to show how any force that abolishes competitor systems wouldn’t apply mass compulsions, which take on the more odious characteristics of a state. In other words, anarcho-syndicalists must figure out how to navigate between the Scilla of state violence and the Charibdys of competition.
Chomsky, like other anarcho-syndicalists, seeks the abolition of the wage system because he regards it as a form of slavery. Yet elsewhere, Chomsky seems quite fond of taxation. Indeed, he doesn’t regard taxation as a form of slavery or a protection racket at all, even though authorities must take people’s earnings without their consent. To be fair, Chomsky has called for activists to avoid paying taxes to the warfare state and has himself avoided taxes—maybe with the help of Jeffery Epstein. But he supports taxation that works for his pet causes. One suspects Chomsky is dancing a two-step between his ideals and political pragmatism. But he should understand that, far from helping him realize his ideals, even selective support for taxation feeds power, whether that power serves welfare or warfare.
As the anarchist Lysander Spooner writes:
If any man's money can be taken by a so-called government, without his personal consent, all his other rights are taken with it; for with his money the government can, and will, hire soldiers to stand over him, compel him to submit to its arbitrary will, and kill him if he resists.
This is how political power works.
According to Chomsky, both state- and private ownership of the means of production lead to different kinds of class division and are thus different forms of evil. We might appreciate Chomsky’s a-pox-on-both-houses perspective. But neither Chomsky nor any anarcho-syndicalist he admires explains what is to be done when competitor systems emerge due to real human choices. One can’t just yell “false consciousness” and wave the problem away. In reality, no One True Way is likely to predominate unless it is A) imposed by force or B) clearly a superior system and thus the collective product of human choices. That latter possibility smacks of American-style libertarianism, which Chomsky rejects in favor of “libertarian socialism,” which is distinctly European.
The Ugly
Syndicalists typically offer Bakunin’s work as an anti-authoritarian critique of Marx. Chomsky himself says he is “not an enthusiastic Marxist,” likely for this reason. But to what extent is Chomsky a reluctant Marxist? Most of the overlaps with Marx lie in anti-capitalism. Where Chomsky departs from Marx seems to be areas in which the Marxists acknowledge their ideas can’t work without authoritarian control. What’s ugly about Chomsky’s view is not just the apparent contradictions. It’s also that Chomsky gets tantalizingly close to a synthesis view that neither depends on a visceral disgust with capitalism, or lapses into Marxism.
How does syndicalism justify itself without reference to Marx’s Labor Theory of Surplus Value? This theory of objective value is the lynchpin of Marxist economics and the idea of exploitation. Without it, the theory fails. The idea is that because profit goes to the capitalist, it is an unearned surplus that ought to accrue to the workers who really create the value.
I will pass over the fact that in traditional firms, owners bear the risks of their decisions, and making good decisions is a critical form of work. The fundamental problem with Marx’s Labor Theory is that all value is subjective. It doesn’t matter what the inputs are. The value of any product lies solely in customers’ eyes. Karl Marx teeshirts and Carl Menger teeshirts might have the exact same inputs – such as cotton, dyes, labor, and machines – but because so few people know Menger, the Marx teeshirt is likely to fetch a higher sum. The point of entrepreneurship—whether determined by the ‘capitalist’ or workers in a cooperative—is to discover what people value and make bets accordingly. If the communist wants to argue that only workers should be allowed to take such risks collectively, more should start co-ops before fomenting revolution.
As one sympathetic to classical liberalism, I was heartened to read in Chomsky that his libertarian socialism is “properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.” But it’s pretty challenging to cherry-pick enlightenment thinkers who were not committed to the institution of private property, which Chomsky thinks is illiberal. At the very least, Chomsky thinks “democracy” should involve mechanisms by which workers can seize wealth, land, or organizations from those whom workers deem unjustifiable hierarchs.
Let’s linger for a moment on three major problems with this view.
First, it’s unclear how a stateless order and majoritarian rule are commensurable, much less sustainable. If workers are permitted to take over firms and vote on how they’re run, how will they not degenerate into what Bakhunin termed a “red bureaucracy”? As Friedrich Engels wrote,
“...no communal action is possible without submission on the part of some to an external will, that is to say, authority.”
Engels was wrong about a great many things, but he has a point here. Syndicalists like Chomsky claim not to like the politburos of early-stage communism, staffed as they are with brutal enforcers. Must syndicate workers forever double as enforcers to safeguard against the cooperative’s internal and external threats? Outsourcing enforcement risks creating proto-states. So if syndicalism doesn’t inadvertently create states, how does it harness a countervailing force to prevent people from organizing as non-syndicates? Does it contract freely with defense and security syndicates?
