Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously with Noam Chomsky

Deconstructing the "approved dissident" Noam Chomsky

This week, social media has been buzzing about Noam Chomsky following the latest release of the Epstein files, which contain a number of deeply uncomfortable revelations. There are 48 documents referencing Chomsky, including email correspondence showing repeated contact between Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein. Among these is an email thread in which Epstein offers Chomsky the use of his private jet and Manhattan apartment. Chomsky declined these offers, but he did meet Epstein, including at an event attended by Woody Allen. Given what is now widely known about the kinds of “leisure” Epstein facilitated, this alone should give any reasonable person pause.

More troubling is the fact that Chomsky authored a letter of recommendation on Epstein’s behalf, a detail that gives Manufacturing Consent an unintentional new resonance. Chomsky also sought Epstein’s assistance with what he described as a “difficult transaction” related to his late wife’s estate — a request that culminated in Epstein transferring $270,000 into Chomsky’s bank account.

An example of Cringe-worthy praise of Chomsky as the “Pope of the Left”

Ordinarily, when a previously admired public intellectual is revealed to have engaged in conduct this compromised, supporters reassess. Unfortunately, rather than reassessing their position, Chomsky’s defenders have opted to maintain their necessary illusions. The most striking example is a recent article in The Nation by Yale professor Greg Grandin, which reads less like analysis than public relations.

The defenses offered fall into a few predictable categories:

1. “Chomsky writes letters for everyone.”

   If Chomsky truly “writes to everyone,” the obvious step would have been for defenders to ask him directly. They did not.

   Even if true, this does not justify corresponding with — let alone recommending — a convicted sex offender with documented ties to political elites across party lines.

2. “Chomsky didn’t know Epstein was a convicted pedophile.”

   This claim is implausible. Epstein’s 2006 investigation and 2008 guilty plea were widely reported. His status as a registered sex offender was a matter of public record. Chomsky, who prides himself on documentary rigor, had access to Google.

3. “Epstein initiated the contact.”8

   Irrelevant. Chomsky sustained the relationship, including being on a flight with him.

4. “The 2018 exposé was the first major reporting on Epstein.”

   This is simply false.

5. “We don’t know that Chomsky wrote the recommendation letter.”

Despite this, many continue defending Chomsky on the grounds that he is “good for the left” — as if moral compromise becomes acceptable when attached to the correct political brand.

For those who are instead asking, What went wrong? or Where did Chomsky go wrong? this article is for you. The answer is uncomfortable but simple: nothing went wrong. Chomsky did not change. You did. You grew.

Chomsky was always like this.

If I were to describe Noam Chomsky in one sentence, I would describe him as “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, a famous example of a sentence that is perfectly grammatical but entirely meaningless, which Chomsky coined in his Book Syntactic Structures. This sentence perfectly describes Chomsky’s entire career, as he has perfected the art of saying perfectly grammatical sentences that are entirely meaningless.

A Chatgpt Generated image about Colorless Green Ideas

Consider, for example:

“Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement. And he was so regarded by the mainstream Marxists… We’ve forgotten who the mainstream Marxists were because they lost.”¹

Or:

“Fairly deep properties of the number system… may well be genetically determined… arising as a concomitant of structural properties of the brain developed for other reasons.”²

Both of these show that while Chomsky was able to use them in a grammatically correct fashion, without understanding the deep meaning. The Epstein revelations did not represent a fall from grace, but instead, it merely a continuation of his often jumbled and incoherent thought in both linguistics and in his politics.

There is no need to defend Chomsky.

And there is no reason to mourn him.

He is not a visionary, nor is a revolutionary.

While his supporters credit him with opening their eyes, seeing the world through Chomsky’s framework ultimately narrows the field of vision in linguistics and encourages a defeatist politics

The Epstein correspondence is not a betrayal of Chomsky’s principles, but their logical conclusion. The problem that unites his linguistics and his politics is not error, but a foundational refusal to engage with the real world on any terms but his own idealized abstractions.

In linguistics, this meant defining his object of study—language—out of existence. He famously began by excluding the very thing that makes language real: communication.

“Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.³

He didn’t study language as it is spoken; he invented a purified mathematical object—a syntax machine—untouched by society, history, or human imperfection.

In politics, he performed the same maneuver. He overtly rejected the messy, material analysis of power. When asked about dialectical materialism—a method for analyzing historical contradiction and change—he dismissed it:

Question: “Dialectics?”

Chomsky: “Dialectics is one that I’ve never understood, actually—I’ve just never understood what the word means. Marx doesn’t use it, incidentally, it’s used by Engels. And if anybody can tell me what it is, I’ll be happy. I mean, I’ve read all kinds of things which talk about ‘dialectics’—I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is. It seems to mean something about complexity, or alternative positions, or change, or something. I don’t know.”⁴

This is not humility; it is a declaration of method. He refuses the tools that examine how power concretely operates through institutions and economies, preferring instead to judge the world against an abstract, moralistic idealism. The result is a politics of incoherence, ignorance and irrelevance. In Chomsky’s own words, “a colorless green idea”

Therefore, to understand the man who could write a recommendation for Jeffrey Epstein, we must first understand the thinker. We must trace how the same intellectual habit—the retreat from the contaminated real into a self-referential ideal—produced both the elegant emptiness of his syntax and the morally bankrupt equivalences of his politics. The flight from material reality in his theory made the flight on Epstein’s plane, and the subsequent defenses of it, not just possible, but consistent.

Part 1: Chomsky’s Linguistic Theories of Nothing

Part 2: The Acceptable Dissident

Part 3: Chomsky: The Moderate Rebel

1. Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” lecture delivered at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, March 15, 1989, transcript by William Greene.

2. Trevor A. Harley, The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory, 2nd ed. (Hove: Psychology Press, 2001), 304.

3. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 4.

4. Noam Chomsky, “A Review of The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray,” The New York Review of Books, June 23, 2011, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/06/23/language-communication-understanding/.