Noam Chomsky Was Right About Epstein

It was driving me crazy that no one with any minimal fluency in the Epstein matter was making any kind of proactive defense of Noam Chomsky, amid this utterly repellent crusade over the past two weeks to denounce and disavow him — which has included his cowardly former “friends” and collaborators. The firehose of defamatory garbage is all the more repellent given Chomsky’s current age and physical condition, incapacitated by a stroke and unable to respond — despite, I’m told, at times being able to understand things communicated to him. Self-righteous charlatans like Chris Hedges felt no need to do the slightest examination of the relevant facts and evidence before rattling off their melodramatic excoriations of a 97-year-old stroke victim whom they once revered as the titanic intellect of our age. And not only have they excoriated him, they’ve declared that his entire life’s work is irreparably tainted.

So, somebody’s gotta do a corrective: Here is my article published today in Compact magazine.

A few things to add:

In his little screed, Hedges cries out that Chomsky “knew about Epstein’s abuse of children. They all knew. And like others in the Epstein orbit, he did not care.” Despite the smug certitude, Hedges clearly does not know, and does not care, that Epstein was never even alleged to have committed any sexually violative acts against any alleged “children” after the year 2005. That’s right: even if you go by mere allegations — which of course should never be taken as dispositive of anything — the federal indictment of Epstein in July 2019 alleges only illicit non-adult sexual contact that occurred, at the latest, in 2005. The indictment was mostly a spiced up rehash of old, already-investigated allegations from at least fourteen years prior, which the Feds tried to strategically reframe as “trafficking” rather than “prostitution” — which is what the common legal/cultural/political parlance would’ve been in the early 2000s.

So again: by the time Epstein became acquainted with Chomsky around 2013-2015, it had been nearly a full decade since there was any discernible claim that Epstein had done anything sexually improper with anyone under age 18. What “children,” therefore, was Chomsky supposed to have been so hyper-vigilant about protecting between 2015-2019, when most of his visits and emails with Epstein appear to have taken place? Hedges seems to imagine Chomsky sinisterly looking the other way as Epstein dips out of an impromptu linguistics seminar to go rape some preteens. This is a totally ridiculous caricature of what actually went on with the Epstein legal saga, but a lot of people seem to vaguely believe some version of it — or presumably they wouldn’t be so willing to disown their former idol.

As to their unexpectedly close personal bond — which I certainly had not been fully aware of before a couple months ago — what these new documents plainly show is that Chomsky really did derive significant value from his friendship with Epstein. And like so many other top academics and scientists, Chomsky genuinely appears to have found him intellectually stimulating.

In one email exchange, Epstein recounts some sort of abstruse experiment he says Chomsky inspired him to conduct, involving the neurological processing of music — apparently he overlayed Beethoven’s symphonies to extract certain audio wavelengths? Or something. I admit I don’t fully comprehend the nature of this experiment — Epstein’s perpetually garbled writing style doesn’t help — but Chomsky called it a “very interesting experiment. It might tell us a lot about musical genres and their underlying structure, and the cognitive capacities that organize thought, creativity, and experience in these apparently human-specific ways.” Epstein also forwarded the findings of his experiment to Mark Tramo, a professor of neurology at UCLA, who likewise complimented Epstein’s ingenuity. Now, Tramo is getting protested at his office by wackjobs who thought a different email exchange contained coded language for rape of babies, or something.

Back in the land of reality, Tramo was merely commenting on one of his longstanding areas of scientific expertise — how auditory stimulation can ease pain and stress for premature newborns. But the wackjobs took Tramo’s innocuous reference to babies sucking on a pacifier to be sexually sinister innuendo, which is itself truly sick. That hasn’t stopped feckless UCLA administrators from removing web pages featuring Tramo’s work — as if any public mention of him now is gravely injurious to their institutional reputation. And of course, the reddit hordes are demanding his immediate firing.

After an initial uproar, UCLA mewlingly “thanked” the campus “community” for “sharing their concerns” about Tramo — and assured the rabid complainers that the “Civil Rights Office” is hard at work investigating the matter. Public relations specialists are working diligently to “gather facts,” so they can “take prompt and appropriate action.” What prompt administrative action could possibly be “appropriate” in this scenario? What new “facts” would need to be gathered? Does the Tramo-Epstein email chatter have to be further analyzed by internet freaks so they can identify additional coded references to rancid child molestation? Or perhaps ritual sacrifice? Any facts that might be ascertained suggesting Tramo’s complicity in pedo-sex crimes would seem unlikely to be uncovered by UCLA’s Office of Civil Rights — perhaps not the most well-equipped agency to recommend felony charges, or convene a grand jury. What a ridiculous joke this stuff is — and a perfect manifestation of the insane moral panic we’re all bizarrely engulfed in.

Chomsky, to his great credit, was resolutely unwilling to be buffaloed by such nonsense. I’ll have more mind-melting tidbits from the ludicrous Chomsky situation in a forthcoming article, which will be paywalled, so consider subscribing if you appreciate the work.

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