This is a long post. The ramifications of my title are surprising and significant.
I have been wondering lately about why my discipline has not embraced the considerable problem of climate disinformation - at least not in any way commensurate with the scale of the current and impending impacts of global heating.
Chomsky is a part of the explanation for linguistics’ failure to take on one of the most important language issues of our time. I’ll get to that, via a little excursus into the Epstein files.
But first, here’s some evidence for my claim. This recent and significant book called Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment was put together by 110 academics. It has a lot to say on fossil fuel discourse-related issues. But there are no linguists in this mix. The word ‘linguistics’ does not appear in this 389 page book, even though the word ‘discourse’ is central to explanations of climate denial and delay, appearing on almost one in every five pages of the book.
The work on language and climate, with a few notable exceptions, is being done by academics outside linguistics, and in a whole range of disciplines. Some of them are adjacent to linguistics, like media and communication, but I’ve come across great papers on language and climate obstruction by climate scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and even one by a mathematician. I’m working on an academic journal article on this topic at the moment.
It is so obvious that language is powerful and important and needs to be studied - you don’t need a PhD in linguistics to see this. And it is obvious that language is a weapon in the hands of the fossil fuel industry, wanting to keep its business afloat at whatever planetary cost. Researchers in many disciplines have been working on this problem for a couple of decades at least. They know that the management and manipulation of public discourse, and therefore, of hearts and minds of ordinary people, has been essential to stalling action on climate.
But not Chomsky.
Chomsky and Epstein
In 2023 Chomsky defended knowing Epstein, presenting him as a man who’d served his time, and whose crimes were just like any other. Chomsky explained his relationship to Epstein as if it was like other professional meetings he had had in the course of his extended career. In his defence of his meetings with Epstein, Chomsky argued it was no worse than his colleagues, and institutions like MIT and Harvard, accepting money from some of the ‘worst criminals’ in the world. Perhaps not. But Chomsky was saying: everyone else was doing it.
When asked if he regretted his relationship with Epstein, Chomsky resolutely said no. And by this time he must have been in full possession of the knowledge of Epstein’s arrest in 2019 for trafficking scores of underage girls.
No regrets. In 2023.
We now have access to more than 6, 300 documents on their relationship: it’s the number of files that are returned when you search for ‘Chomsky’ at the Department of Justice portal.
In her public statement on their relationship with Epstein, Valeria Chomsky writes as if the relationship between Chomsky and Epstein was professional and intellectual. And she writes as if her husband, someone routinely called ‘the greatest living intellectual’ was another one of Epstein’s victims: Epstein ‘encircled’ Noam, and with gifts and invitations which ‘ensnared’ Chomsky and his wife.
I have seen various pieces by male commentators trying to retrieve Chomsky’s reputation by telling us how charming Epstein was. As if this towering intellectual and trenchant critic of American imperialism could not be expected to wonder where Epstein’s money came from, or why he wanted to befriend Chomsky. Or to wonder why Epstein had such expansive connections, including to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
You have to laugh sometimes. Here’s one such defense in which the explanation for Chomsky’s friendship with Epstein goes like this:
What the files actually reveal, once you set aside the outrage, is a textbook case of predatory manipulation targeting a vulnerable person.
This is not a statement about Epstein and his many victims. It is about Epstein and Chomsky. If it’s such a ‘textbook case’, why were the Chomskys apparently so blind to it?
As this commentator serves us up excuses for Chomsky - another man not held accountable for his behaviour - we are told to ‘set aside the outrage’, in other words, to put aside emotions and to get rational. It’s an echo of Chomsky’s ‘hysteria’ comment - on which, see below.
I’m won’t link you to the column by a well-known Australian male commentator who defends Chomsky as a victim of the Epstein ‘charm’, a poor old man at the mercy of his children, and hey, what about all the women who worked for Epstein, and aren’t we getting too hot under the collar about sex with teenagers?
