When the gods fall to intellectual dementia, they fall hard. Chomsky was one of mine because of his Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship essay on the intellectual suppression of the anarchosyndicalist revolution in the Spanish Civil War, the subject of my oral history BA thesis I met Chomsky at a lecture he gave about the engineering of consent at MIT in 1977. Back then he would never have conflated the engineering of consent with totalitarian control. Now he's become a de facto Russian useful idiot, like the Stalinists of the '30s and 40s he rightfully excoriated. It's as if Orwell had joined the party of his jailers. Without Chomsky's intellectual dementia cover, the Code Pinkos and other appeasing genocide apologists of Russified Whataboutistan would be far less influential.

The lesson: never abandon critical thinking and have no intellectual gods.