Noam Chomsky’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein force the Left to confront the dangers of hero-worship, moral blind spots and selective accountability, writes Dr Raffaele Ciriello.
THE EPSTEIN FILES would be exhausting enough without our intellectual hero among them.
With each new tranche released by the Department of Justice, we are reminded that we live in a world where a handful of rich and powerful men feel so entitled to the exploitation of vulnerability that they treat the abuse of underage girls as a birthright without consequences. And they seem to cluster together, across the political spectrum.
In a particularly tough blow to the Left, that cluster now includes Noam Chomsky — towering figure in linguistics, iconic libertarian socialist, a lifelong critic of U.S. foreign policy and, apparently, a sympathetic correspondent of a convicted child sex trafficker.
That stings. Chomsky was not merely mentioned in passing. Reporting describes sustained contact long after Epstein’s conviction — dinners, phallic jokes and even travel fantasies (‘I’m really fantasising about the Caribbean island’).
Most jarring is a line attributed to Chomsky advising Epstein to ignore the “horrible” press and dismiss scrutiny as ‘hysteria about the abuse of women’, in a climate where ‘even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder’.
If, like me, you have relied on Chomsky to puncture elite self-righteousness, this feels like discovering Santa is not real.
How can the Left respond without retreating into denial or defaulting to cancellation?
A modest starting point is to revise an old maxim:
To err is human.
Chomsky is human.
Therefore, Chomsky errs.
This is not an excuse but an antidote to hero-worship. The most revealing remark may not be the “hysteria” line but Chomsky’s earlier defence of the relationship. Epstein had served his sentence and “according to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate”, he said. For decades, Chomsky has challenged elite impunity. Here, he appears to defer to the very legal formalism that has often shielded elites from accountability.
The cancellation reflex is tempting. If he, of all people, failed to see this, then what else has he missed?
A dialectical posture is more helpful: two opposing propositions can be true at once.
Chomsky can be a foundational critic of U.S. power whose work enabled generations to see what respectable media preferred to smooth over. And he can be morally wrong – even gravely wrong – in how he speaks about the abuse of women, in how he relates to a man who exploited them and in how he failed to recognise his proximity to the entitled elite he has long condemned.
There is a difference between complicity in abuse and blindness to it. Nothing publicly available establishes Chomsky as a participant in Epstein’s crimes. What it does establish is serious enough: a willingness to treat a convicted sex offender as a legitimate interlocutor, to accept his assistance, to socialise with him and to offer advice that reads less like solidarity with survivors than like reputation management for their abuser.
Nor is Chomsky’s political record free of controversy. His scepticism toward early reporting on Khmer Rouge atrocities, his defence of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson’s free speech and his framing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as largely provoked by NATO have all been fiercely contested. Genius in one domain can coexist with tunnel vision in another.
Chomsky himself has not clarified his position, but his wife, Valeria, has called their ties to Epstein a “grave mistake” born of carelessness and deception. That acknowledgement humanises the error, but it also reveals that intellectual brilliance does not inoculate against moral blindness.
If this is uncomfortable, it should be. Political maturity lies in holding steady amid mixed truths.
What follows from such steadiness?
First, refuse sanctification. “No gods, no masters” applies to intellectual icons. The aim is not to abandon thinkers but to stop treating them as moral authorities beyond scrutiny. A politics attentive to suffering cannot rest on personality cults.
Second, recentre accountability. When the first question becomes “what does this mean for Chomsky’s legacy?”, we have already drifted from the moral core. The focus should be on survivors, not sages.
Finally, resist tribalism. The Epstein network spans factions and will be weaponised endlessly. “Your side did it, too” is deflection, not accountability. If the Left claims ethical seriousness, it must hold its own icons to the standards it demands of others.
Chomsky’s legacy is stained, not cancelled. The lesson is that brilliance does not confer moral immunity. The task ahead is not to curate flawless heroes, but to build cultures in which authority, including intellectual authority, remains answerable to the vulnerable.
Dr Raffaele F Ciriello holds a BSc in Information Systems from the University of Stuttgart and an MSc and PhD from the University of Zurich (2017). He is a Senior Lecturer in Business Information Systems at the University of Sydney, specialising in compassionate digital innovation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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