Noam Chomsky, Explained for People Who've Only Seen the Memes

People search for what Noam Chomsky believes as though it were hidden. He has published the answer, at length, across more than 150 books. Asked in 2013 to define the tradition he works in, he called anarchism a standing suspicion of domination, authority and hierarchy, in which the people holding the power carry the burden of proof:

If they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just.

Apply that test to the Pentagon, the State Department, the New York Times and his own profession and you have accounted for nearly everything he has written since 1967. He is 97. He taught linguistics at MIT for almost fifty years, and the internet knows him mostly as a screenshot.

The screenshots run in two directions. One set has him as the last honest man in America; the other has him as a crank who blames the United States for the weather. Both skip the paperwork, which is unusually thick and almost all of it dated.

Philadelphia, and an uncle’s newsstand

Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928. His father, William Chomsky, was a Hebrew scholar. His political education happened at his uncle’s New York newspaper stand, where Jewish leftists argued current affairs in front of the customers, and in the anarchist bookstores he worked through on those trips into the city. At ten he wrote an article about the fall of Barcelona and the suppression of Spain’s anarcho-syndicalist movement. He never really changed subjects.

The day job

MIT hired him in 1955 and made him a full professor in 1961. His first book, Syntactic Structures (1957), argued that the structure of human language is partly built into human beings rather than assembled from scratch by imitation, an idea that reorganized his field and is still fought over in it.

On April 15, 1992, MIT’s own news office ran the numbers under the headline Chomsky Is Citation Champ. Between 1980 and 1992 he was cited 3,874 times in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, which made him the most cited living person and the eighth most cited source of any kind. The seven ahead of him were Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato and Freud. Hegel and Cicero came ninth and tenth.

He has also been plain about who paid for the lab. Chomsky has acknowledged that the funding for his MIT research in those years came from the military. He was about twelve years from being arrested outside the Pentagon.

The essay that made him a political figure

On February 23, 1967 the New York Review of Books published The Responsibility of Intellectuals. The line people still quote out of it is the flattest one in the piece:

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.

The argument around it is hard to wriggle out of. Western intellectuals, he wrote, have political liberty, access to information and freedom of expression, which is exactly what it takes to check a government’s story against its conduct, and privileges of that size leave no excuse. Half a century earlier the United States had jailed people for antiwar speeches. Chomsky published the essay anyway, and then went further than print.

He put money behind it first. “I organized tax resistance in 1965, with a friend. I kept at it for about ten years,” he said in a 2011 interview quoted by Fifth Estate. In 1968 he signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, the advertisement in which writers publicly pledged to refuse the war tax, alongside Howard Zinn, Allen Ginsberg, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich and Kurt Vonnegut.

Then he sat down in front of the Army. At the march on the Pentagon on October 21, 1967, Chomsky and a small group walked up to a line of troops with a portable sound system; when a second line advanced in formation, they sat. His account ran in the New York Review of Books that December:

I was arrested at that point by a Federal Marshal, presumably for obstructing the soldiers.

In the prison dormitory he found people he had respected for years, and wrote that he was relieved to see them there: Norman Mailer, Jim Peck, David Dellinger. Mailer turned that weekend into a book. Chomsky went back to work, and in mid-1971 Charles Colson’s office added him to Nixon’s master list of political opponents, under academics.

Manufacturing Consent, and who wrote it

The book everyone credits to Chomsky was mostly written by Edward S. Herman. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media came out from Pantheon in 1988 under both names; Herman wrote the preface and chapters one through four, which contain the propaganda model itself, and Chomsky wrote chapters five through seven. The title is borrowed from Walter Lippmann, who used the phrase “the manufacture of consent” in Public Opinion in 1922.

The model is an argument about structure, not about a conspiracy. News passes through five filters before it reaches a reader: who owns the outlet and what they want out of it; advertising, which is where the money actually comes from; the daily dependence on government, business and approved specialists for raw material; flak, meaning the organized cost imposed on outlets that step out of line; and, in the 1988 edition, anticommunism as the national religion that settled arguments before they started. The result gets one sentence:

The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print.

The most screenshotted moment of Chomsky’s life came out of this argument. On February 14, 1996, on BBC2’s The Big Idea, Andrew Marr asked how he could possibly know that journalists censor themselves. By the transcript of the broadcast, Chomsky answered:

I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.

Nobody in that model gets handed a list of forbidden opinions. The filter runs earlier, at the point where a newsroom decides which reporters are sound enough to hire and promote.

What anarcho-syndicalism means when he says it

The label Chomsky uses for himself is anarcho-syndicalist, or libertarian socialist. In practice it means workers running their own workplaces, federations of those workplaces instead of owners, and a permanent demand that any hierarchy explain what it is for. The American branch of that tradition is the IWW, which is one reason his politics have never fit the labels American commentators reach for. He wants less state, and he wants it for the opposite of the reasons libertarians do.

Where the record gets uncomfortable

Two episodes keep a certain argument about Chomsky permanently open, and both belong in any honest account of him.

In 1979 he signed a petition defending the free-speech rights of Robert Faurisson, a French academic who denied the Holocaust. In October 1980 he wrote an essay on freedom of expression making the case that the right only counts when it covers the people nobody wants to defend:

it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense.

Serge Thion and Pierre Guillaume then printed that essay as the preface to a Faurisson book without telling him. Chomsky asked for it to be taken out. His position, then and since, is that defending a person’s right to say a thing is separate from the thing said. French intellectual life did not accept the distinction, and the fight has run for more than forty years.

The second episode is current. Jeffrey Epstein’s calendars, reported by the Wall Street Journal in 2023, showed meetings with Chomsky in 2015 and 2016. Asked about them, Chomsky told the Journal: “First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally.” Emails released by the Justice Department on January 30, 2026 showed years of correspondence, including family and financial matters and an exchange on February 23, 2019, after the Miami Herald’s investigation into Epstein’s trafficking network, in which Epstein asked how to handle the coverage and Chomsky answered the same day advising him to ignore it. Reporting on the emails in The Nation, Greg Grandin stated plainly that Chomsky has not been implicated in any of Epstein’s crimes. Chomsky has not responded publicly to the releases.

The obituaries

Chomsky had a stroke in June 2023, and he has lived in Brazil, his wife’s native country, ever since. On June 18, 2024, the day he was discharged from a Sao Paulo hospital, reports of his death went around the world. Jacobin published an obituary. So did the New Statesman. Both took theirs down. Valeria Wasserman Chomsky told the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse that the reports were false, and told ABC News: “He is well.”

So the man who spent thirty-six years arguing that newsrooms run on institutional reflex rather than deliberate lying got his obituary published, twice, by magazines on his own side, because a rumor moved faster than a phone call to his wife. She answered when they called. He was ninety-five and in Sao Paulo, and the correction took a day.