It’s enraging. This male can’t even be bothered even to think about his phrase ‘sex with teenagers’. Is the sec consenting? Are we talking about 14 year olds or 19 year olds? And, of course, the gendered dog-whistling going on here: in ‘sex with teenagers’, the male writer does not need to unpack the gender of the teenagers (female), and the gender of the non-teenagers (male).
A purely professional relationship?
Did the Chomskys really not know who Epstein was? I’ll get to that. But first, let’s be clear: from the many many socializing emails, the claims that the meetings were essentially in the line of duty, that ‘In all cases, these visits were related to Noam's professional commitments’ as Valeria Chomsky wrote in her apology - is rubbish. Complete rubbish.
Because the emails show the language of intimates. In one, Valeria writes they have been ‘missing’ Epstein1. In another, from a redacted sender, Valeria is asked whether Chomsky and Epstein have planned any lunches or dinners together, and Valeria replies ‘I don’t believe the boys have worked out anything’.
Epstein and Chomsky. The boys.
In another, the Chomskys are thanked for contributing to Epstein’s birthday book2. There’s a message too where Valeria is asking whether the greatest known sex offender has recovered from a cold, advising ‘hot tea and honey and rest’.
There are emails from Chomsky to Steven Bannon - e.g. one in May 2018, which shows it is Chomsky who reaches out to Bannon to arrange a meeting. ’Jeffrey gave me your address’, he writes. ‘Lots to talk about’.
There are extensive email exchanges about financial matters between Chomsky and his children where Chomsky refers to Epstein’s longtime accountant as his (i.e. Chomsky’s) ‘extremely trustworthy and competent financial advisor’. Chomsky’s children push back.
In another, Valeria Chomsky asks Epstein if a new research institute on Linguistics and Cognitive Science could be established in Phoenix with Mrs Chomsky as the director.
We have all seen the glowing recommendation by Chomsky of Epstein: where Chomsky advises whomsoever it may concern that Epstein ‘constantly raises searching questions and puts forth provocative ideas, which have repeatedly led me to rethink crucial issues’. Valeria Chomsky’s apology confirms the recommendation letter was written by her husband.
Chomsky’s reference for Epstein will surprise linguists like Daniel Everett, once a devoted accolyte to Chomsky’s linguistics. Everett’s research, based on 25 years of field work with a community deep in the Amazon, challenged the central tenet of Chomsky’s theory. But unlike the sex offender’s ‘provocative ideas’, Everett’s deep empirical research never provoked Chomsky to reconsider his ideas. Instead, Chomsky and his supporters ridiculed and vilified the researcher. Chomsky did not offer counter-evidence, because he never worked in the field. It was against his views on the nature of language to work empirically with natural language.
Did Chomsky know what Epstein had done?
While it appears that the first meeting between Chomsky and Epstein was in 2015, the initial attempt at a meeting goes back to March 2012, in an email to Chomsky from physicist Lawrence Krauss, the subject of multiple accusations of sexual harrassment, some confirmed after investigation by his university.
I could not find the initial invitation email sent by Krauss, but there is a reminder email to Chomsky about his invitation to meet Epstein. In this message, Epstein is referred to only as ‘Epstein’ - he is clearly a man who needs no introduction.
Krauss writes to Chomsky ‘I can understand if you can’t or don’t want to’ [meet Epstein]. Krauss not only knew why someone wouldn’t want to meet with Epstein, but also believed that Chomsky would also know why. It did not need spelling out.
Chomsky’s first reply is ambiguous, and Krauss writes again:
If you are willing, is there anyone I can have him contact to set up an appointment? I will owe you. He is an interesting fellow in any case.
Krauss urges Chomksy to do him a favour and meet Epstein - how else can we interpret ‘I will owe you’. This appears as Krauss trying to overcome some potential reluctance. And why the words ‘in any case’? It can only be to mitigate any potential objections to meeting Epstein.
