In October 2021, Noam Chomsky, who had been documenting the manufacture of consent for fifty years, declared that unvaccinated people should have the decency to remove themselves from the community. This reversal does not invalidate his thought. It is, on the contrary, its most troubling verification, since his own concepts are what best allow us to understand it.
« They should have the decency to remove themselves from the community »
In October 2021, a video interview with Noam Chomsky circulated on the internet, a conversation with the YouTube channel Primo Radical. He said that people who refused the Covid vaccine should not be forced to take it, but that their isolation should be insisted upon. « They should have the decency to remove themselves from the community. » Asked the practical question of how these people would get food, he answered that it was « actually their problem », before adding that if they became truly destitute, their survival would have to be secured, just as it is for people in jail. He was 92 years old.
I have never gotten over hearing this. Statements of this violence could be heard every day in that period. These came from the author of Manufacturing Consent, from the thinker who had taught entire generations how those in power obtain the assent of populations through fear, and that is what struck me. In this interview, he brought no information, no analysis, no critical distance. He repeated the doxa of the moment, with the prison comparison added. The question has been working on me ever since, and it took me years to get down to it, that is, to move past the stupefaction and try to understand.
To speak the truth and to expose lies
Noam Chomsky was born in 1928 in Philadelphia. A linguist at MIT, he transformed his discipline in 1957 with Syntactic Structures, in which he argues that the language faculty is innate in human beings. The Vietnam war made him a committed intellectual. In February 1967, he published in the New York Review of Books an essay that would remain a founding text, « The Responsibility of Intellectuals ». Its thesis holds in one sentence: it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. He specifies that this responsibility is proportional to privilege. Intellectuals in Western countries have the time, the resources, the training and the political liberty that make it possible to seek the truth behind official discourse, and from this comfort arises a duty that others do not have.
His entire public life was built on this demand. A self-declared anarchist, in the tradition of libertarian socialism, he held for sixty years a position of distrust toward instituted powers, that of the American state first, whose wars and lies he documented, that of the major media next. He counts among the most cited intellectuals in the world, and generations of activists were formed by reading him.
The five filters of the propaganda model
In 1988, with the economist Edward S. Herman, he published Manufacturing Consent. In it they describe a « propaganda model » that accounts for how the major media operate in liberal democracies, without resorting to the hypothesis of a conspiracy. Information passes through five filters before reaching the public:
- the concentration of media ownership;
- dependence on advertising;
- privileged reliance on official sources;
- reprisals against dissenting voices;
- the ideology of the common enemy, which was anticommunism when the book came out and which Chomsky himself later updated, since fear can attach itself to other figures depending on the era.
I have presented this model in more detail in the article The Mythology of Truth.
The point of the model that seems to me the strongest, and the most useful for what follows, holds in this: journalists do not need to be dishonest for the overall result to be propaganda. Herman and Chomsky insist on the sincerity of the professionals. The selection happens upstream, on the people, the subjects and the admissible frames, so that everyone can believe in complete good faith that they are thinking freely. The constraint bears on no one in particular, it has taken the form of the shared framework in which everyone works.
Freedom of expression for people we despise
In 1979, Chomsky signed a petition in defense of Robert Faurisson, a French academic who denied the existence of the gas chambers, then wrote in 1980 a text on freedom of expression that would be used as the preface to one of Faurisson’s books. The scandal in France was immense, and part of the French intellectual world never forgave him. Chomsky never varied on the substance: defending freedom of expression only makes sense if we defend it for the opinions we find odious, otherwise we are only defending our own comfort. He said it again in 1992, in the documentary based on Manufacturing Consent, in a formula I quote in the article Presence and freedom of expression: « If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. »
The man who paid that price to defend the right of a Holocaust denier to speak thus proposed, forty years later, the social exclusion of people whose only fault was to refuse an injection. Bringing the two scenes together, we can measure the reversal. In 2021, Chomsky explicitly refuses to let the state constrain bodies, faithful in this to his libertarian grammar, and it is the community that he asks to exclude. The doxa entered his mind dressed in his own concepts, speaking his language, and that is probably why he did not recognize it.
The propaganda model applied to its author
My hypothesis is that his own concepts describe best what happened to him. The third filter first, reliance on official sources. In 2021, Chomsky was 92 years old. Elderly people were at once the most threatened by the virus, the most isolated by health policies and the first recipients of the discourse of fear. His information, during that period, could hardly pass through anything other than the very channels he had described in his model, the institutional press, the health authorities, the words of accredited experts. The fifth filter next, the ideology of the common enemy. The virus, then unvaccinated people, came to stand in the place that anticommunism occupied in the 1988 model, that of the common threat around which the group closes ranks and before which critical examination is suspended. I have described in Critical Thinking Against Archetypes the scapegoat mechanism theorized by René Girard, and in Political awareness and political conscience how a person can pass from political awareness to political good conscience without noticing. Chomsky seems to me to be the limit case of these mechanisms, the one who tests their theory on his own person.
