The Chomsky-Epstein Connection and the Problem of Critical Purity

There were no major surprises in the documents and photos released from the Epstein files, except those involving Noam Chomsky, at least for me. Something about Chomsky has long bothered me, and here, again, I find myself trying to articulate the persistent bug buzzing at the edge of my thinking.

The word “manufacturing” in his most famous work, Manufacturing Consent, has always struck me as problematic. It suggests the presence of bad actors deliberately engineering consent, when what is really at stake is a systemic problem. Chomsky does not vilify individuals at the personal level, but he does consistently direct criticism at specific roles and positions of power.

Consider an analogy from basketball. If one team has a freakishly tall player who can score without jumping, the optimal strategy for the rest of the team is simply to feed him the ball. Criticizing the tall player, his role, or even the team makes little sense as they are not breaking any rules. The imbalance is structural. If the outcome is undesirable, the rules of the game need to change. This kind of recalibration happens routinely in Formula One.

In capitalism, comparable structural advantages are often invisible to the public, while those who benefit from them normalize their own behavior. Jeffrey Epstein appears to have functioned as a kind of lubricant within such arrangements. Aside from human trafficking, which is, of course, a separate and extreme crime, much of what surrounded him operated within legal and institutional norms. People engaged with him according to incentives that were lawful, routine, and often necessary for survival or success. This includes Chomsky himself.

Despite his emphasis on structural analysis, Chomsky effectively preserves a notion of critical purity, enabled by his position within the ivory tower. He continues to criticize specific roles, media figures who shape narratives in ways that serve power, while implicitly exempting himself from the same logic of systemic entanglement. If the system is truly as pervasive as he claims, then critics are no less embedded in it than anyone else. And by befriending figures like Epstein, he participates not only in normalization but in the legitimation of the very power structure he critiques.

From my perspective, proximity to power is not inherently problematic. If the issue is systemic and legal, then engagement with insiders, even deeply flawed or immoral ones, can be valuable for understanding how the system functions and how it might be changed. The problem is not that a critic should avoid relationships with powerful individuals, but that a critic who publicly condemns particular roles or groups cannot simultaneously normalize his own proximity to those same figures. The hypocrisy lies not in engagement itself, but in projecting moral authority while obscuring, or even denying the explanations for, the conditions that make such authority possible.

Normalization is not binary; it is a matter of degree. This is where Chomsky’s position becomes unstable. Once critique targets roles rather than the system as a whole, complicity turns into a sliding scale with no principled cutoff. Publishing in mainstream venues, participating in elite institutions, maintaining personal relationships with powerful figures; all of these exist on the same continuum. Drawing a moral line that condemns some forms of proximity while absolving others risks arbitrariness or self-serving distinction. That is precisely the logic elites use to justify their own positions, by contrasting themselves with those who appear more corrupt. In this way, normalization itself becomes the mechanism through which consent is manufactured.