Chomsky writes back: ‘Just suggest to him to write to me’.
In the public apology, Valeria Chomsky claims people did not really know what Epstein had done until after the Miami Herald exposé was first published November 28, 2018.
So, did the Chomskys drop Epstein after that? Here’s a Happy New Year! email sent by Valeria to Epstein December 31st, 2018, cc’ed to Chomsky, hoping Epstein’s new year brings ‘good projects’.
And towards the end of February, 2019, Epstein reaches out to Chomsky for media advice in the fallout of the Miami Herald investigation. ‘Awful situation’, replies Chomsky - not about the abused minors, but the media coverage - and he feels so bad for ‘Lawrence’ (probably Krauss, as mentioned, the subject of multiple claims of sexual harrassment). Not just Lawrence, but for ‘other cases I know about’. The ‘vultures dearly want a public response’ writes Chomsky. They assume guilt ‘whatever the facts’.
Take the time to read about Julie K Brown, the dogged Miami Herald journalist who finally brought the Epstein case into the glare of full sunlight. Brown pursued the facts. Chomsky empathizes with Epstein: ‘I’ve had plenty of experience, though of course not on this scale’.
Chomsky’s linguistics
There’s more to see in these files about the personal dealings between the Chomskys and Epstein. But I want to put them in the context of Chomsky’s view of language and his linguistic theory. It helps us understand why linguistics has not stepped up to one of the greatest challenges of our era.
What is so ironic is that to the wider world, the Epstein files are bristling with meanings - meanings about power and the wholesale abuse of women and girls, about a world of entitled men whose behaviour is above the law, and it seems, beyond reproach.
These texts show how the men in this world use language to navigate the logistics of their financial and sexual dealings. They use language to show their solidarity with each other, to construct their membership of an insider cabal. And they routinely use language in the ongoing maintenance of utter female objectification, and of male entitlement to sexual services, whether within or outside of the law.
Now know this: you cannot analyse one single example of the Epstein files using Chomsky’s linguistic theory.
This is because for Chomsky, grammar is innate3. The result of his many decades in linguistics is his claim that the unique and biological feature of all human languages is a principle called ‘recursion’ - the capacity to construct a sentence like ‘Mary said that John had left’. The amazing diversity of human language and languages was reduced to simply this. Open any of his linguistic tomes and you’ll find trival examples like this one pored over, as if they are a portal into the deep mysteries of language.
His scholarly method was not to study and compare different languages. He eschewed the analysis of real people using language in our everyday lives. Chomsky argued, instead, that linguistics should assume an ‘ideal speaker', in a ‘completely homogenous speech community’. Linguistic science is about ‘a mental reality underlying actual behaviour’. The ‘observed use of language’ may be evidence of the ‘mental reality’, but ‘surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter of linguistics’4. Linguistics cannot actually seriously study people using language.
Moreover, whatever human babies and infants learn about language through socialization is excluded from his linguistic project. His famous dismissal of the daily processes of little humans’ immersion in their natural linguistic and cultural environments is ‘the poverty of the stimulus’. How could children possibly learn language from (merely) what goes on around them?
To be a ‘Chomskyan’, you have to enter his little black box model and close the curtains so you don’t get any sunlight or hear the sounds of children playing outside. Chomsky’s linguistic theory is a brittle paradigm that you have to wholly occupy to accept. How many human hours of study and research, and how many dollars in precious research funding, were spent over 5 or so decades in the pursuit of his arcane, unappliable ideas?
As he prosecuted his case, constructing himself as a linguistic revolutionary along the way, Chomsky argued that using language to actually communicate was ‘a tiny fraction’ of what language is all about. Ignoring the buzz and hum of public and private discourse surrounding him, he argued ‘it doesn’t make much sense to say that the function of language is communication’5.
Chomsky was never interested in the human experience of language, how it is used to construct intimacy, to flatter, to inquire, to denigrate, to oppress; how it mediates our day-to-day lives, while simultanously constructing and maintaining a culture’s ideological currents.
