I had learned my analysis of propaganda, communication and imperialism by reading Chomsky. I was then sixteen years old. But I had also learned my analysis of power and control from Adivasi activists and organizers, articulating their theories of change from everyday observations in struggles at the global margins. The Epstein files and the Chomsky linkages show the impermanence of elite critiques from spaces of privilege, distanced from the voices and embodied struggles at the margins. Such critique often falls short, itself complicit in power. The other kind of critique, that emergent from within struggles is transformative, holding the potential to undo the very games that underlie imperial power.
In February 2019, Chomsky wrote to Epstein dismissing what he called the "hysteria" around abuse of women. He characterized press coverage as "horrible" treatment—not of the victims, but of Epstein himself. The women who Julie Brown's reporting had finally centered—giving them faces, voices, stories—became in Chomsky's framing a mob of hysterics. The intellectual who spent decades exposing how power manufactures consent now deployed that very mechanism to silence the powerless.
This was not an isolated lapse in judgment or a single compromised transaction. The relationship was warm, sustained, and continued after Epstein's 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. This timing matters profoundly. By 2019, when Chomsky penned his dismissal of "hysteria," the nature of Epstein's crimes was public knowledge. The 2008 plea deal that allowed Epstein to serve merely thirteen months in a county jail—with work release privileges six days a week—was already widely understood as a grotesque miscarriage of justice, facilitated by power and privilege. Yet Chomsky and his wife Valeria continued to exchange affectionate correspondence with a man whose Manhattan mansion and Caribbean island were sites of systematic sexual violence against girls and young women.
Valeria called Epstein a "very dear friend," even a "hero." Chomsky himself wrote glowing praise of Epstein's "penetrating insights" into global finance, calling him a "highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange." They discussed vacations, politics, dinners. The correspondence reveals a relationship marked by warmth and mutual regard. Epstein introduced Chomsky to political figures including Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, and Steve Bannon, the far-right strategist. Hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed to Chomsky and his family through financial arrangements facilitated by Epstein.
The details matter because they reveal pattern, not accident. This was not a brief intellectual flirtation or a naïve acceptance of funding from a questionable source. It was sustained engagement across years, maintained even as Epstein's predation became undeniable public record.
This is not simply a story about one man's moral failure. It is a structural case study in how elite power operates on—and through—its own critics. It reveals the mechanisms by which even the sharpest analytical minds can be absorbed into the systems they claim to oppose.
Chomsky's intellectual project rests fundamentally on the insight that intellectuals are not outside systems of power. They are inside them, serving as gatekeepers and legitimators, shaping narratives that protect existing hierarchies while appearing to critique them. In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Edward Herman demonstrated how media creates the illusion of debate while systematically excluding perspectives that fundamentally challenge power. In essay after essay, Chomsky exposed how intellectuals serve as "commissars" of the powerful, policing the boundaries of acceptable discourse.
Yet here he stands, comfortably embedded within Epstein's circuit: the financier-trafficker-intelligence nexus that perfectly embodies the "privatized global aristocracy" Chomsky spent decades analyzing. The architect of the propaganda model now accepts flattery, access, and hospitality from the living archetype of unaccountable elite impunity. The man who wrote about how power corrupts intellectual work through selective patronage became himself a beneficiary of exactly that patronage.
The irony would be darkly comic if the stakes were not so devastating. Epstein's victims—overwhelmingly young women from economically precarious backgrounds, many recruited from communities marked by poverty and instability—represent precisely the populations Chomsky's political analysis claimed to center. These were not abstract subjects of imperial violence. They were girls whose bodies became sites of exploitation, whose voices were systematically discredited, whose pain was dismissed as either fabrication or irrelevant noise by those with power to define reality.
When Chomsky characterized public outrage over their abuse as "hysteria," he performed exactly the communicative violence his own framework should have made him most sensitive to. He deployed his considerable cultural capital—his status as public intellectual, his reputation for moral clarity—to delegitimize the claims of those with no comparable platform. He positioned himself not alongside the exploited, but alongside the exploiter, characterizing criticism of Epstein as unfair persecution.
The seduction is structural, not simply personal.
