Talk:Noam Chomsky/Archive 17

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Steve Bannon

A June 28, 2019 text message from Steve Bannon to Jeffrey Epstein reads: "We are set for Noam on Saturday." This seems to indicate that Noam Chomsky (a lifelong member of the political left) was meeting with Steve Bannon, a well-known member of the far right. This seems rather strange and paradoxical, and we should probably add a mention of it to this Wikipedia article. Source: https://ellieleonard.substack.com/p/the-epstein-bannon-emails-2019-p2 ~2026-72428-6 (talk) 16:24, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Do you have any proposed text that you want to add, supported by reliable sources? Substacks are not reliable sources. – Muboshgu (talk) 17:08, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

I wonder how many people Chomsky has met and done interviews for in his 70 plus-year career, and how many appointment books all around the country and around the world have an entry, "Set for Noam on Saturday." Maybe 5 to 7,000 or so? If you add this one for Bannon, I would like to add the other 6,999 if that’s okay with you. Mathglot (talk) 23:29, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

Collapsed contentious opinion per not a forum.

I know some of his disciples are scratching their heads over this, but Chomsky isn't just on the 'political left,' but the far-left. And Bannon is on the far-right. There's a horseshoe theory in political science which views the ideological spectrum as shaped more like a horseshoe than a straight line, where the far-left and far-right are closer to each other than either side is to their respective center (in the same vein, moderates align more with each other than their left/right extremes). Both Chomsky and Bannon are populists, and if they agree on nothing else, they share an anti-system ideology, a view that American institutions are fundamentally corrupt. I know, it's a hard pill to swallow if you read Jacobin type literature, but outside of that bubble, there's good reason why most experts of geopolitics, economics and political science see Chomsky as an intellectually slimy propagandist, much like Bannon.

Of course there's also the possibility that Chomsky and Bannon were just acquaintances, and that Chomsky has had 1000s of such relationships after being alive for nearly a century. Either way, this does not seem particularly noteworthy. ~2026-79374-2 (talk) 23:39, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

Collapsed debate per not a battleground.

79374 wrote:

most experts of geopolitics, economics and political science see Chomsky as an intellectually slimy propagandist...

Shall we add {{citation needed}} to that, or do you think that your statement is so obvious that we can just go ahead and add that statement to the article, and find a citation later if someone challenges it? Ha-ha, just kidding; let's see what the experts really say. I checked Google scholar for the first 20 pages of results for the query, "chomsky is a", to see how often the word propaganda would come up anywhere in the search result abstract. There were about a dozen abstracts among the 200 sources that have the word propaganda in it. Nearly all of those were references to Chomsky's books, such as Propaganda and the Public Mind and Media Control, The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. However, one abstract did have this:

"Chomsky is a global propaganda corporation. His repetitive and cheap propaganda are published by his supporters in the Zionist media and spread around the world."

That is pretty amusing, considering that Chomsky is an anti-Zionist who considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid, and criticizes U.S. support for Israel. From this examination of 200 search result abstracts at Google Scholar, we can see that every time the word propaganda is used in connection with a description of Chomsky, it is referring to Chomsky's analysis of propaganda, not that he is a propagandist himself; with the one exception noted. From this I conclude that your highlighted statement above is so far from the truth as to be an extreme outlier and not worthy of inclusion in the article per the "tiny minority" quoted in WP:DUEWEIGHT. Either you have no idea what experts actually say about Chomsky and are talking through your hat, or you do have a good idea, but you say the opposite anyway as a way of influencing others to follow your pre-baked opinion, devoid of fact. Something that we call, um, propaganda.

