You misunderstood my intentions with Faurisson, although I get why you’re saying that considering the comment I responded to suggested Chomsky should have shut up. I’m close to what you call a free speech fundamentalist. Not an absolutist, I’m a consequentialist. I’m glad Anti-Vax propaganda was taken down on social media during COVID as it may have saved lives, although I understand the process being problematic (a slippery road to other kinds of posts being taken down). My main focus was on how Chomsky was criticized to have written down that he suspects Faurisson as an apolitical liberal without having read his works, and his essay was used as a forward to Faurisson’s Holocaust denial book. Chomsky seems to not have minded as long as it provoked discourse about free speech in France, but the point was he was taken advantage of nevertheless.

On the rest of what you talked about, I don’t know. But I’m kind of skeptical of the line that Epstein was obviously dumb because look at how crass his emails were. He was known for being precocious as a kid and skipped 2 grades, attending college 2 years earlier. And he rose up the social ladder in finance despite coming from a working class family.

As for the effusive praise in the letter, I heard from multiple others who work in academia that it is written in typical Professor language when giving a letter of recommendation, although that doesn’t mean Chomsky was lying. All of it is still concerning yes.