For the propaganda model is a structural model. Nowhere do Herman and Chomsky claim that intelligence protects from propaganda, nor that having been lucid yesterday protects tomorrow. They describe a system that runs on sincere people, convinced that they think for themselves. In a structural model, there is no exception for its author. If the 1988 model is right, it also holds for the man who built it, and his reversal of 2021, far from refuting the book, is a verification of it that no one would have wished for.
Czesław Miłosz had observed a neighboring mechanism among the Polish writers who rallied to Stalinism. In The Captive Mind, published in 1953, he shows that the finest minds did not submit out of cowardice but out of a sincere need for meaning and belonging, and he describes, with the image of the Murti-Bing pill borrowed from the novelist Witkiewicz, the relief found by those who swallow the obligatory doctrine, who stop being torn and recover harmony with their era. It seems to me that the Covid period offered intellectuals a relief of the same order, that of being on the side of care and reason, at a moment when doubting was very costly.
Let me be precise about the status of what I am advancing. I do not know Noam Chomsky’s inner state in 2021, nor what he was reading, nor who was speaking to him. My hypothesis, drawn from his own concepts, is that age, isolation and fear made him the ideal target of the apparatus he had described. Other explanations are possible, an age-related decline for instance, which can be neither established nor ruled out from the outside.
The work outlives the man who gave in
Chomsky’s writings from before that period remain what they were, formative, rigorous, indispensable. I laid down this principle in the article Political awareness and political conscience: a man’s reversal does not invalidate what his books demonstrate, for demonstrations do not hold by the authority of their author but by their own solidity. Chomsky’s case adds something to this principle. His work does not merely outlive his reversal, it allows us to explain it. The tools he forged work on him. It is hard to imagine stronger proof of the value of a body of thought than its capacity to account for the failure of the very person who produced it.
For us readers, a critical body of work protects no one, neither the person who writes it nor those who read it. To believe oneself protected by one’s critical culture is already to have lowered one’s guard, and that is perhaps what happened to Chomsky, whom half a century of lucidity gave every reason not to be wary of himself.
One clarification, finally, which is a matter of respect. Noam Chomsky suffered a massive stroke in June 2023 that deprived him of most of his speech. He lives today in Brazil, surrounded by care. He will not answer this text, nor any other. I am therefore writing about a man who can no longer defend himself, and I want to do so without contempt. What I am trying to understand through him is a mechanism that concerns us all, not the trial of a sick old man.
Anthony Fauci’s silence, more than a hundred times
On July 29, 2026, Anthony Fauci, who was one of the main officials in charge of the American health response during the Covid period, appeared under subpoena before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee of the United States Senate, chaired by Senator Rand Paul. He had testified more than two hundred and fifty times before Congress over the course of his career without ever invoking the Fifth Amendment, which protects against self-incrimination. That day, surrounded by half a dozen lawyers, he invoked it more than a hundred times, in answer to every question, including when the committee chairman asked him to confirm that a folder was sitting in front of him, including when he was asked the color of his tie. His lawyer, who kept trying to intervene, was escorted out of the room. Joe Biden had granted him a preemptive pardon in early 2025, but perjury committed during the hearing itself would be a new fact, outside its protection, and this is the risk his lawyers wanted to remove. Republican senators announced a vote to hold him in contempt of Congress.
This hearing was itself a spectacle, organized by political adversaries of Fauci who expected images from it, and Democratic senators denounced a trap. It belongs to the political fiction I analyzed in Political Fiction, the scripting of the public’s emotions, by both camps. Once this theater is recognized as theater, one fact remains: the man who embodied the official source during the Covid period, the one whose word carried such authority that doubting it earned the accusation of conspiracy theorizing, now chooses legal silence on every one of his past actions.
I see a direct link between this silence and the video interview of 2021. The third filter of Herman and Chomsky’s model describes the dependence of information on official sources. Anthony Fauci was that official source par excellence, and Chomsky, in 2021, consented to the words of the official source, the very one we learn to distrust by reading his 1988 book. Five years later, the source refuses to answer, to every question, even the most trivial, in order to protect itself, and in this silence we can measure what the trust then demanded of populations was worth. I have described in What fear did to us what these policies, carried out in the name of care, undid in health, in the bonds between people and in collective trust.
The compromise of the man who had described it
In the article Philosophy of compromise, I propose to look at compromise not as a moral fault to be judged but as a condition of existence to be understood. The case of Noam Chomsky is perhaps the most complete illustration of it that I know. A man devoted his life to describing the manufacture of consent, and his consent was manufactured. He did not notice, and showing why we do not notice is the very heart of his theory. Judging him teaches nothing, while from understanding him we retain at least this: no acquired lucidity dispenses with present vigilance, and the only protection, always partial, consists in knowing oneself unprotected.
This is also why his books remain to be read. They allow us to understand what happened to him, what happened to so many intellectuals during that period, and what could happen to us, we who perhaps believe ourselves, at this very moment, on the right side of our own critical thinking.
