Chomsky is one of those writers who measures every word for its effect. So attempts to critique him generally go haywire because you never know if the word he just said was meant to manipulate or meant to express his actual view.
Chomsky was regarded as the most influential scholar of the 1960s ans 1970s. For decades people made the claim that Chomsky was the most cited living writer and claims that he was the most influential American writer.
I read some of his early works. Chomsky was an advocate of the idea that we needed intelligentsia that manipulated the public with language. I think that he is the source of many of the problems of our day.
Yes, he served the purposes of the elite, or he got nothing at all, imo.
What drives me is the normies' need to get their certifications.
'I was told I was smart, so I must be!'
Smdh.
I grew to dislike Chomsky after reading his academic works. I never read his political polemics. Chomsky supposedly created two "paradigm shifts." The first paradigm shift came when he declared to have discovered universals. His alleged universals weren't universal. I can't remember the second one. It was equally pathetic.
One thing that drove me crazy about the Chomsky cult was that admirers of Chomsky would rave on about how he was the most cited living academic and that Chomsky was the most influential scholar of the day.
Chomsky didn't just create one paradigm shift. He created two paradigm shifts! Maybe he created some paradigm shifts in politics. I think he has been pushing a contradictory ideology like "Libertarian Socialism."
Anyway scholars would praise Chomsky as being the most influential thinker of the day and In the next sentence they would frame Chomsky as a persecuted intellectual voice crying in the wilderness .... unheeded.
A person can't be both the most influential thinker of the day and be an obscure voice in the wilderness.
The same is true of Marx. Professors praise Marx as being the most cited economist in history. They then claim that Marx is an obscure voice that no-one as ever heeded.
No-one has ever read Marx. If no-one has read Marx; where did all the citations come from?