His much celebrated foray into media discourse, Manufacturing Consent – a book analysing media discourse on Central America, the Russian invasion of Afganistan and the American invasion of Vietnam – did not use a single tool from linguistics.
This well-known concept - like so many in academia, a renaming of an old idea already lying around (see Gramsci on ‘hegemony’) - is now an object of ridicule. Marina Hyde writes ‘Never mind Manufacturing Consent – have a read of Not Giving A Shit About Consent’.
In a 1988 book of his interviews, titled Language and Politics, Chomsky expressly rejected any connection between language and politics: the relationship between them was ‘tenuous’ as far as he was concerned6.
Chomsky actively rejected thinking about language in its manifest glory, as both the source of humanity’s greatest achievements in art, science and diplomacy, and the generator of our deepest ideologies. Like those, for example, that continue to protect and obscure patriarchal power, the ideologies that create and sustain a culture of male entitlement to female labour: household, emotional and sexual.
Chomsky was simply never, ever interested in the empiric power of language.
In her apology on their behalf, Valeria Chomsky insists that her husband ‘always supported gender equity and women’s rights’. I’ll let someone else do the research to test this claim. What we do know is that when asked by Epstein, Chomsky chose his relationship with Epstein over the defence of unfathomably brave women who had been trying for years to alert us all to Epstein’s empire of paedophilia and sexual violence. He did this fully knowing the extent of the accusations against Epstein - he acknowleges the scale of these accusations in the email with his media advice.
In that moment, Chomsky threw all of these brave women under the bus. To even question these charges, Chomsky wrote in his act of solidarity with Epstein, ‘is a crime worse than murder’. The Noösphere, linked below, explicates what Chomsky’s act of referring to the ‘hysteria that has developed around the abuse of women’ did to all of us.
If only Chomsky knew something about how language works - how it is deeply entwined with meaning, culture and ideology.
Epstein and the ‘Chomsky Challenge’
There is some correspondence in the files unlikely to be covered by anyone else writing about Chomsky and Epstein. It shows just how deeply bereft and irrelevant Chomskyan linguistics has always been.
In September 2015, Epstein emails Chomsky with his idea for ‘The Chomsky Challenge’. It follows up what has clearly been a face-to-face discussion about this idea and Epstein is now putting in writing the ‘first draft’ of the challenge.
Epstein lists various options - all banal, but more interesting that what Chomsky goes on to suggest - and then ends his message having a dig at Chomsky’s political affiliations: ‘top prize 1000 protesters of your choice for three demonstrations’.
Chomsky was clearly OK with his pal making fun of the people aligned politically to these causes he mentions - their friendship lasted another four years after this email.
Chomsky’s immediate response to the first draft was that it needed more thought. As part of his musing, Chomsky counsels Epstein that:
it is important to avoid the fashionable (and moronic) approach of google-style statistical analysis of Big Data. Thus one could perhaps get a better prediction of leaves blowing in the wind by that approach than by invoking the laws of motion and interfering factors, but the better prediction would be scientifically worthless, whatever utility it might have.
All of the big data analysis of climate discourse - media, right wing think tanks, fossil fuel company communications - well, according to the world’s leading living intellectual, it might tell you something useful but it’s scientifically worthless. Years and years of researchers, most outside of linguistics, trying to understand the mechanisms of climate denial and obstruction - it’s all ‘moronic’.
Like this paper from 2017 by two scientists Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, followed up by this extension of this research in 2021 - this work that shows that ExxonMobil deliberately misled the public about what it knew about climate science and the impact of burning fossil fuels. Supran presented these LINGUISTIC! findings at the U.S. Senate Committee On The Budget Hearing on Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change.
Where were the linguists?
Sure, this research might tell you something but in the end it is ‘moronic’ and ‘scientifically worthless’. And throw in here all of the other linguistic studies, in and outside of linguistics, on so many important topics in public discourse.
