Kill your idols

Even before this Epstein shit, I knew he had severe liberal tendencies (yes even from an anarchist position) and yeah honestly he became a court jester for capitalism, but at least he has some good takes in his past. Like at a bare minimum he had Manufacturing Consent.

Unironically if you have an alternative recommendation for Manufacturing Consent that doesn't have his prints on it, I'd love to see it because I'm so tired having to cite this fucking clown 😮‍💨

Yeah, they don't get to be a tenured professor at a major university without jumping through the hoops of capital.

I listened to a lot of Chomskys talks on YouTube, which have always been very critical of capitalism and the elite.

Yeah if Chomsky is to be taken at his word, he was an anarcho-syndicalist. Too bad he betrayed his principles, if he ever really held them in the first place 😮‍💨.

Is the dude just too old to give a shit now?

One of my critiques of Chomsky even before this Epstein shit is that he's too tolerant of monsters. For example, he defended freedom of speech, which okay cool, but even for fascists. I always chalked it up to the fact that he has been cancelled various times throughout his career for his anti-war stances and probably found the experience unenlightening, and the fact that he's a bit of a liberal. And honestly, I can agree to disagree with others to some extent about who is worth talking to, especially since some of those people are more likely to listen to Chomsky based on his background and signals of privilege. And personally, I do lie closer to "I'm willing to talk it out" than "We should to beat up people with bad ideas".

But this...this is beyond reasonable disagreement. Even if he ends up being cleared of Epstein-related crimes (which I gotta be real with you, I fully believe at this point that he knew what was going on), he is clearly in bed with the monsters destroying our world. Steve Bannon is not going to listen to a loony """leftist""" like Chomsky, and Chomsky is not gonna get anything from Bannon that he couldn't have figured out by watching the news.

Like even if Chomsky didn't want to tell the guy off, he could have declined the invitation or left the room. And it's Noam fucking Chomsky. No shot he didn't know who Bannon was! And it would be an abdication of duty for a so-called leftist so-called academic to not know the names in his field. I.e. even if this was an accident on his part, it should seriously damage his credibility.

All this to say, Chomsky became what he wanted to destroy.

Idolize no one, unless they die a hero.

IMO we can pick and choose parts of a person to admire without idolizing them.

Chomsky shows up pretty often in the Epstein emails too.

Left: Steve Bannon. Republican strategist, Trump ally, active fascist piece of shit.

Right: Noam Chomsky. Linguist, activist, self-descibed anarchist. If you asked him, he would say he's one of us. Many of us here probably read Chomsky. Frankly, most people on the left, even non-anarchists, routinely use the logic in Manufacturing Consent to analyze how capitalist media manufactures consent from the working class for their various atrocities.

I've had my critiques of Chomsky for a long time, but his apparently deep connections with Epstein (not just this picture) and willingness to talk politely to fascists are absolutely beyond the pale.

I took the photo straight from the pictures released yesterday by the House Oversight Democrats, which itself came from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.

Photo from the Epstein estate of Noam Chomsky and Steven Bannon

Looks like Noam Chomsky embracing Steve Bannon

Manufacturing A Beating