An alternative view. Don't agree with her downplaying of the epstein files or with the attempted normalisation of their relationship - if that's typical behaviour of uni faculty towards donors in the US, then shouldn't someone like NC be criticising and refusing to participate rather than enthusiastically joining in with the rich boys' club? Also, if Chomsky was socially illiterate and unaware of epstein's sexual deviancies (quite a feat in itself), how could he not know that he was politically an arch zionist very probably in the pocket of mossad?

Anyway, if the point is don't throw away Chomsky's work and don't engage in a performative social media show trial, then fine, I agree.

cheers,
I

PS: Michael Tracey the only person looking into the epstein files 'objectively'? (per the footnote) Not what I've heard, mainly from DD. Though I couldn't stick to their debate with him for longer than 5 mins admittedly...

*****

https://morbidsymptom.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-noam-chomsky

In Defense of Noam Chomsky
Against the Tabloid Left & Stalinoid Political Snuff Theatre Frenzy
Tara van Dijk
Feb 11, 2026

Jimmy Dore Show, Due Dissidence, Bad Faith & Alan MacLeod, Bad Empanada, Chris Hedges, Mint Press News, Syriana Analysis, TYT, Propaganda Inc, and Red Scare

With Comrades like these?

A fresh dump of “Epstein files” chum has served up Professor Noam Chomsky, 97 and in hospice after a massive stroke, for another round in the pillory. The Left is feasting. Soon there will be nothing left of the sacrificial elder; the bones will be picked clean.

What are we to make of this political snuff theatre? A historical analogy, the Stalin-era show trials, helps clarify the Left’s appetites: the lust for purges, purity spirals, virtue signalling, public recantations, and the rest that now goes under the rubric of “cancel culture”.

First, I will lay out the basic facts for readers unfamiliar with the basis on which Chomsky’s alleged political and moral crimes are being constructed. I will also share a few remarks from others who knew him about his character and his approach to dealing with detractors and “enemies”, to use Chris “Vyshinky” Hedges’ terminology in his summary judgement of Chomsky’s “betrayal”. Given how loaded the name “Epstein” is now, compared to 2015–2019 (the period in question), I will refer to him as “Mr. E”.

Pertinent Background

Noam Chomsky was a linguistics professor at MIT (from 1955) whose work helped found modern generative linguistics, with wider influence across cognitive science and philosophy of language. He became a prominent public dissident during the Vietnam War era, beginning with “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” and went on to publish extensively on US power, propaganda, and international relations.

He knew much about the world’s evils, yet didn’t know what Saturday Night Live was when he was invited on. He was a workaholic under constant, relentless demand. Read the memoir of his longtime secretary, Bev Stohl, for a sense of what his everyday life was like. He also assigned the royalties of his books to others at signings. - Greg Grandin

It is an incontrovertible fact that Professor Chomsky met and corresponded with everyone. He didn’t discriminate; that was his modus operandi. That disposes of the bulk of the accusations leveled against Professor Chomsky. - Norman Finkelstein

How Jeffrey Met Noam

Mr. E was a significant donor to MIT, and patronage at elite institutions includes access. Donors want to meet and socialise with prominent professors and scientists. Universities facilitate this through events designed for precisely that purpose. Faculty are often expected to participate when they can. The amount of “donor-facing” time can be informal, or it can be part of the institutional expectations attached to one’s role. It was at one of these events that the ill-fated relationship began.

Emails, photographs, and Valeria Chomsky’s recent statement indicate that a friendly relationship developed. Given Chomsky’s long-standing work on Israel–Palestine, Mr. E arranged a meeting with Ehud Barak. The Chomskys attended a few dinners hosted by Mr. E, including one with Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, and another at which Steve Bannon was also present.

There were also emails involving a distressing set of issues around Chomsky’s retirement and the family trust that followed his first wife’s death, which strained relations with his three adult children. Mr. E helped the Chomskys sort this out. In that context, even the much-cited letter of recommendation begins to look less like ideological treason than ordinary reciprocity: returning a favour.

Much performative outrage has been made of Chomsky writing that he was “fantasising” about a Caribbean getaway. If they were, as stated, under financial and famial stress at the time, that line reads less like a smoking gun than clickbait alchemy.

Finally, Chomsky replied to an email in which Mr. E asked for advice on handling a media firestorm in 2019. The reply, insofar as it can be characterised on the record, was generic counsel rather than anything resembling professional crisis management. Anyone not combing through the “files” for gotcha lines can see he wasn’t offering to be an Olivia Pope for the embattled Mr. E. But of course the tabloid Left isn’t interested in facts or nuance. Exhibit A: the correspondence made the apparently credulous, and clearly cowardly, Vijay Prashad “shudder” (insert the most massive eye roll here).