From the commanding heights—MIT offices, private jets, island estates—the suffering of the exploited becomes abstract. The material reality of sexual violence, the embodied experience of girls coerced into acts they could not meaningfully consent to, the psychological devastation that follows such violation—all of this disappears when viewed from sufficient altitude. What remains visible from that vantage point are interesting conversations about global finance, political connections that seem intellectually stimulating, the flattering attention of someone positioned as a peer rather than a supplicant.
Victims transform into "hysterical accusers." Their testimony becomes suspect, their pain exaggerated, their demands for accountability characterized as mob justice. Public outrage becomes noise to be managed with "thick skin" and strategic silence. This is communicative inequality in its starkest form: those with proximity to power determine whose pain matters and whose does not. They control the framing, the language, the boundaries of legitimate concern. Everyone else is background static, emotional noise that threatens to disrupt important intellectual work.
This is precisely the dynamic Chomsky spent his career exposing in other contexts. When U.S. officials dismiss civilian casualties in American wars as "collateral damage," when corporate spokespeople characterize worker complaints as unreasonable demands, when development agencies reframe indigenous resistance as obstacles to progress—these are all instances of the powerful using communicative resources to delegitimize the claims of the powerless. Chomsky understood this deeply in contexts where he stood outside the machinery of power. But positioned inside Epstein's orbit, receiving its benefits and accepting its social logic, he could not or would not recognize the same pattern.
The culture-centered approach offers critical insight here. Critique conducted from spaces of elite comfort and control, without the body on the line, almost inevitably gets absorbed by the power it claims to oppose. This is not a moral failing unique to particular individuals. It is a structural tendency of how critique functions when detached from struggle.
Embodied solidarity—standing with the trafficked, the colonized, the disposable—requires risk, presence, and refusal of elite hospitality. It means accepting that your analysis might foreclose certain opportunities, certain social connections, certain forms of validation. It means recognizing that you cannot simultaneously occupy spaces of privilege and authentically represent those excluded from such spaces. The tension is not always resolvable through good intentions or careful language. Sometimes solidarity requires refusal.
Chomsky's work has always gestured toward that solidarity in theory. His political writings consistently center the perspectives of those victimized by American imperialism, corporate exploitation, media manipulation. He has articulated powerfully how systems of domination depend on silencing certain voices while amplifying others. He has named the mechanisms through which intellectuals become complicit in violence they do not directly commit.
Yet in practice, when the invitation arrived from the Caribbean, he entertained accepting it. When money flowed through Epstein's financial networks, he accepted it. When his association with a convicted sex offender drew criticism, he dismissed it as hysteria. The gap between theoretical analysis and embodied practice reveals something fundamental about how elite critique functions.
The political right wants to weaponize this scandal to discredit everything Chomsky articulated about imperialism, Zionism, and media control. Conservative commentators have seized on the Epstein connection to suggest that Chomsky's entire analytical framework is invalidated, that his critiques of American power were always hypocritical, that the left's claims to moral authority are exposed as fraudulent. That response is both dishonest and intellectually lazy. It represents exactly the kind of ad hominem deflection that avoids grappling with substantive arguments by attacking the character of those making them.
Chomsky's analysis of how media systems serve power, how American foreign policy operates as imperial domination, how intellectual institutions police acceptable discourse—none of this becomes false because he failed to apply similar scrutiny to his own social networks. The propaganda model does not stop working because its architect got seduced by proximity to wealth and power. The critique remains valid even when the critic proves complicit.
But the real scandal cuts deeper than simple hypocrisy. This entanglement is a living refutation of Chomsky's own sharpest insights about how intellectual work functions in relation to power. It demonstrates that even the most incisive diagnostician of power can be absorbed into its circuitry when the rewards include intellectual stimulation, social access, and the quiet validation of being treated as a peer by the untouchable.
Epstein was, by numerous accounts, deeply interested in ideas and cultivated relationships with scientists, mathematicians, and public intellectuals. He donated to research institutions, hosted seminars, positioned himself as a patron of knowledge production. This was not incidental to his predation—it was part of the same system. The intellectual legitimacy he purchased through such associations provided cover, created networks of people invested in defending him, established him as something more than a financier with murky wealth and disturbing proclivities.
