Chomsky, Epstein, and the Intellectual’s Blind Spot

There are scandals that expose corruption, and there are scandals that expose temperament. The Chomsky–Epstein affair belongs in the second category. The fact that Jeffrey Epstein cultivated famous acquaintances is not surprising. That was his method. His talent lay in quietly and persistently attaching himself to prestige until the association began to look natural. What unsettled people was not the contact. It was the indifference.

When he was asked to explain these meetings by the Wall Street Journal in April 2023, Chomsky replied with a characteristically blunt email: “First response is that it’s none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally.” He seemed to believe that meeting controversial individuals is not unusual. Pressed to explain why he had attended a dinner with Epstein and Woody Allen, Chomsky replied: “I’m unaware of the principle that requires that I inform you about an evening spent with a great artist.” Intellectual life, he implied, involves encounters with all sorts of people, and since Epstein had served his time and paid his debt to society, so what?

Most people heard arrogance, and in a way, they were right. But it was a particular kind of arrogance—the confidence of a mind trained to believe that the real danger lies not in proximity to the powerful, but in accepting the narratives built around them. Chomsky has spent a lifetime distrusting the obvious story, and that instinct has made him formidable. But it has also sometimes led him into situations where the peculiar refusal to accept appearances becomes its own kind of blindness.

A Taste for Revisionism

Chomsky’s defenders routinely praise his consistency. They say that he applies the same sceptical lens at all times and to all things. But consistency, pushed far enough, can become a habit rather than a principle.

In the late 1970s, refugees fled the Khmer Rouge regime bearing horrifying stories about what was going on in Cambodia. Some of these tales sounded unreal: emptied cities, forced labour, mass executions, and hunger on an almost incomprehensible scale. Much of the early information emerged in fragmented testimony filtered through journalists with limited access.

While the world recoiled, Chomsky hesitated. Not because he admired the regime, but because he distrusted the channel. Western media, Cold War incentives, the possibility of exaggeration—these were his stated concerns. And they were not irrational concerns. But they collided with a reality that was moving faster than his scepticism could adjust.

As evidence accumulated, the picture of Cambodia became clearer. Cities really had been emptied. Money had been abolished. Entire populations had been driven into agricultural camps. People suspected of education—sometimes merely those wearing glasses—really had been marked for liquidation. Families were split apart. Millions of people were forced to labour under conditions that blurred the line between policy and annihilation. By the time the regime collapsed, roughly two million people were dead.

At which point, the facts were no longer in dispute. But something about Chomsky’s original posture lingered—as if his argument about media distortion had acquired a life of its own, independent of the bodies it was meant to interpret. A person can begin by questioning narratives and end up resisting reality when it refuses to cooperate.

The same reflex appeared in the case of the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, whom Chomsky defended in print. Chomsky insisted he was defending a principle—freedom of speech—not a man. On its face, that distinction is clear enough, but distinctions have a way of collapsing when placed in the wrong context. His essay ended up as a preface to Faurisson’s work. Worse, it described Faurisson, with a kind of casual neutrality, as “a relatively apolitical liberal.”

It was the sort of phrase that makes a thoughtful reader stop, reread, and wonder if something essential has slipped—not intelligence, but proportion perhaps. Again, the instinct is recognisable: strip away hysteria, refuse moral panic, insist on principle. But there is a point at which this posture begins to float free of reality. When everything is filtered through scepticism, even the obvious starts to look negotiable.

Even a minor, almost throwaway remark Chomsky made about the Khazar theory of Ashkenazi origins carries this imprint. This idea, popularised by novelist Arthur Koestler, holds that Ashkenazi Jews descend from a Turkic kingdom on the Eurasian steppe not from the ancient Levant. This hypothesis has been examined repeatedly and found wanting, and it survives today as a historical contrarian’s delight. 

But Chomsky was happy to entertain it during a 2023 podcast on the basis that debates about DNA are irrelevant to cultural traditions that constitute ethnic identity. Faced with a settled account, he leans towards revisionism and away from consensus, even if that makes him sound cranky. Not because the revisionism is true, but because it is revisionist.

