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HE STAYED IN THE ROOM
The first time I saw it clearly was 2014.
Ukraine had fractured. Fascist militias were on the streets. Civilians were burning in Odessa. The West rushed to bless a regime installed by force — and Chomsky followed suit. He didn’t name the gangs. He didn’t name the war. He condemned Russia and protected the narrative.
That wasn’t silence. That was consent.
He justified the overthrow of a government by groups he should have recognized by lineage alone — openly ultranationalist, openly fascist, openly genocidal. He called it sovereignty. While he ignored the sovereignty of the Donbas and Crimea.
That’s when I realized he wasn’t analyzing propaganda anymore.
He was supplying it.
It happened again during COVID.
He moralized exclusion.
He endorsed social punishment.
He called coercion principle and obedience science.
Twice, in less than a decade, he didn’t just echo consensus — he manufactured it.
The voice that once warned how power manipulates consent had become one of its instruments.
This essay isn’t about contradiction.
It’s about pattern.
It’s about structure.
And now that it’s visible, it can’t be unseen.
There is a silence in the 1971 Dutch television debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky that matters more than anything either man said.¹
The debate is remembered as intellectual theater — justice versus power, human nature versus history. But one moment passes almost unnoticed unless you’re listening for it.
Foucault asks Chomsky where he stands in relation to power.
Not whether it lies.
Not whether it corrupts.
Where he is within it.
Chomsky does not answer.²
He redirects. He invokes innate moral faculties, universal principles, justice as an external standard. The transcript is unambiguous: the question of position is not confronted — it is neutralized by theory.
At the time, this passed as philosophical temperament: two thinkers speaking past each other. That interpretation no longer holds. This was not misunderstanding. It was maneuver.
Because the question Foucault posed cannot be answered without consequence. To locate oneself in relation to power is to accept exposure. It fixes you in place. It makes judgment possible.
Silence, in that moment, preserved plausible deniability.
That silence has not faded. It has matured.
Chomsky did not merely critique power — he installed himself as a moral sovereign over it. His role was not simply analyst or dissident. He became an unappointed conscience. Across decades, he positioned himself as a guide to dissent, absorbed into anarchist and progressive cultures not just as a thinker, but as an ethical reference point.
He spoke as if clarity itself conferred innocence.
This is why Manufacturing Consent mattered — and why it must be reread without reverence.³
The book did not interrupt the system it described. It explained the system without threatening it. It rendered domination legible while leaving its operations intact. Readers were trained to recognize propaganda. Power learned it could be studied without consequence.
Critique became credential.
Explanation became insulation.
That posture functioned as long as power remained abstract.
Then it didn’t.
The Epstein files contain no claim of illegality on Chomsky’s part. That is not the charge. What they establish is conduct after moral ambiguity had collapsed.⁴
After Epstein’s 2008 conviction — not before exposure, not amid rumor — after conviction — Chomsky remained in contact.⁵ The contact was not adversarial. It was social, strategic, and reputational in tone. Not denunciation, but availability. Not refusal, but proximity.⁶
No strategy memos are required.
Continued advisory contact — post‑conviction, post‑disgrace — is itself the act.
This was not ignorance. Chomsky had built a career explaining how elite insulation works.⁷ He mapped how powerful men survive scandal through networks, language, and deference. To suggest he failed to recognize that structure when it requested his time is not charitable — it is absurd.
And yet he did not rupture.
He did not withdraw.
He did not refuse.
He stayed in the room.
This is not hypocrisy in the casual sense.
It is virtue hoarding.⁸
Virtue hoarding is moral capital weaponized as immunity. It is the accumulation of ethical authority until critique itself functions as cover — until righteousness becomes a private asset rather than a public risk.
Chomsky’s standing performed refusal on his behalf. His reputation absorbed the ethical cost — until the record made that insulation visible.
This is why legality is irrelevant.
Law is the floor — the lowest bar for behavior. Ethics begin where legality stops being sufficient.
After conviction, continued assistance is a choice.
After exposure, continued proximity is alignment.
Seen this way, the 1971 silence hardens into meaning.
When asked where he stood in relation to power, Chomsky did not answer because answering would have collapsed the posture that sustained him. To admit proximity would have forfeited moral elevation. To deny it outright would have invited scrutiny.
Silence preserved both.
That was not fear.
It was design.
And design is not liberation.
This is the hardest truth for those shaped by his work.
This was not a hero who fell.
It was a court intellectual who maintained cover.
He spoke the language of resistance while preserving access. He taught the mechanics of domination while declining to confront them when they appeared in human form. He trained others to distrust narrative while laundering his own through decades of deference.
The question that mattered was asked once, plainly, on Dutch television.
It went unanswered.
The Epstein files answer it now — not philosophically, but structurally.
That answer is not tragic.
It is the proof of what the silence always meant.
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Endnotes
1. Chomsky–Foucault Debate (1971) — https://chomsky.info/1971__
2. Chomsky–Foucault transcript and video — https://chomsky.info/1971__
3. Manufacturing Consent, Herman & Chomsky (1988) — https://archive.org/details/ManufacturingConsent
4. Epstein Court Documents, Unsealed Jan 2024 — https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24317061-epstein-documents-unsealed
5. WSJ: “Jeffrey Epstein’s Private Calendar” (May 2023) — https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeffrey-epsteins-private-calendar-reveals-prominent-names-including-cia-chief-goldman-sachs-top-lawyer-2f3bd47e
6. The Guardian: “Noam Chomsky among Epstein contacts” (Jan 2024) — https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/03/epstein-documents-noam-chomsky-names
7. Deterring Democracy, Noam Chomsky (1991) — https://archive.org/details/DeterringDemocracy
8. Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu (2021) — https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/virtue-hoarders
