After the extent of his personal and financial connections to Jeffrey Epstein became apparent, the progressive internet exploded.
For some, the revelation proved that Chomsky had always been morally compromised; for others, it demanded an immediate closing of ranks. The heated debate underscored his importance as a political thinker, prompting closer examination of his legacy.
It also demonstrated, yet again, that people would rather talk about anything other than the victims of Epstein’s international sex trafficking ring, whose voluminously documented horrors make the fate of a ninety-seven-year-old millionaire inconsequential.
Although it’s ridiculous to worry about an old man’s reputation in the face of such depravity, the fact that so many of his fans continue to do so reveals a lot about the state of the left, particularly in Anglophone countries. For half a century, Noam Chomsky has occupied a peculiar position in their world, less a theorist than a civic weather system.
The pattern is familiar. A crisis erupts, the mainstream press harmonises, and then Chomsky appears to remind everyone that power lies. This ritual comforts people who would like, simultaneously, to distrust institutions and to believe that the basic coordinates of liberal society are still intact. He is the dissident one can assign on a syllabus without alarming the dean.
Until the Epstein files were made public, anyway.
In the 2016 film Captain Fantastic, about an anarchist family that has spent years living off the grid, we learn the children have been taught to celebrate Noam Chomsky’s birthday instead of Christmas. Absurd as that may sound, it neatly communicates the reverence in which the celebrated thinker was held.
The revelations in the Epstein files have already brought this longtime icon down to earth. But an analysis of Chomsky’s significance should not be led astray by this morality play. Even if he ends up getting “cancelled” by most, his impact cannot be wished away.
The real question is why his politics have remained, for decades, so strangely compatible with the ideological atmosphere he is credited with exposing.
Chomsky’s enduring reputation rests above all on Manufacturing Consent, co-written with Edward S. Herman, which has given generations of readers a language for understanding how media systems filter reality. When the book was published in 1988, his argument—roughly, that corporate ownership, advertising dependence, sourcing routines, and elite consensus structure what counts as news—felt revelatory because it punctured the civic catechism taught in high school civics classes.
Journalists were not independent truth-seekers but professionals embedded in a hierarchy of institutions. Wars were not unfortunate mistakes but predictable outcomes of informational choreography. The book’s great achievement was pedagogical: it taught people to notice patterns.
But the model’s very clarity has produced a peculiar intellectual afterlife. Readers often treat the “propaganda model” as an adequate explanation unto itself, rather than a description of surface mechanisms. Media distortion appears as a set of technical biases—filters, incentives, professional habits—rather than as an expression of deeper social relations.
Ownership matters, but ownership is not interrogated beyond the level of corporations behaving badly. The economy is shown mainly in the background, like weather conditions affecting a sporting event.
The result is a politics that is radical in rhetoric and curiously moderate in ontology. Chomsky’s analysis encourages scepticism toward state violence while preserving a generally optimistic picture of society, in which otherwise neutral institutions are occasionally captured by malign interests.
Although Chomsky does not deny structural inequality, he treats it as one item in a list of abuses rather than a constitutive feature of the entire system. From his perspective, the media misleads because elites are manipulative, not because ideological production is an ordinary requirement of social reproduction in a stratified economy.
This distinction sounds pedantic until we notice its consequences. If propaganda results from the bad behaviour of identifiable actors—state officials, corporate executives, pliant editors—then reform remains conceivable within existing arrangements.
All we need, presumably, are better journalists, stricter regulations, and a more vigilant citizenry. The public sphere can still function the way it should if we repair the damage done to it by malign individuals.
The implication is comforting: democracy is fundamentally healthy but periodically hijacked.
Yet the persistence of the very phenomena Chomsky documented suggests something more stubborn. Media institutions do not merely fail to challenge power; they reliably generate interpretations compatible with that power, even when individuals working within their framework believe themselves independent.
A society organised around concentrated economic power cannot function without a constant production of legitimacy. Markets distribute goods, but they also distribute authority. Those who control investment decisions effectively determine the range of feasible policies, and the ideological apparatus of a society adjusts accordingly. The press does not simply err; it stabilises expectations. Without that stabilisation, economic coordination itself would falter.
Seen in this light, propaganda is less a scandal than a routine administrative function.
Ideology does not merely conceal domination; it enables everyday cooperation under conditions of inequality. People must believe that outcomes reflect fairness, competence, or necessity. Otherwise, the system could not secure compliance without overt repression.
Put another way, the media, universities, think tanks, and entertainment industries together perform the subtle work of making structural constraint appear as personal choice.
This is precisely where Chomsky’s political interventions are most puzzling. His critique excels when exposing the hypocrisy of US foreign policy—the selective invocation of human rights, the amnesia surrounding allied atrocities, the moral accounting that treats American violence as unfortunate error and enemy violence as inherent barbarism. Yet his insistence on symmetrical scepticism sometimes collapses into a refusal to differentiate forms of power.