Show Trials as Political Communion Ritual

Stalin’s show trials were public proceedings in which guilt had already been decided. They were political theatre. The allegations supplied the rising action, the confession the climax, and the self-recriminations and recantations the falling action. The verdict, delivered at the end, had been determined in advance.

The courtroom was converted into a perverter of truth. Everyone knew it was a performance, yet everyone performed anyway, including the wretched soul on trial. That shared compliance is the point. Everyone is in on it.

Show trials served a deterrent function, of course. But they were also pedagogical. The public humiliation of the accused teaches the audience what loyalty to the Party means in practice. Most importantly, they functioned as political communion, an interpellation ritual. When the Party, embodied in Stalin, hails the prosecutor, judge, accused, and audience, each answers in the proper register and plays their part.

Today’s cancellation campaigns share more with Stalin era show trials than guardians of the Left can admit. The gulag, the bullet, and the noose are replaced by reputational annihilation. In Chomsky’s case, your entire contribution to politics and culture is “re-evaluated”, demoted within the canon, or purged in total if the Stalinoid Marxist–Leninist revivalist sects have their way.

The Chomsky show trial

Chomsky is not implicated in any of the ever-expanding, ever-more-salacious crimes now being attributed to the conveniently dead Epstein.1 The dead can’t sue for libel or defamation, nor can they have their day in court. Yet Chomsky is being prosecuted in absentia for a series of unfalsifiable crimes against the Left. The allegations range from hypocrisy to “controlled opposition” to being a witting intelligence asset to being a “pedo defender”. The maximum sentence is reputational liquidation: purge the “compromised” corpus, exile the “pathetic fans,” and make the name itself, Chomsky as signifier, radioactive.

This carnival of condemnation, revision, and bargaining is not taking place in a court. It is distributed via social media and tabloid-left media churn consisting of: petty prosecutors and judges; former colleagues, collaborators, and friends performing distancing (“no excuse, but…”) and bargaining (“he was 90”); base virtue signalling; threads of decontextualised tidbits arranged into the most damning (and often absurd) post hoc narratives; ad hominem and revisionist outbursts from Stalinists and other campists; guilt by association; and sentencing delivered in advance. The one thing their behavior agrees on is that Chomsky is guilty of some fluid and plastic offense.

Remember him for nothing else than that photo with Epstein, now elevated into the wringleader of a “global elite Satanic paedo cult” that obviously exists and rules us all. Chomsky’s role, naturally, was to play the “reasonable” or “designated” Left to fool you. Sounds legit, right? Don’t think. React and enjoy the bonding ritual.

For the Stalinoids, the goal is the Trotsky treatment. Elevate Chomsky into a designated traitor whose ritual denunciation binds the cadre. This performative show trial, staged as “revelation,” “unmasking,” or “purifying the Left,” isn’t about truth. It’s about control. It is an interpellation ritual into a political libidinal economy, a form of political enjoyment. Fail to comply, as dictated by the self-appointed Central Committee of the feed, and you’ll find yourself in the virtual dock.

The inquisitors weaponise the ongoing “Epstein files” to settle old scores, farm engagement, or give sermons from their YouTube channels. Where argument would require evidence, historical record, logic, and moral reasoning, the show trial offers something easier and more libidinally gratifying: contamination, denunciation, and obliteration.

Self-Destructive Delights of the Late-Stage Cannibal Left: I’d Prefer Not To

The Left is a zombie, but leftists remain in denial. The jolts of enjoyment they get from purges, purity spirals, and endless relitigations of the past, whether last week or over a hundred years ago, are treated as proof of vitality. They are not. Their words say “join us”; their actions say “members only.” Many exceptions apply, and yes, we burn witches here.

Trots or tankie? WGAF outside those sects. Culture war or class war? Both, obviously. They are two sides of the same coin. Who is the best “working-class” whisperer, ventriloquist, teacher? Wrong question. The question is what it is about the Left today that puts so many people off, rightly. But I suppose it is too much to ask those who bang on about “the dialectic” to apply it to themselves, and to the historical moment they are in.

Please let this tragic-farcical grotesquerie—this political snuff theatre frenzy of Professor Chomsky—be the end of the Left’s long death march, so that something new can be built from the ashes.

In a follow-up out this week, The Show Trial of Noam Chomsky Cast & Playbook covers the cast of characters, the their roles (denouncer, distancer, bargainer, infantiliser, cynic, umpire) the standard fallacies and sophistries and the Epstein quiliting point. Not about Chomsky’s legacy, but the mechanics (and delights) of the pile-on that wants to rewrite it.

1

It is beyond the scope to go into the “Epstein Files”. Michael Tracey is one of the only people looking at this story, and the files, objectively. Seems that there maybe lots and lots of smoke but only an ember or two. Truth will out.