For intellectuals, the appeal was obvious. Access to funding without bureaucratic oversight. Introductions to powerful figures. The flattering attention of someone wealthy and connected who treated their ideas as important. The seduction operated not through crude bribery but through the more subtle currency of recognition, access, and inclusion in elite networks.
Chomsky, like others in Epstein's orbit, appears to have believed he could accept these benefits while maintaining his critical independence. He could take the money, enjoy the conversations, benefit from the introductions, while remaining fundamentally oppositional to the systems of power Epstein represented. The arrangement seemed mutually beneficial: Epstein gained intellectual credibility through association with a renowned critic of power, while Chomsky gained resources and access that ostensibly served his political work.
But this calculus misunderstands how power operates. Epstein's world was never about ideas or genuine intellectual exchange. It was about leverage, impunity, and the grotesque pleasure of owning people—including those who believed themselves beyond ownership. The intellectual relationships, like the political connections and the financial arrangements, served to create networks of complicity. People who accepted Epstein's hospitality, his funding, his introductions, became invested in maintaining his legitimacy. They became less likely to ask uncomfortable questions, less willing to believe accusations, less capable of recognizing predation happening in their midst.
That Chomsky could not or would not recognize this reveals the fatal limitation of any critique that remains detached from the material reality of struggle. From his position of security and status, Chomsky could analyze imperial violence in Southeast Asia, corporate manipulation of media, the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But he could not or would not apply the same analytical rigor to his own social networks, his own sources of funding, his own proximity to power.
The blindness was not accidental. It was structured by his position within exactly the elite institutions he claimed to critique. MIT provided him security, status, and platform. His intellectual celebrity gave him access to spaces of power unavailable to most critics of that power. He could meet with political leaders, appear in mainstream media, influence policy debates—all while maintaining his identity as radical dissident. This position was precarious, dependent on not pushing critique too far, not refusing too much, not breaking too completely with the institutional contexts that enabled his voice.
Epstein represented the far end of that compromise—the point where proximity to power becomes indistinguishable from complicity in it. But the difference is one of degree, not kind. The same structural logic that allowed Chomsky to maintain prestigious academic positions while critiquing the institutions that employed him, to appear in mainstream media while denouncing it as propaganda, also allowed him to accept Epstein's hospitality while claiming to oppose everything Epstein represented.
The lesson is brutal but necessary. Power does not fear intellectuals who accept its invitations and dine at its table. It fears those who refuse the invitation altogether. It fears critique that emerges from within struggle, articulated by those who have everything to lose and nothing to gain from accommodation with existing systems.
This is why the organizing work of Adivasi activists, the resistance of indigenous communities, the mobilization of sex workers demanding rights and recognition—these represent more threatening forms of critique than any number of academic papers or public lectures by credentialed intellectuals. They threaten not just particular policies but the entire logic of who gets to speak, who gets heard, whose knowledge counts as legitimate.
Genuine resistance is not conducted through seminars from the penthouse. It emerges from refusal at ground level, with bodies and livelihoods on the line. It comes from those who cannot retreat to institutional security when struggle becomes dangerous, who cannot code-switch back into respectability when advocacy becomes inconvenient, who have no choice but to transform systems because they cannot survive their continuation.
This is not to romanticize struggle or claim that only the oppressed can produce valid critique. It is to recognize that critique detached from embodied solidarity, conducted from spaces of safety and privilege, faces constant pressure toward accommodation. The rewards for moderating, for maintaining access, for not breaking too completely with power are substantial. The costs of refusal are real.
Chomsky's failure was not primarily intellectual. His analytical framework remains largely sound. His failure was one of practice, of position, of the everyday choices about whose company to keep, whose money to accept, whose claims to believe. These choices are not separate from intellectual work—they shape what becomes visible, what questions get asked, what critiques seem reasonable.
Anything less than this recognition becomes another form of manufactured consent—this time produced not by corporate media or state apparatus, but by the critic himself, absorbed so completely into structures of power that he cannot recognize his own complicity even as he continues to name it in others.