Chomsky replies to Epstein with a ‘very significant question’: ‘how to incorporate head-movement, with its pecularities, within a Merge-based system’.
Doesn’t quite grab you? Even Chomsky admits it is ‘theory internal’ and ‘can barely be understood outside of the theoretical context’.
His question, clouded in the mystique of his particular theoretical language, is not particular to his linguistics. It is about how to relate linguistic structure to some proposed theoretical architecture. Linguists in all schools ask a form of this question.
In the paradigm that I work in, the test of our answers to these kinds of questions is whether they help us understand how language works, whether they help us analyse language in a way that is useful and meaningful to people outside our discipline.
But Chomsky is so far down his rabbit hole, that he has little chance of being able to show anyone outside of his own theory why this matters. It is, as he admits in a further email ‘too theory internal’, for ‘the general significance to be easily perceived’. In other words, it has no application to the real world.
A year later, Epstein is still prompting Chomsky to come up with ideas for the Challenge. Chomsky’s still got nothing, but instead - as we watch Epstein’s empire of sex trafficking and sexual violence start to fray - these two great intellectuals have a brief exchange over a ‘nice definition of power’ that Chomsky has recently come across.
Two extremely privileged white males, musing over an abstract notion of power. Men over whom power never acts, until of course, it acted over Epstein - but only because it had to, dragged kicking and screaming.
I have not been able to discover whether the Chomsky Challenge ever materialized - it appears not. Even with Epstein offering to throw money at this opportunity, Chomsky can’t come up with a single, suitable idea for a grand challenge in linguistics.
An email exchange in February 2017 from Richard Kahn shows a sum of $20K to be paid to Chomsky as a consultant on the Advisory Board of Gratitude America, Epstein’s non-profit ‘charity’, to ‘formulate and administer the linguistic challenges’.
Richard Kahn then writes to Chomsky about how to send him this money.
Another entitled male
Unremarkably, Chomsky writes back to Kahn to say ‘ask Valeria’ - he is too important to deal with details of money matters. He has a wife to do these things for him. He needs his wife to write back to Kahn to ask that a cheque be sent to their home address.
In another of the attempts to cut Chomsky some slack - Chomsky was ‘not a straightforward guy’, and he was ‘vulnerable’ to Epstein’s advances - we are told that Chomsky’s work ethic was so strong ‘he had to be reminded to eat’.
As I read this, I thought of the books which assemble ‘great thinkers in linguistics’. This one comes up with a list of 50 - how many women? Just one.
If Chomsky had to be reminded to eat, it is because he wasn’t responsible for feeding anyone else. He did not have to organize this career around the caring of others. His work day was not punctuated by the quotidian demands of managing a household.
I don’t know. Perhaps he did the vacuuming. But this comment suggests his stellar career in linguistics was, like that of so many entitled academic males, simply built on female servitude.
If a woman of colour proposed the ideas that have made Chomsky famous, would they have been so enthusiastically embraced? Would she have been treated as a god, and a revolutionary in the field?
An obituary for Chomsky
Chomsky’s name has been synonymous with 20th century linguistics. So much so, that in 2024, when rumours were circulating of Chomsky’s apparently impending death after a stroke, a journalist reached out and asked me would I write an obituary in advance.
Apologising for making this ‘sad but important request’, the journalist assumed that because I’m a linguist, I must be one of Chomsky’s disciples. I declined this invitation.
And Chomsky didn’t die. He has lived on to have his intimate association with and unfailing support for Epstein revealed.
Despite Chomsky’s best efforts to ignore the power of language, his own words, in black and white in the Epstein files, now show better than any of his decontextualized, made-up sentences how language works. Chomsky tried to make language fit his own mould, but in the Chomsky-versus-language grand challenge, language has won.