Furthermore, how will workers determine which workers fill needed roles? By election? If one doesn’t desire a position the majority offers, how is that appreciably different from the purportedly exploitive decisions of management in hiring, firing, or assigning? Private ownership puts decision-making authority in owners’ hands. That authority can be delegated or reconstituted (as with Holacracy). But scrapping private ownership risks taking decision-making authority away from those with the strongest incentives and/or best capabilities to make good decisions. Tragedies of the decision-making commons and back-biting politics already infect democratically governed firms.
Worker cooperatives are private in the United States, which means the workers govern their firms, not the government or the masses. If one believes syndicalist George Woodcock,
The syndicate… is based on the organisation of workers by industry at the place of work. The workers of each factory, or depot or farm are an autonomous unit, who govern their own affairs and who make all the decisions as to the work they will do.
If the factory or farm workers are “an autonomous unit,” how is neither factory nor farm considered private under syndicalism? Private property, after all, is simply a legal designation for the ownership of property by non-governmental entities.
Insecure property or land titles almost always yield situations like those in Central and South America. In such conditions, entrepreneurs—even simple farmers—hesitate to make investments or project plans out of concern that some external force will snatch their farms. The nigh-inevitable consequence is poverty, cronyism, or both, in which the humblest entrepreneurs must bribe officials to leave them alone. The people see grotesque inequality as a result.
Weary of the corruption, the people blame ‘capitalism’ and install state socialists who, like Castro or Chavez, turn everything to shit. Chomsky claims to hate corruption, state capitalism, and cronyism. But he never manages fully to explain how anarcho-syndicalism redistributes wealth in a manner that doesn’t result in red bureaucracies, corrupt kleptocracies, or a monstrous hybrid of these. Masses of workers with torches and pitchforks look no more like justice than armed functionaries. ‘Land reforms’ have made basketcases of places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Why will matters be different this time?
Finally, if workers can suspend private ownership by vote, Chomsky’s inchoate anarchism risks removing key features that generate abundance. For example, if secure property is a precondition of exchange, syndicalism restricts trade between consenting adults. After all, if x is not exactly mine, how can I trade it for y, which is not exactly yours? Syndicates can trade ‘ours’ for ‘theirs.’ But, presumably, under anarcho-syndicalism, one must appeal to the multi-headed creature known as the majority before trading or acquiring certain things. That hardly seems free.
But matters get worse: Any system that removes the ability to sell product surpluses or restricts the use of profits to grow the enterprise tamps down incentives to invest and produce. China learned that lesson with its collectivized farms prior to 1980. History is replete with such examples, including among the kibbutznikim. Chomsky might argue that his syndicates will get the details right. But again, he must tell us how we will all be obliged to organize according to a particular corporate form and how he will eliminate competitor forms without state violence. After all, there are more than 12,000 co-ops worldwide. But there are myriad other self-management forms, many of which happen to suck less.
Chomsky raises one’s hopes when he asks readers to consider the benefits of “devolution, that is, removing authority down from the federal government to the state governments.” He is generally in favor of such, he says—unless it’s likely those states will submit to corporate influence. But if all corporations were co-ops, why wouldn’t smaller governments succumb to the influence of co-ops, just as they do to the labor unions he claims to be the tip of the anarcho-syndicalist spear?
Supposing one could solve all such problems of political economy, Chomsky introduces yet another contradiction:
“So despite the anarchist ‘vision,’” he says, “I think aspects of the [welfare] state system, like the one that makes sure children eat, have to be defended–in fact, defended very vigorously.”
At this point, I want to conjure the ghost of Peter Kropotkin – another socialist anarchist – who produced a nice big book on mutual aid, called Mutual Aid. Kropotkin writes:
“The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.”
Kropotkin is correct on this point.
Indeed, an even deeper historical dive – especially of history since Kropotkin – shows the Welfare State, which was planned, not evolved, has utterly crowded out what had once been a robust mutual aid sector. In fact, mutual aid offers Chomsky exactly what he wants, a social safety net without authoritarian power.
But Chomsky also wants to defend the very technocratic schemes that annihilated the mutual aid sector. I’ll mostly pass over the fact that the welfare ‘entitlements’ represent the bulk of U.S. national debt spending that looms dangerously large at 138 percent of GDP–which doesn’t include unfunded liabilities. When that system collapses, and millions are cast into penury, will Chomsky still vigorously defend the welfare state with its algorithmic and impersonal disbursement of helicopter money?
Matters get uglier when Chomsky says:
“[I]t’s completely realistic and rational to work within structures to which you are opposed, because by doing so you can help to move to a situation where then you can challenge those structures.”
These words could have been uttered by any politician anywhere on the political spectrum. Indeed, those politicians who aren’t sociopaths all along eventually get corrupted by the calculus of horse-trading, special-interest monies, and otherwise working within the system. Who benefits from those former ideologues operating within this calculus? The system—you know, those who benefit from the arrangement.
