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Chomsky hasn't changed a bit

Chomsky hasn't changed a bit

Find something you love as much as Noam Chomsky loves running interference for authoritarian tyrants.

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Damian Penny
Jul 25, 2022
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Chomsky hasn't changed a bit
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Note to premium subscribers: if you’d been wondering what happened to the comment section, I had it turned off by mistake. My bad.

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Thanks to some readers who wrote in to let me know.


I’m seeing people point to this interview with momentarily famous comedian Russell Brand as proof that Noam Chomsky has gone full Grandpa Simpson in his later years, and I don’t know why. He was always like this:

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Chomsky: The US is living under a totalitarian culture much worse than Soviet Union Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German TV Today Americans are not permitted to hear what Russians are saying The US has imposed constraints on access to info beyond Soviets
6:29 PM ∙ Jul 22, 2022
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Well, at least he admits that the USSR was a totalitarian state. Better late than never.

Soviet citizens were indeed free to listen to Western radio broadcasts…after 1988, when Gorbachev stopped jamming them. Before then, you could pick them up without too much interference if you went somewhere outside the city limits, or something. Basically, you could listen to VOA or BBC in the same way that you might have been able to find Top Gear episodes on The Pirate Bay.

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