That perverse reflex runs through much of Chomsky’s work. It gives his thinking its provocative edge. But it also sometimes detaches it from reality.

The Activist Inside the Machine

Chomsky has never believed in moral withdrawal. He doesn’t stand outside systems; he works inside them. This is not a contradiction for him, it’s his premise. Throughout his writing, he returns to the same point: purity is impossible. Citizens pay taxes that fund policies they oppose. Universities accept funding from institutions they criticise. Consumers participate in systems they would never design. The world is built from compromises. The question is not whether you are implicated, but what you do with that implication.

Chomsky’s own career reflects this. He spent decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an institution deeply entangled with the American defence establishment, while simultaneously becoming one of its most relentless critics. To outsiders, this can look like hypocrisy. To Chomsky, it’s simply reality stripped of illusion.

Seen from this angle, the Epstein meetings do not immediately register as problematic. Society is full of compromised figures. Refusing all contact would mean refusing social life itself. But that reasoning rests on an assumption that doesn’t quite hold up. It assumes that interaction is neutral, and that conversation is just words. In Epstein’s world, it wasn’t.

Structural Genius, Social Blindness

Chomsky was preoccupied with structural thinking. In linguistics, he identified deep generative rules beneath language. In politics, he exposed systems—media, power, institutions—that shape human behaviour regardless of individual intentions. His work has always moved beneath the surface, searching for patterns that outlast personalities.

But not all power operates structurally. Some of it operates through people. And people, unlike systems, do not always behave transparently. Epstein understood this better than most. He didn’t collect intellectuals out of curiosity. He collected them because they conferred legitimacy. A dinner here, a photograph there, a conversation remembered or implied. Enough fragments, arranged carefully, and you begin to resemble a man of substance. To the intellectual, it is conversation. To the operator, it is accumulation.

Intellectual life is built on an unspoken assumption: that those who engage in it are there, broadly speaking, for the exchange of ideas. It’s a fragile assumption, but it is reliable enough to pass unquestioned. Epstein operated outside that assumption. For him, ideas were secondary. What mattered to him was proximity—who he could be seen with, who would take his calls, who might sit across from him at a table. In that world, association becomes a form of currency. And currency, once accumulated, can be spent.

There’s no evidence that Chomsky had any interest in Epstein’s crimes or private life. The more plausible explanation is simpler. He treated Epstein as he has treated many controversial figures: as someone one might talk to, argue with, and engage.

That instinct—the refusal to draw hard social boundaries—helps to explain his position on Cambodia, his support of Faurisson, and his willingness to flirt with historical absurdities. And it helps us to understand the Epstein encounter. 

The problem is that Epstein was not simply a controversial figure. He was a man who understood the mechanics of legitimacy at a level that many intellectuals never have to consider. He didn’t need Chomsky to agree with him. He needed him to appear with him. Chomsky’s framework leaves little room for this kind of asymmetry. If systems are what matter, then individuals are secondary. If structures shape outcomes, then personal proximity seems trivial. But proximity is not always trivial. Sometimes it is the whole point.

The man who spent a lifetime examining hidden structures of power may have underestimated the oldest and simplest one: that reputation can be borrowed, that legitimacy can be staged, and that not everyone at the table is there for the same reason. Chomsky saw a conversation. Epstein saw an asset. And in that gap, the blind spot opened.

It doesn’t take much for this kind of thing to get flattened once it leaves a room and becomes a story. A meeting becomes something else, a name gets attached, and before long, it’s folded into something broader and more suggestive. When antisemitism rises, it often works exactly this way, turning scattered associations into insinuations, and insinuations into familiar claims about Jewish collusion, influence, or hidden alignment.

Chomsky gets pulled into that pattern not because this case actually demonstrates anything of the sort, but because it can be made to look that way once the detail is stripped out. But nothing here supports those old constructions. What happened is more ordinary and more human than that—a particular cast of mind, highly effective in one domain, simply misread another.