What Chomsky Knew When

Thoughts of a Radical Reporter

Noam Chomsky was obviously a Leftist institution worldwide, so substantial that no less than Hugo Chavez displayed one of the MIT linguist’s pamphlets in a powerful United Nations speech. But there is the more granular reality of Noam as a distinctively East Coast radical and éminence grise of Southern New England anarchism.

I have always sought to provide a unique angle on radical organizing and movement leaders in New England. I have engaged with anarchist, third party, and Democratic campaigns while building a list of sources that included Noam Chomsky. Talking as someone who interviewed Noam four times or so, here’s my take:

If we want to throw the baby out with the bath water and say this invalidates his linguistics, his scholarship in larger topics, and the books that were published in collaboration with Ed Herman, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, or other writers, then we’re basically defenestrating the entire Left intellectual project since McCarthyism. The dude was part of the discussion, good, bad, or indifferent, for 60 years, and he made a contribution that was useful. He and Howard Zinn co-edited the Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers, which was one of the most important press and free speech developments in the last century. If you read the Commentary Volume that he co-edited with Zinn, you get a thorough understanding of something that is not evident by just reading the Papers themselves. They brought together a number of brilliant analysts and experts who dismantled the biases and self-serving lies in the Papers, which was an in-house study trying to impose a liberal face-saving spin on a genocide.

That’s something you find across the entirety of major radical campaigns spanning from the 1960s until roughly the 2010s. Johnny Eric Williams recently wrote about how, when Noam spoke at Trinity College in New Haven, he told Johnny to send the honorarium to a Palestinian children’s health organization. Noam and Zinn were actively involved with the Boston area anti-Vietnam movement from the literal beginning and Noam was a substantial figure in the Boston movement.

Which is to say that, if you lived in New England like me, you’d also have a perspective on Noam’s activism and engagement with organizations in New England.

In that regard I stopped agreeing with him on all sorts of issues years ago. For instance, even though he was so adamant about his anarchism, he wasn’t actually a serious member of the Boston Industrial Workers of the World, even though he professed their model as the ideal. My experience with the Wobblies in Providence was a horrible nightmare of sectarianism, homophobia, and a truly horrific sex abuse scandal. So it is pretty easy for me to say that, since I have interacted with it in the past decade or so, I have found the larger New England anarchist “scene” (which it truly is, just like punk or hip-hop) to be a political dead-end, full of people who shelter antisocial people, just as was the case with the Trotskyist International Socialist Organization and Socialist Workers Party in the UK. Regardless of political affiliation or inclination, these antisocial personalities exist and insinuate themselves into spaces to gain power. I think at the very least Noam should have been much more involved with the organization that he valorized in all his speeches as the ideal. That’s a complaint I have had for years.

Now specifically regarding the Epstein situation, I actually can say I know what Noam knew and when he knew it.

Ken Silverstein published columns on Epstein’s sweetheart deal with Alex Acosta on Washington Babylon ten years ago, back when he was a distinct liability for the Clinton campaign because Bill was listed frequently on the flight logs of the Lolita Express. (Oh how cynical the Democratic Party truly is!)

So I don’t give Noam a shred of pardon in terms when he says that Epstein “served his sentence and is therefore entitled to be seen as redeemed.” Ken’s column was completely clear and detailed in terms of that “sentence” being a complete joke, a month of community service for a literal kiddie rapist. So that’s really where I am with it. But frankly, and I think that this is a deeper issue, we should contextualize Noam in his milieu. He was part of the academic Left in Southern New England. Howard Zinn’s biographer pointed out that Zinn had multiple partners during his marriage, which actually can be considered two ways, open marriages have been a thing for a long time. Did Noam seriously bring his notion of relationship anarchism to that level? What was he thinking by making those arguments?

This argument Noam made about having “served his sentence” was disclosed a long time back, way before he was incapacitated by his stroke. He emailed it as a response to the Wall Street Journal. At that point, my interior monologue said “Oh, this is not going end well at all!” You can pretty easily tell that a source is headed for a public scandal when they are emailing such a response to the Wall Street Journal of all places.

