This isn't actually an apology in any real way.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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I like the part where Epstein helped Noam do his taxes and the Chomskys are just like well we are actually victims here
Sorry, but this apology would have more credibility if it was issued before you were publicly exposed as being in so closely in league with the notorious rapist, pedophile and human trafficker. It should be noted that Epstein was convicted before old man Chomosky chose to run defense for him.
"Im sorry i got caught."
"I regret that so many people are offended."
What I find most damning in the correspondence isn’t Chomsky’s defense of Epstein—he seems to have genuinely believed in his innocence—so much as Chomsky’s subscribing to the framework that the #metoo movement/“cancel culture” and associated wave of sexual assault allegations was a baseless collective “hysteria”. Valeria’s statement implies that this was a stance Chomsky arrived at independently of Epstein.
Chomsky was born in 1928. This doesn't justify him being a sexist piece of shit, but it certainly can explain him being a sexist piece of shit.
He was well into this forties when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was made law which essentially stopped discrimination against women for getting checking accounts and lines of credit, which were hard to come by at many banks prior to that.
Until 1976, nearly every state had a "marital exemption" for rape, at this point Chomsky was pushing 50. It wasn't until 1993 that marital rape was codified into federal law as being a crime nationwide, at this point Chomsky was in his sixties.
He was 17 when World War II ended in 1945.
Chomsky is a massive piece of shit for this, but I mean, are we really that shocked that a motherfucker from the beginning of the Silent Generation, literally on the edge of being from the Greatest Generation, is a sexist pig who thinks women are the devil? In two years he'll be a 100 god damned years old.
Not excusable, but I mean, I'm just... not shocked, honestly.
My parents were silent generation and my siblings and I sometimes discuss how really amazed we are that they never seemed that racist and such.
Chomsky’s attitude seems representative of a lot of men and women (most of whom were younger than him) who had always described themselves as feminists, but who had similar feelings that #metoo was unfounded hysteria.
Epstein was capitalizing on that and promoting it, not just with Chomsky but with a lot of other academics outside of his usual circle.
A LOT of Boomers and silent generation people are really protective of rapists and child molesters and the systemic rape culture that enables it. Just look at how they circled the wagons around woody Allen for example it’s pretty disgusting
It seems like a fair number of men hid their abusive tendencies behind a thin veneer of feminism. I'm looking at you, Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman.
I completely agree, I thought someone With that depth of view wouldn't have been also sexist. it is really strange.
I never got the Chomsky hype. Why do/did people like him?
IIRC, he helped invent XML.
He was able to present leftist ideas in a way that didn't scare 
liberals. I'm sure lots of us on Lemmy got into leftism through Chomsky. Sucks that he sucked (so fuck him) but it is what it is 😞
Ok, but TIL somehow you type amerikkkan and a based af burning flag emoji renders, at least for me. Is that an instance thing, or is my client doing that??
ETA what I'm seeing:
The original comment:
Replying to the comment:
😱
It's actually just me copy-pasting a small image hosted by Hexbear. I believe Hexbear does actually have some extra stuff for their users to call emojis, but what I'm doing is just copying the Markdown it generates using the ordinary embedded image syntax.
The syntax is:
Also thank you for verifying that this works 😁. I've just been doing it and praying it looks good.
That's awesome haha. It does indeed work, at least for me in .world using Boost. And also explains why it didn't render for me in my initial reply lol.
Well that's... Interesting to say the least. Opened the comment in a browser and long-clicked the image, and it is indeed as you say. You likely got downvoted cause it seems troll-ish, but this is some type of fuckery. Maybe it's a .world thing?
Edit: It's hexbear
I think it should work with any instance, it's just that Hexbear did all the legwork of drawing all the flag burning emojis 😆
Edit: Just to prove it, this one is uploaded to SDF, which as an instance has absolutely no special features. 
And the syntax pulls an image from any URL, so you can host the image on any website. Doesn't even have to be a Lemmy instance.
So you can do this on .world as long as you have a URL to the image or a version stored locally. Which I ultra-encourage everyone to do
Thanks, me too. Even though I never thought he'd be pedophile material, I always thought he was bad vibes. I feel vindicated somewhat. He is a creep, I wasn't just imagining it.
I had an immediate dislike too, despite hearing nothing but praise if anything of him.
Whatever, fuck him.
What? "Tankies" have never liked him what parallel universe do you live in? As an anarchist who's always disliked him I wish his fans were primarily "tankies".
I knew only his name being venerated in certain parts of "the left," when I heard him make an argument I considered disingenuous that excused russian meddling in the US election as we have done that in other countries'elections.
Which is just wrongheaded. The ones in the US doing this in other countries are the ones those forces are helping to get into power here, to do more in those other countries.
It in no way excuses the democrats failure to nominate popular candidates that the russians got involved and helped push the republicans over the edge, but it also is incredibly dangerous to have a hostile foreign intelligence agency helping the already dangerous party win, and then fix elections going forward, which is the subtext.
I've had no respect for Chomsky since I heard him say that, on Democracy Now I think it was, 2017 or so.
He had some interesting ideas about language development in the 70s which have mostly been debunked since (by people who actually knew what they were talking about).
Noam Chomspky has always been a blowhard.
lol, that's just fake. Go have a look at the Chomsky wikipedia article, he has proposed a revolutionary view on the linguistic science. His work is fundamental in the natural language processing science, except for LLM.
beside that he is an anarchist with great takes on how mainstream media is manipulating opinion. A very interesting person.
I was very sad to learn that he was friend with Epstein though..
lol, that's just fake.
Look, of you're going to quote Wikipedia on Chomsky, at least do some of the required reading:
- Chomsky publicly reviled Bolchevism, yet actively advocated for a "social revolution" using the exact same mechanisms. When questioned in a recorded interview on this point in 1974, he got up and left.
- Speaking of old-world, anticapitalist "social renegade" behaviour, he famously endorsed Mao Tse Tung and Fidel Castro as aspirational figures. Many of the 60s left were led astray by these figures, but Chomsky was one of the stubborn few who refused to recant their support, even after it became apparent that both had been revealed to be as power-hungry as the establishments they claimed to fight.
"When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung’s “relatively livable” and “just society,” Chomsky was probably unaware he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history."
Chomsky also continued to crow about the stellar merits of USSR agricultural output, and when presented with the discovery that they had forged the numbers in an effort to appear more productive, he did not change this support.
- Chomsky defended and rationalized violence as a legitimate means to social change, and by extension, praised authoritarian leaders on their methods and policies.
- He also wasn't shy about rubbing elbows with the "elite", so it should come as no big surprise that he had ties to Epstein. The fact that his wife knew of the association and only addressed it once public should tingle your Spidey sense.
- Chomsky's "Universal Grammar" theory has been largely debunked as armchair psychology.
- Modern times are proving Chompsky was full of shit: https://www.toolify.ai/gpts/the-revolution-in-language-models-debunking-chomskys-theory-143628
- similarly, Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus" theory of language development has also been proven to be garbage.
Anecdotally, I studied linguistics in the late 90s and we were specifically prohibited from quoting Chomsky in my syntax, phonology, and semantics courses. That's how much respect he commanded in the actual academic community. Thirty years ago.
*Chomsky. Chompsky in the gnome in HL2, who does not appear in the Epstein files, so I will not have you sully his good name.
My apologies, a phonological transcription error.
I studied linguistics in the 90s, and that was the general attitude about Chomsky then (specifically universal grammar and to some extent X-bar theory—his work on generative syntax and formal grammar from the 50s was still considered foundational).
But I’ve lately discovered the research of the Minimalist program that he was working on for the last few decades, and that seems pretty solid and cutting-edge.
I've never liked Chomsky. But it's bullshit that he's getting more bad press than the dudes who raped little girls.
I mean it's a pretty bad look to go to bat for dudes who raped little girls and to call public outcry about it hysteria. Poe-tae-toe Poh-tah-toe.
Give it a minute...
"who's this guy I never liked him what a moron nobody ever heard of thsis gie"
- Uninformed Buffoons ITT
Too little too late 🖕
Where did he meet his new young wife?
I mean I understand the desire to make this kind of connection because she is 30 years younger than him, but my goodness, that's kind of ignoring her respectable career University of São Paulo. Let's not minimize her accomplishments and education or reduce her to merely a call-girl procured by Epstein.
I remember Chomsky getting visibly upset and telling an interviewer that talking about his first wife is upsetting and that they won’t be talking about her. It seemed like he was just sad. And it was painful.
I have complicated feelings about that moving me so much now that I know how much Chomsky can rationalize interacting with Epstein.