Using Chomsky's Writings to Read His Disappointing Engagement with Epstein

Undated photo of Jeffrey Epstein, right, speaking to academic and linguist Noam Chomsky. 

Photograph: House Oversight Democrats/AFP/Getty Images

On 3 February 2026, Ramon Antonio Vargas reported in The Guardian in an article titled 'Newly released files shed new light on Chomsky and Epstein relationship' that a tranche of U.S. Justice Department records released under a congressional transparency law documents an extensive and friendly relationship between Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein. The emails show sustained social contact, financial coordination, casual familiarity, and private advice offered by Chomsky to Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor. The records also include Chomsky reaching out to Steve Bannon, using contact details supplied by Epstein, to request a meeting. Collectively, the material challenges earlier characterisations of Chomsky’s relationship with Epstein as primarily financial and limited in scope.

------- 

For those of us who came of age intellectually reading Chomsky—his work on linguistics, media, and the structural analysis of political power—these disclosures are difficult to reconcile with the intellectual project he advanced. 

Chomsky taught generations of scholars to recognise how elite networks normalise impunity and reproduce power through informal social and financial ties. Seen in that light, the newly released material is not merely surprising; it is destabilising. It forces a confrontation between a structural critique of power that many of us learned from Chomsky and evidence of personal conduct that appears to sit uneasily within the very networks that critique sought to expose. 

What makes the recent release of evidence so unsettling is that Chomsky’s own work taught us to treat such relationships as structural mechanisms of power, not as morally neutral personal ties.

With Epstein, the ethical problem deepens. This was not abstract engagement undertaken to understand power, but sustained social familiarity and private counsel that minimised public concern about sexual abuse. What it reveals, using Chomsky's own work to make sense of his behaviour, is how deep and ordinary elite power networks (particularly male power networks) can be—even among their most formidable critics—and how easily structural critique can coexist with personal participation in those networks. 

By his own standards, the problem is not that Chomsky spoke to people he opposed, but that he normalised and privately assisted figures whose power he taught generations of students to analyse as corrosive. 

The sadness here is not scandal; it is the dissonance between an intellectually rigorous structural critique and personal conduct that quietly reproduces the very arrangements it sought to expose.