Overall, Noam is a benchmark in a history of New England radicalism that has to be acknowledged in terms that are far more complex than anyone is really grasping yet. Despite being an anarchist, he had a Cult of Personality that fused magnificently with Nineties counterculture. He was mentioned in rock song lyrics and his recorded speeches were sampled in rap songs. He inspired entire groups to become serious media critics and devote their journalistic output to debunking news (Alex Cockburn’s writing being the wittier example). Getting an interview with Noam was like scoring a hot commodity, you could shop your column to a legit outlet for freelancing cash. The fact Noam gave those interviews so generously and let the reporter make cash off it was a solid favor. So it’s a complicated thing for a person who did things for us as a comrade.

But it must be further said that there is something deeply disturbing about how sectarians want to use this as the political straw that broke the camel’s back of Noam’s total contribution.

Sorry, that’s not how sex criminal pathology and psychology work, instead it is a matter of attraction, sexual orientation, visceral excitation, and a variety of deeper determinants in humans regardless of their politics. Stalin’s secret police chief Beria ran a rape dungeon in his dacha, relying on his lieutenants in the security apparatus to pick up and drop off girls in Moscow that caught his fancy. Wartime French Resistance veteran and quasi-Maoist Louis Althusser, still a cornerstone of undergraduate liberal arts departments, murdered his wife during a purported psychotic episode. American Communist historian and Party theoretician Herbert Aptheker incestuously abused his daughter and the Communist Party continues to print his historic study on Black slave revolts. During the past 25 years, the Trotskyist International Socialist Organization and the Socialist Workers Party (UK) both were shut down permanently by sex crime coverup scandals. In March 2017, the Providence Industrial Workers of the World were subject of a public zap by the RAGE Collective, a group of Wobblies who had survived sexual violence perpetrated and covered up by cis men in the IWW. Most disturbingly, the alleged perpetrator was a serial sexual predator with an internet trail of alleged offenses in both Boston and Southern California. The perpetrator’s co-conspirators, grotesquely, had helped the perp migrate to Providence. They invoked the notion of a so-called “Accountability Process” that the perp had already participated in, perversely warping this notion of mandatory disclosure into a right-to-privacy for someone who was by no means entitled to such obscurantism. An “Accountability Process” used so as to prevent an expected disclosure of past harms and antisocial behaviors is the exact same sleight-of-hand that Catholic priests used with the Seal of the Confessional and the various nuances of the Hierarchy so to cover up similar abuses. Because I was extremely familiar with the situation, I emailed Noam and asked if he knew the perp. He responded that he had no memory of the person.

In 2025, I located a picture of Noam appearing at a Boston area Palestine solidarity speech. Noam is standing at the podium and the alleged perpetrator is sitting at a table beside the rostrum.

In this one localized incident, was Noam lying to me or did he simply not know this person?

It is utterly ironic that Norman Finkelstein comes out as the Better Angel in all of this. It is also most disappointing.

The reason Noam sought so much financial advice from Epstein was because of a financial dispute in his family stemming from the death of his first wife Carole and his second marriage, which seems to have generated friction with his children. That is not a justification, any storefront accountant could have given similar guidance.
Norm, by contrast neither a family man nor one who had such phenomenal access to power as Chomsky, told an email correspondent he hoped that the correspondent would have “throttled” Epstein if he had molested the correspondent’s daughter in such a manner.

This is so disappointing because it really does show that there was an alternate response to Chomsky’s, one that is underwritten by the “simple Cartesian logic” he always prescribed for activists, including myself.

Again, this demonstrates that Leftist ideology does not inoculate against manifestations of antisocial behavior linked to mental health and its inclinations. Epstein’s torture chambers were known about, in a bipartisan manner, for thirty years or more, starting as late as 1996 when Maria and Annie Farmer reported Epstein to the FBI. Reading Landon Thomas Jr.’s Epstein puff-piece from October 2002, with an opening line praising the financier’s “keen eye for the ladies,” is disgusting. In 2007, the New York media mocked a trans woman, Ava Cordero, who came forward claiming Epstein had assaulted her as a teenager. The centrality of these events in the East Coast, Clinton-Land, is blatant.

Finkelstein once commented on his friendship with Noam about how he “Didn’t want to become a groupie.” I always have suspected that Noam’s second wife Valeria was a source of friction for his friends and relatives, something demonstrated in spades by these newest emails. This happened in my own family, my widowed grandmother married a widower construction company owner, infuriating his heirs.

These very venal and private parts of our lives often are at the heart of these failures.