The linguist and political scientist disagreed with Ezra Levant, the Canadian conservative host of The Rebel, that the American left had abandoned its free speech ideals of the 1960s and 1970s, when demonstrators were calling for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War.
“The struggle for free speech in the 60s and 70s was an effort to break through constraints against what could be articulated and what people could hear,” Chomsky said.
He also disagreed with Levant’s suggestion that leftists used free speech as a “temporary weapon” to advocate social change decades ago, but are enforcing politically correct speech codes now that they are in a position of authority.
“I don’t think that’s true at all,” Chomsky said. “The constraints on breaking through to the public are greater than they were, or at least comparable, to what they were in the 60s.”
He dismissed Levant’s concerns about campus speech codes as “a dramatic exaggeration,” but Chomsky said corporations placed “pretty rigid” restrictions on the terms of debate.
“It is a very marginal phenomenon on campus which barely exists, but there’s a major phenomenon, and that is the virtual monopolization of the major media by private, corporate entities which radically restricts the opportunity for expressing opinion and providing information,” Chomsky said. “It’s true that you can get around it in peripheral ways, but this is an enormous constraint of freedom of speech.”
He said the First Amendment offered protection from government constraints on free speech, but not from corporate limitations.
“Nothing prevents me from saying in the United States that the Iraq War was the worst crime in the 21st Century, but I can reach only very marginal audiences on what is pretty obvious fact,” Chomsky said. “You can say in the United States within the mainstream that the Iraq War was a strategic blunder, as Obama did, but try saying that it’s a crime of aggression of a kind that led to the hanging of Nazi criminals at Nuremberg. Try to write an op-ed about that.”
According to Chomsky, the general public relies almost entirely on limited information rationed out by corporations, which he said tilts the political spectrum overwhelming toward the right.
“Obama is a man of the center-right,” Chomsky said. “It’s called the left in the United States, but that’s an indication of the narrowness of the spectrum.”
Some elected officials do occasionally reflect his own views, Chomsky said.
“There have been times when [left-leaning Independent Senator] Bernie Sanders has expressed views very close to mine on foreign policy, [and] there are times when [Republican Senator] Rand Paul did,” he said.