Hands up any linguists who will volunteer to write Chomsky’s obituary? Who will continue to defend the Chomskyan linguistic project - not just tarnished by his willingness to associate with and defend Epstein, but everyday more and more irrelevant to the big challenges of our time, including climate obstruction and delay.
EFTA00322680; all other references to file numbers will be listed here. I’m an academic, so I need my sources, but I didn’t want them to interrupt the flow of this post.
‘I don’t believe the boys have worked out anything’ (EFTA02051333);
In another, the Chomskys are thanked for contributing to Epstein’s birthday book (EFTA02060102);
There’s a message too where Valeria is asking whether the greatest known sex offender has recovered from a cold, advising ‘hot tea and honey and rest’. (EFTA00873711);
There are emails from Chomsky to Steven Bannon - e.g. one in May 2018, which shows it is Chomsky who reaches out to Bannon to arrange a meeting. (EFTA02661083);
Chomsky refers to Epstein’s longtime accountant as his (i.e. Chomsky’s) ‘extremely trustworthy and competent financial advisor’. Chomsky’s children push back. (EFTA00946756);
Valeria Chomsky asks Epstein if a new research institute on Linguistics and Cognitive Science could be established in Phoenix with Mrs Chomsky as the director. (EFTA02657719);
We have all seen the glowing recommendation by Chomsky of Epstein (EFTA00804504);
While it appears that the first meeting between Chomsky and Epstein was in 2015, the initial attempt at a meeting goes back to March 2012, (EFTA00660389);
Here’s a Happy New Year! email sent by Valeria to Epstein December 31st, 2018, cc’ed to Chomsky, hoping Epstein’s new year brings ‘good projects’. (EFTA02606473);
And towards the end of February, 2019, Epstein reaches out to Chomsky for media advice in the fallout of the Miami Herald investigation (EFTA01032534).
It follows up what has clearly been a face-to-face discussion about this idea and Epstein is now putting in writing the ‘first draft’ of the challenge (EFTA02488988);
A year later, Epstein is still prompting Chomsky to come up with ideas for the Challenge. (EFTA00821237);
An email exchange in February 2017 from Richard Kahn shows a sum of $20K to be paid to Chomsky as a consultant on the Advisory Board of Gratitude America, Epstein’s non-profit ‘charity’(EFTA01052902);
Richard Kahn then writes to Chomsky about how to send him this money. (EFTA02207437).
Note this is not the birthday book with the infamous sketch of a prepubescent girl done by Trump. That was the 50th birthday book - Epstein turned 50 in 2003.
If grammar is innate, it has to be universal. This was Chomsky’s claim, and why his theory is referred to as Universal Grammar. Humans are clearly predisposed to learn language, but this isn’t the same as claiming grammar is biological.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press. p3-4.
Chomsky, Noam. 2012. The science of language: Interviews with James McGilvray. Cambridge University Press. p12.
Otero, C.P. 2004. Noam chomsky: Language and politics. 2nd edition. A.K. Press.
I simply don't understand how formal linguistics can survive. It's not just this scandal involving its belligerent, entitled "dissident-leader" and its ongoing irrelevance, but perhaps the most revolutionary application of language - generative AI - rests not on the logical formalisms Chomsky insisted underpin human language, but on learning through exposure to texts. As we all do. While Functional linguistics can explain how GenAI is similar and different to human language use, and corpus linguistics provides the tools that laid the foundations for this breakthrough, Formal linguistics has failed exactly what it set out to achieve - to provide a comprehensive and workable computational model of language. Millions of research dollars, countless careers on "scientifically interesting" questions of language and the domination of a field and most of it is just trash. What a waste. That's one way to trash the planet.
Thanks for the background on Chomsky. Long ago, I came up against his dismissal of research into how language in the classroom can set some groups of children up to fail but not being a linguist didn’t have the context to understand where he was coming from.
Climate action certainly needs linguists. Finding a way to make these ideas accessible to a broad range of people with varying levels of experience and interest is a challenge.