Because Western governments lie, their adversaries become presumptively misrepresented. The scepticism becomes distributive rather than analytical.
The controversies over the Balkan wars and the Syrian conflict illustrate the pattern. Chomsky approached claims about Serbian nationalism or the Assad regime primarily as objects of Western propaganda rather than as political formations with their own dynamics. His analytical centre remained the duplicity of US discourse.
To be sure, that focus makes sense for his primary audience. Americans possess greater responsibility for their own government’s actions than for those of distant states. But the effect of this US-centrism is to render non-Western authoritarianism secondary, almost derivative: a mirror image produced by Western misrepresentation rather than a structure requiring explanation in its own right.
The main problem here is not moral relativism so much as methodological provincialism. By treating propaganda primarily as a tool wielded by identifiable powers, Chomsky’s analyses risk ignoring how different regimes participate in the same global order.
The contemporary world economy integrates democracies and dictatorships alike into a single circuit of accumulation. States vary in form, but each must manage populations, attract investment, and maintain internal stability. Their informational strategies reflect these pressures. A media system in Damascus or Belgrade does not need Washington’s influence to produce self-justifying narratives; it responds to analogous structural demands.
Bearing this in mind, we begin to see how critique, originally intended to demystify power, can itself become a form of reassurance.
If propaganda is principally the work of American elites, then opposing those elites appears sufficient for radical politics. The deeper question—why modern societies require elaborate ideological management at all—recedes into the background.
Chomsky’s approach reduces critique to investigative journalism by other means, a catalogue of hypocrisies. His audience learns to spot double standards but not to interrogate the social order that renders them predictable.
This helps explain the peculiar loyalty Chomsky commands among people whose broader political commitments stay within the confines of reformist liberalism. His work validates distrust without necessitating rupture.
For someone steeped in Chomsky’s teachings, institutions are not fundamentally incompatible with equality. They have merely been misused by the wrong people.
This explains why Chomsky’s admirers rushed to defend his character in light of the Epstein revelations. He embodies the possibility that truth-telling alone can confront domination. His authority functions symbolically. Were he to be disgraced and discarded, faith in the institutions his analyses helped to reinforce would falter.
The present controversy surrounding Chomsky’s reputation risks distracting from a more significant reckoning. The left’s reliance on individual critics—however admirable their record—can substitute personalities for analysis. We defend or condemn figures instead of examining the theoretical framework they represent.
The left must not be satisfied with a critique that merely exposes hypocrisy; it needs a critique that interrogates the conditions that produce it.
It doesn’t matter whether legal institutions determine that Chomsky’s associations were criminal. Even in the absence of such findings, it’s abundantly clear that he prioritised the perks that came with being an associate of Jeffrey Epstein over the suffering of the financier’s victims. Nothing can wash that stain away.
The structural problems that made it possible for Epstein’s network to function for so many years will not be solved even if all the people who benefited from it are canceled and the ones who committed crimes are prosecuted for them.
A politics adequate to the present cannot rest on the hope that truth, once spoken, dissolves domination. Power does not persist because elites successfully hide their actions. Often those actions occur in plain view, justified by necessity, normalised by habit, and reproduced by everyday participation.
The real lesson of media distortion is not that the public has been fooled, but that society requires stories that reinforce its organisation. Changing the stories without changing the organisation leaves the dynamic intact.
Exposure matters, of course. Without the slow accumulation of investigative work, public awareness would remain narrower still. Chomsky’s meticulous documentation of media bias expanded the horizon of critique for countless readers. Yet the assumption that unveiling hypocrisy suffices for emancipation resembles the faith of earlier reformers who believed that corruption was the principal obstacle to justice.
A more unsettling form of critique would focus on the fact that modern societies generate dissent as reliably as they generate conformity.
Critical intellectuals perform a function as well: they delineate the boundaries of acceptable opposition. One may condemn specific wars, denounce corporate media, and catalogue elite deceit while leaving intact the underlying distribution of economic power that necessitates these phenomena or the traffic in women that persists regardless of who prevails at the ballot box or in the corporate boardroom.
Even if Noam Chomsky is transmuted from an icon into a symbol of shame, his true legacy will endure as long as those patterns do. Chomsky provided a vocabulary for recognising manipulation and a moral seriousness rare among public intellectuals. Yet the very accessibility of his critique may have encouraged a political imagination content to expose individuals rather than discern the structures that made their depravity possible.
Our task now is neither to defend nor repudiate Noam Chomsky, but to move beyond the comforts of revelation. A society capable of reproducing inequality on a planetary scale will not be undone by fact-checking alone.
Photograph courtesy of Andrew Rusk. Published under a Creative Commons license.
