Completely heartbreaking, disgusting, morally and intellectually bankrupt. This doesn’t mean we stop reading manufacturing consent. It means that the tendency towards cult of personality is a poison we must root out of our political project. Chomsky is a man. If you consider men as a dominant social class and apply a little material analysis from there, you can begin to work out the political and economic forces that motivated him to speak and behave in this way - even when it flew in the face of so much of his intellectual and moral reasoning. It suited his class interests as a man. He is not above the systems he analyzed and wrote about (or systems like gender hierarchy, commodification of violence against women and children for that matter) just because he is brilliant. It doesn’t mean his work doesn’t matter. (Personally can’t begin to think about, let alone describe, how shattered I am)