Now that we have established that, please read WP:NOTFORUM, and be aware that this page is about discussing how to improve the article, not to expound your cockamamie theories about what "most experts of geopolitics, economics and political science" say, when obviously they say nothing of the kind. If you want to bloviate about your personal theories about Chomsky, there are forums for that: try Medium, or Facebook; Wikipedia is not the the place for it. Mathglot (talk) 02:22, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Okay, I'll rephrase my statement: respected academics in the aforementioned fields generally do not refer to Chomsky as a 'propagandist,' because respectable academics generally ignore Chomsky and his harebrained ideas. Perhaps he bonded with Bannon over their similar experiences of marginalization by mainstream academics, just like he found common ground with Epstein over media treatment. Crackpots pushing fringe theories are always demanding respect from academics, when none is owed them. ~2026-79912-6 (talk) 17:18, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

It was already explained to you that this page is exclusively for discussing how to improve the article. It is not a place to have a college bull session or to debate your personal theories. Please stop disrupting this page. If you persist, you will receive escalating warnings on your Talk page. Mathglot (talk) 18:40, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Something I noticed, thought it might be of interest ping Mathglot and Muboshgu about IP editor ~2026-72428-6 who created this topic on 2 Feb 2026. Editor is new to Wikipedia, and after adding this section, they went on to quickly add five other very similar BLP talk page entries (all were tagged with "Possible BLP issue or vandalism") the same evening, see here. Don't think it is worthy of ANI as it ceased after that.--FeralOink (talk) 08:55, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Daniel Everett & Pirahã Controversy

Unless I'm mistaken, this article contains zero reference to this debacle. I'm in favor of including a section on this.

Chomsky appeared in the documentary "Grammar of Happiness" and has some very, shall we say, interesting quotes – which, just to be clear, that documentary kind of paints him in a negative light and Everett in a positive light and I don't necessarily agree with much of how the topic in general is presented in that documentary. Nevertheless, I feel the documentary's mere existence and Chomsky's presence in it should indicate that the whole Pirahã controversy deserves at least a mention in this article.

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Some relevant notes I compiled back when studying this in a university anthropology class (containing a lot of my own opinion, I recognize this is not the WP neutral voice and am not proposing my college notes be taken as a draft, but to provide some sources I collected at the time and thoughts that are relevant to the inclusion of this section):

• In linguistic terms, what Everett is getting at is that Pirahã utterly lacks hypotaxis, or said another way, only exhibits parataxis; or said another way, that Pirahã has no subordination. The documentary calls this “recursion” and explains it well enough.

• Furthermore, I’d like to just go ahead and quote an abstract from Geoffrey K. Pullum on the topic (2024):
  • “Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues attempt to represent Everett as having dishonestly concealed earlier evidence of hypotaxis in the language. They are not successful. Later attempts by others to exhibit self-embedding in Pirahã syntax fare even worse. The issue has little general importance for linguistics, since nothing important about language or humanity hangs on whether an upper bound on sentence length exists. In pursuing the matter, Everett’s accusers have done him a gross injustice.”
    • Full text PDF: https://zenodo.org/records/12665907/files/434-GibsonPoliak-2024-2.pdf?download=1
  • As the Pullum quote may illustrate, the idea that hypotaxis is a fundamental idea in linguistics, or indeed a fundamental part of Universal Grammar, is a weird claim.
    • Clearly there was really some drama between Chomsky and Everett over this but it seems like the wider linguistic community thought this was all kind of silly.
    • Chomsky's specific ideas are far from universally upheld or foundational (instead, the idea that there is a universal grammar has had some staying power, but Chomsky’s idea of what that looks like has been largely abandoned well before the whole Pirahã thing) and Everett seems to be attacking a strawman of sorts. Or at least, this is the impression I get of Everett from this documentary.

• Furthermore, I’d just like to go ahead and quote an interview of Noam Chomsky (in 2006, 9 years before the documentary). In response to the question: “To what extent does the language of the Pirahã tribe (which has no subordinate clauses, numbers or descriptive words) invalidate your work on linguistics?”
  • "The reports are interesting, but do not bear on the work of mine (along with many others). No one has proposed that languages must have subordinate clauses, number words, etc. Many structures of our language (and presumably that of the Pirahã) are rarely if ever used in ordinary speech because of extrinsic constraints."
    • https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/noam-chomsky-you-ask-the-questions-5330371.html#:~:text=To%20what%20extent,of%20extrinsic%20constraints.
  • It seems like a lot of the controversy was not started by Chomsky himself, but rather by belligerent dogmatists in his camp. Pullum details this elaborately in the chapter I linked earlier.
    • That said, Chomsky did call Everett a charlatan, and expressed views on recursion in this very documentary that are directly contradictory to these words; so I have no idea when he transitioned from the rather sane opinion on display in this interview to the hostile views expressed at other times.