Nearly Decentralist
The thing about capitalism, properly construed, is that it’s the baby Chomsky seeks to throw out with anti-authoritarian bathwater. Chomsky doesn’t like competition, but he likes experimentation. Yet experimentation is how private organizations operate to create value in entrepreneurial markets, which are competitive. Organizational forms compete, too, as their protocols are also experiments.
So, what if people were free to organize in various ways—any of which could perform well in some socioeconomic niche? Cooperatives? Holacratic firms? Traditional firms? Syndicates? Mutuals? Sociocratic firms? Despite some legal defaults the tax code privileges, all of these forms are legal in most wealthy nations. What if we could experiment with markets for internal governance, as well as markets in governance systems?
Instead of the great, top-heavy states, Chomsky claims to reject (unless they feed the children or help the environment…), what if we were to unleash social entrepreneurs to provide all manner of governance and welfare services? Many of these could be bundled as offerings within civic associations or mutual aid societies competing to solve problems. The Decentralist view commits to no One True Way. Why? Because, as Chomsky admits, we need experimentation.
Decentralism starts with the core Jeffersonian ideal of “the consent of the governed.” This metapolitical superstructure leaves everyone to make peaceful choices from a menu of governance options, both in organizational and socio-economic governance. Federalism is a start. More jurisdictions offer more choices. But maybe we can evolve towards greater polycentricity and panarchy, or what Balaji Srinivasan calls “the network state.” Doing so injects more competition among purveyors of governance services who must honor real contracts.
As author Michael P. Gibson writes:
It turns out there’s only one thing that guarantees production of good laws. The people bound by the laws have to agree to be bound by them. Not hypothetically or tacitly, as in some imaginary will of the people or behind a veil of ignorance. Consent must be real, transparent, and continuous. No law can bind a single person only when and because that person consents to be bound by that law. All laws must be strictly opt in. Lawmakers could be saints, devils or monkeys on typewriters — doesn’t matter. The opt-out opt-in system lets only good laws survive. Bad laws are driven out of production.
People trust the institutions they build and use together.
Now, Chomsky doesn’t like concentrations of wealth, so he is unlikely to approve of Decentralism, which respects Bejan’s Law of Flow. It’s unclear, though, how a successful syndicate wouldn’t concentrate wealth relative to other syndicates–especially if redistribution only happens internally among the workers. For example, imagine a successful software syndicate that sold billions of dollars worth of some popular apps. Those many billions divided evenly among, say, 100 employees would still be highly concentrated relative to the rest of the population. Chomsky must grapple with the likelihood that inequality under conditions of relative freedom is inevitable, a feature of human choices in living systems.
We’ve pointed out that Chomsky is willing “vigorously” to defend the kind of power that serves his noblest ends. At least private entrepreneurship builds in a right of exit, unleashing a dynamic of disassociation and association that tilts to anarchy. Chomsky would scoff at this point, as he has in the past. Yet why are we not permitted to associate with any group of people, structured any ole way, for any common mission–so long as that group is peaceful? After all, one can opt out of working for or transacting with any private firm. But you can’t opt out of paying for failed welfare programs that keep people dependent and threaten insolvency. The state is an extortion racket Chomsky will defend until someone can realize his ‘vision.’
Again, Chomsky doesn’t want privately-owned firms, but he hasn’t shown us an alternative form that will make quantum leaps in improved living standards or superior governance. Nor has he explained how people – free to self-organize – won’t choose any number of organizational models besides democratic, worker-controlled syndicates, which are already legal to spin up.
Anarcho-syndicalists like Chomsky tend to be short on details when operationalizing their “vision.” Yet I agree with Chomsky and other anarchists about the problems of concentrated political authority. The monopoly power to threaten violence against others is ruthlessly self-justifying. That is, it’s hard to justify beyond the powerful saying because we can. To wit: Why should any person or group be permitted to threaten violence against you or another who has injured no one? The answer usually comes back as It’s for your own good. Any ideology with the term ‘libertarian’ attached to it ought to default to the idea that you might be a better judge of what’s in your interests than the janitor in your syndicate or a bureaucrat in some distant capital.
In short, Chomsky’s anti-capitalism steers him away from Decentralism, which shares more than a few overlaps with his anarchism. Indeed, Decentralism finds the sweetspot between waving off operational concerns and constructing some rationalistic scheme. To wit, Decentralism accepts complexity and pluralism as a feature, not a bug. If Chomsky could offer us another 93 years, perhaps he might come around to this view. After all, if Professor Chomsky has taught us nothing else, he’s taught us the benefits of keeping an open heart and mind. But he probably doesn’t have many years left. So we are left to grapple with his impressive life and legacy.
Note: After I completed this article, I learned that Chomsky has been implicated in shady financial dealings with Jeffrey Epstein. What other dealings he had with the teen trafficker I cannot say, but Chomsky did meet with Epstein after his sex crimes conviction. I would never accuse anyone of guilt by association. But I do know that if you see Chomsky before he moves on from this world, see if he scratches. It seems he has lain down with dogs.