Books: Diary of an Anti-Chomskyte

Noam Chomsky: The Last Totalitarian

Michael J. Totten

My friend and colleague Benjamin Kerstein has published a number of books, and this summer he released what is perhaps the most blistering critique of the radical leftist ideologue Noam Chomsky ever to appear in book form. It’s called Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite and is a collection of essays, reviews, and take-downs that originally appeared on his blog of the same name during a three-year period from 2004 through 2007.

I read most of the material in this book when it first appeared, and now I have it all in one place in trade paperback on my bookshelf. Kerstein and I discussed Chomsky and his new book last week.

MJT: What possessed you to spend three years writing about Noam Chomsky?

Benjamin Kerstein: That's a huge question, and lest people start thinking I'm completely obsessive, I should note that I was doing a lot of other things at the same time. The short answer is 9/11. I grew up in an extremely liberal community where Chomsky was very popular, and as soon as 9/11 happened I knew that all those people I used to know would go straight to him in order to find out what they should think about it, and what they would come back with would be very nasty indeed. I regret that I was proven absolutely correct in that. It was really a disgraceful display by some very disgraceful people. Chomsky had become quite marginal in the years before that, but after 9/11 the left disinterred him and put him back on a pedestal. The New York Times, for example, ran a ridiculously fawning profile of him. He was being mainstreamed again and I felt strongly that someone had to say something.

I like to think that I and the others who were speaking out against him managed to make a small difference. For years he was spewing this stuff out with basically no opposition at all. I hope we managed to give people some material that helped them apply some critical thinking to his claims.

MJT: Can you boil down your case against him into a couple of sentences or paragraphs?

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