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I understand if the consensus is that most of the more in-depth information should instead go on Daniel Everett's page, but I definitely think there ought to be at least a subsection or short paragraph within this article that has a reference like:

See also: Daniel Everett and Pirahã language

at the beginning of it.

I'm willing to draft the section if we're agreed on including it (and might do so either way later).

Saturnine (talk) 22:14, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Do you have any WP:RS that demonstrate that WP:WEIGHT would be appropriate? Because that one question and answer in that Independent piece doesn't meet that. – Muboshgu (talk) 23:46, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

I was going to make essentially the same point as Muboshgu just did, i.e., it is a WP:DUEWEIGHT issue. This article is a biography of Noam Chomsky, who has revolutionized the world of linguistics, and made major contributions to political comment and analysis. The article can only summarize the high points of a lifetime of achievements from 40,000 feet. Does the issue you raise qualify as one of the most important issues of his long career, and exhaustive coverage in books, journals, and the press? I think the answer to that question is clear: the section you propose may deserve a write-up in some article, but probably not this one, per due weight.

Did you know that there are 26 articles that are so centrally about Chomsky that they have Chomsky in the title, and 2,000 other articles that mention or cite him? Chomsky is nothing if not ubiquitous and controversial, and has dustups on all sorts of issues covered in linguistic journals, and there certainly isn't room for them here. If there is an article where it would fit and there are sufficient citations for it, by all means add it there. If not, maybe you could create a new article, like maybe, Linguistic controversies involving Noam Chomsky (possibly a list article), and start it off with this issue, and add a couple more so it isn't the only one. Given that the wider linguistic community thought this was all kind of silly, I question whether it rates more than a sentence or two in an a stand-alone list article about Chomsky controversies. What do you think? Mathglot (talk) 21:31, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

Chomsky is nothing if not ubiquitous and controversial, and has dustups on all sorts of issues covered in linguistic journals, and there certainly isn't room for them here.

This is a good point.

Given that the wider linguistic community thought this was all kind of silly, I question whether it rates more than a sentence or two in an a stand-alone list article about Chomsky controversies.

So to clarify what I had meant by that point, this controversy did make a big stir involving a number of linguists and all too many published papers. The controversy is still being taught about in university linguistics classes and in university anthropology classes in the US - I say that from personal experience, and if desired I can link to the textbooks said classes required as sources. At the same time, however, the controversy is taught about seemingly primarily as an example of how not to conduct academic discourse (as well as possibly to dissemble much of generative linguistics and universal grammar). The fiasco was silly, but it did make waves and continues to cause discussions in lecture halls. This was the main reason I thought a section on this might be appropriate directly in the Chomsky article – as a student learning about this and looking for more information, I remember being surprised to find zero mention of it or anything related to it on this page.

Aside: I don't have a ton of time for this at present and don't check my Wiki notifications all that often, so I apologize about sporadic activity and delayed responses.

Saturnine (talk) 21:02, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

I've often stated that we need a bit more than just "As a result of his influence, there are dueling camps of Chomskyan and non-Chomskyan linguistics" - this really ought to be at least a few sentences, enough for the reader to get an idea of how much Chomskyan linguistics is or is not the dominant paradigm.--Eldomtom2 (talk) 17:29, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Chomsky and Epstein

See https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2026/02/noam-chomskys-reputation-will-never-recover-from-the-epstein-files ~2026-10457-26 (talk) 17:07, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

The New Statesman is a leftist magazine. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ~2026-10457-26 (talk) 17:09, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Is there an edit you're proposing with this source? – Muboshgu (talk) 18:25, 16 February 2026 (UTC)