The left’s cruel betrayal of Noam Chomsky

Following the release of the Epstein Files, anyone who had any kind of interaction with the disgraced financier, or whose name fleetingly appears somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of emails, has been declared guilty by dint of association alone. Among those caught up in the witch-hunt is the 97-year-old left-wing academic, Noam Chomsky, who corresponded with Epstein after his release from prison.

Journalist Michael Tracey joined Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss the increasingly dangerous fallout of the Epstein panic and its dire implications for justice and due process. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. You can watch the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: It has emerged that Noam Chomsky had a connection to Jeffrey Epstein. What does the reaction to this reveal about the climate surrounding the Epstein files?

Michael Tracey: Noam Chomsky is one of the most bizarre casualties of all this. Whatever you think of the man, his political analyses or his theories of linguistics, I think it’s inarguable that he’s one of the most titanic intellectual figures of our time. The deranged, utterly despicable onslaught of defamatory nonsense being spewed about him is all the more ugly because he’s 97 years old and has been incapacitated by a stroke since 2023. He can’t respond or communicate. My understanding, from having spoken to people who are aware of his condition, is that he has a limited ability to comprehend external stimuli and circumstances. So theoretically, he may well learn of the garbage that’s being hurled at him in an attempt to destroy his reputation, but will be unable to respond to any of it, which is just a heinous position for anybody to be in.

For Chomsky to be maligned not only by random people on social media, but also by people who were close personal friends and collaborators, some of whom co-authored books with him, is simply cowardice. Vijay Prashad, who collaborated on two books with Chomsky, said something very instructive in the melodramatic statement he made when the news broke, which is that ‘no context’ could possibly explain any of this. Socialist journalist Chris Hedges responded in a similar manner. These people don’t think it necessary to learn any more about the underlying facts or evidence. No additional information or context will change their view on this situation or the inculpation of Chomsky.

One of the revelations of the Epstein Files was a letter of recommendation written by Chomsky on behalf of Epstein. We still don’t quite understand what the context was, but my sense is that it would have been in 2019, when Epstein was trying to preempt certain legal actions that would be taken against him. The letter served as a character reference. In this letter, Chomsky talks about the fruitful and productive social encounters that he had with Epstein, and Epstein’s ability to facilitate interchanges that had beneficial outcomes for Chomsky’s research. One example he provides is that Epstein facilitated a meeting between Chomsky and a Norwegian diplomat, because they had played a central role in brokering the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s between Israel and the Palestinian territories. This was an area that Chomsky had researched to an otherworldly extent for many decades. It is natural, then, that he would seize the opportunity to speak to somebody with firsthand knowledge and sing Epstein’s praises for making it possible. Nothing in this implicates Chomsky’s involvement in or knowledge of Epstein’s other immoral activities.

But of course, Epstein is now this personage in the collective imagination for the embodiment of all evil. He’s Hitler and Satan combined with a paedophilic component. The mere mention of him makes everyone go crazy. I’m not endorsing or condoning everything Epstein did in his life, but you must be a fairly intelligent and interesting person to be able to connect disparate people such as Steve Bannon and Noam Chomsky. Epstein might have been the only person on the planet who could have united those two. Not everything is black and white in this world, but people have adopted a 100 per cent unshakable, black-and-white perception of Epstein and anyone he ever came in contact with.

It should be said that everything Chomsky wrote in that email to Epstein was substantively correct, with the one exception, which was that he suggested Epstein might be well served by just keeping quiet and letting the storm pass. Clearly, this is not what happened, because within six months of that email, Epstein was arrested, jailed and then ended up dead. Nonetheless, Chomsky was right when he pointed out the hysteria, the media’s refusal to look at the facts, the way that most people in the general public were going to perceive Epstein just based on the tenor of the coverage. He was also correct in his observation that accusations of sexual abuse against females have taken on this outsized character as the most grievous possible atrocity, therefore throwing all rationality around this topic out the window. These are true observations and he should be commended for being so prescient.

O’Neill: The Chomsky situation is not an isolated event. Individuals such as Steven Pinker and Sam Harris are both being threatened with cancellation for what appears to be very limited interactions with Epstein. What have you made of that?

Tracey: Sam Harris’s appearance in the files highlights the diverse assortment of people that Epstein had interactions with. I always viewed Epstein as a secular Jew, and so he would be right at home in the burgeoning cohort of New Atheists like Harris. Beyond that, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to extrapolate from it? What does Sam Harris now have to atone for if, when one does a dispassionate assessment of the underlying evidence, one finds that there was really no evidence of paedophilic criminality?

As a result of the hysteria surrounding the files and the Epstein files Transparency Act, we have created a sort of ‘Epstein class’ of people who are now viewed with unquestionable suspicion. Principally, I was in favour of the idea of mass disclosure. I knew there would be downstream negative consequences, but that in a rational society, these could be guarded against. But of course, we don’t live in a rational society.

According to the co-sponsors of the act, Democrat Ro Khanna and Republican Thomas Massie, there are still three million files that have yet to be produced. Khanna is clearly gearing up to run for president, and thinks that he has a hallmark issue here. He even has a stump speech that he’s developing wherein he denounces the so-called Epstein class. When I spoke to Khanna, I asked him if it was going to be a comprehensive purge. Would it include Chomsky, for instance, given the new information that he had been friendly with Epstein? Khanna didn’t have a prepared answer.

My fears are that it is much easier to just impugn the generic ‘Epstein class’ than it is actually to specify what a particular person ought to be impugned for. At some point, we need to ask seriously: what did they do that merits their impugnment? But I won’t hold my breath for that to happen.

Michael Tracey was speaking to Brendan O’Neill. You can watch the full conversation below: