The Magus of MIT

The three years since 9/11 have turned Noam Chomsky into a household name. His pamphlets of left-wing political extremism sell extremely well, and can serve as Exhibit A in the mainstreaming of American paranoia. He is by all accounts a brilliant man; so, we must ask, how can such a bright person be peddling the worst form of conspiracist hysteria? And it matters: When a scandal-sheet tabloid makes wild charges, people know it’s okay to chuckle; when the voice issues from the ivied labs of MIT—home, after all, of rocket scientists—it’s harder to keep smiling.

In The Anti-Chomsky Reader (Encounter, 260 pp., $17.95), editors Peter Collier and David Horowitz have assembled nine essays that demonstrate why Chomsky is screamingly wrong on the major issues he has tackled. In whitewashing the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge, writes Steven Morris, Chomsky dismisses eyewitness accounts of horrific atrocities; Eli Lehrer shows Chomsky engaging in similar legerdemain in forwarding the theory of a conspiratorial corporate media in the United States. Throughout, Chomsky is shown to be a master of bald assertion, whose incantations cannot survive a basic reality check. “Chomsky weaves his malicious fantasies with the skill of Thomas Mann’s Mario the Magician, a famous fascist prototype,” write David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh; his “hypnotic power derives from the impression that his bizarre text is based on actual sources books, arts & manners like the New York Times, and that the reality he is busily inventing can be decoded only by intellectual wizards like himself.” To read this fine book is to receive an unsparing view of what lies behind the Chomsky curtain.

About the Author

Michael Potemra

Michael Potemra was a literary editor for National Review.

Featured Tags

The three years since 9/11 have turned Noam Chomsky into a household name. His pamphlets of left-wing political extremism sell extremely well, and can serve as Exhibit A in the mainstreaming of American paranoia. He is by all accounts a brilliant man; so, we must ask, how can such a bright person be peddling the worst form of conspiracist hysteria? And it matters: When a scandal-sheet tabloid makes wild charges, people know it’s okay to chuckle; when the voice issues from the ivied labs of MIT—home, after all, of rocket scientists—it’s harder to keep smiling.

In The Anti-Chomsky Reader (Encounter, 260 pp., $17.95), editors Peter Collier and David Horowitz have assembled nine essays that demonstrate why Chomsky is screamingly wrong on the major issues he has tackled. In whitewashing the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge, writes Steven Morris, Chomsky dismisses eyewitness accounts of horrific atrocities; Eli Lehrer shows Chomsky engaging in similar legerdemain in forwarding the theory of a conspiratorial corporate media in the United States. Throughout, Chomsky is shown to be a master of bald assertion, whose incantations cannot survive a basic reality check. “Chomsky weaves his malicious fantasies with the skill of Thomas Mann’s Mario the Magician, a famous fascist prototype,” write David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh; his “hypnotic power derives from the impression that his bizarre text is based on actual sources books, arts & manners like the New York Times, and that the reality he is busily inventing can be decoded only by intellectual wizards like himself.” To read this fine book is to receive an unsparing view of what lies behind the Chomsky curtain.