Chomsky After Epstein, by Alex Gendler – 25 August 2026

Noam Chomsky’s defense of Jeffrey Epstein echoes his campist foreign policy positions – both are a betrayal of the left

From Strange Matters

Following the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, John F. Kennedy is reported to have said, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” It is no surprise, then, that the revelation of Noam Chomsky’s long-standing friendship with the late billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein would trigger an ideological paternity dispute.

Overnight, the public intellectual long considered something of a father figure to the broader political left was transformed into an embarrassing uncle, as representatives of various factions lined up to deny any relation while insisting that his disgrace bore the unmistakable mark of their ideological rivals.

The denunciations and disavowals that followed seemed to describe entirely different people – a callous sexist who benefited from an “old boys club” network, an America-hating zealot who made excuses for authoritarian tyrants abroad, or a weak-willed liberal whose critiques failed to confront imperialism. Yet in their rush to absolve themselves and tar their enemies by association, critics have missed both the unique nature of Chomsky’s position within the left and the deeper issues that enabled his downfall.  

To be sure, the condemnations have not been unanimous, as the once-esteemed professor, incapacitated by a stroke and unable to shed any light on the situation himself, has not lacked for defenders. Some, like his wife, have rather unconvincingly argued that he’d been innocently misled and did not know the full extent of Epstein’s wrongdoing. Others have asserted that any error of judgment he committed was a strictly private one, just as fans of Michael Jackson or Varg Vikernes might urge us to separate the art from the artist. And some have even suggested that Chomsky’s association with Epstein had been necessary to gain access to influential figures like Ehud Barak, in an echo of QAnon die-hards and Trump loyalists insisting the president was secretly working to bring down the Lolita Express from the inside. All of these feeble objections are barely worth dignifying. If we were to grant the most generous interpretation of how little Chomsky knew about Epstein’s worst crimes, what he certainly knew at a minimum was that this was a billionaire financier who hired teen models, often from poor and destabilized countries, to “entertain” the global elite on his private island. Even if he had naively and implausibly believed that all of this was being done legally and consensually, we are left with the fact that a man who built a lifetime reputation as a sensitive paragon of moral conscience denouncing the evils of predatory capitalism had in fact cultivated a yearslong personal friendship – not simply a business relationship or professional contact – with someone who could not have been a more blatant and literal embodiment of it. To insist that so glaring a contradiction could be irrelevant to Chomsky’s politics can only come from an understanding of politics so narrow and impoverished as to be useless.

Alternatively, feminist critics have suggested that Chomsky’s problem was a general blind spot towards women’s issues particularly endemic among men of his stature. This has an undeniable ring of truth, echoed in Chomsky’s dismissive characterization of the #metoo phenomenon as “hysteria” in his emails to Epstein (whom he already knew to have been convicted for sex trafficking), as well as his own admission that a man of his generation may not have fully absorbed the impact of the feminist movement. But Chomsky is far from the worst offender in this regard, even within the world of male academics. For instance, his close friend and collaborator Norman Finkelstein, known for being extremely correct on exactly one issue and egregiously wrong on many others, has spent much of his recent career railing against #metoo, pronouns, and cancel culture, yet had no trouble immediately grasping Epstein’s depravity and rejecting his advances in characteristically blunt fashion – despite being far less established in his career and far more in need of a wealthy patron. While ingrained sexism may have been a necessary condition to explain Chomsky’s sympathy for Epstein, it was not a sufficient one.

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