Photograph Source: Department of the Interior. National Park Service. National Capital Parks. – Public Domain
What sins can and cannot be forgiven?
Earlier this year, the organization Americans Who Tell the Truth (AWTT) announced, “Taking Down Noam Chomsky’s Portrait,” literally canceling Noam Chomsky from its portrait gallery. This is no surprise. It is a surprise that AWTT deems Dwight Eisenhower’s CIA coup-approval sins to be forgivable, and he remains worthy of an AWTT portrait. Furthermore, AWTT inconsistently applies its “Chomsky cancellation criteria” by continuing to display portraits of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Mark Twain; and AWTT gives the Left’s harshest indicter of Chomsky, Chris Hedges, a pass for his very different sins, and his portrait remains.
AWTT is a nonprofit organization founded in the wake of the Bush/Cheney administration’s lies about the reasons for attacking Iraq. AWTT’s website states that “The organization is dedicated to promoting civic engagement, social justice, democracy, and environmental stewardship” and its “portraits and narratives highlight citizens who courageously address issues of social, environmental, and economic fairness.”
Earlier in 2026 in CounterPunch, I detailed Noam Chomsky’s personal failings with regards to sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein (“Malcolm X, Noam Chomsky, Sexual Predator Associations, and Legacy Twists”), and I will return to what is fact versus conjecture. But even the most damning speculation about Chomsky’s state of mind does not rise to the disgracefully damaging orchestrations and actions by Eisenhower, whose portrait AWTT maintains.
Apparently, Eisenhower gets his portrait because of one truth that he uttered in his January 1961 farewell address, warning against the influence of the military-industrial complex, however, while in office, Eisenhower unleashed CIA coups against democratically elected governments.
As most CounterPunch readers know, Eisenhower approved the coup in Iran in which the democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh was removed from power and replaced by the Shah. In 1953, Eisenhower gave presidential approval for Operation Ajax, the very first CIA coup. That coup led to the dictatorship by the Shah, which ultimately led to the 1979 Iranian revolution, followed by an oppressive theocracy. All this suffering can be traced back to the CIA coup which Eisenhower approved.
Eisenhower also approved of the first CIA coup in Latin America in Guatemala in 1954 (the U.S. had intervened in Latin America many times before 1954, but those earlier interventions were not CIA-orchestrated coups). Similar to Mosaddegh, the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz wanted Guatemalans rather than foreign corporations to benefit from their own country’s wealth, and Eisenhower ordered the CIA to overthrow Arbenz. And then in 1959, before he left office, Eisenhower approved the CIA plan to invade Cuba. Thanks to Eisenhower, CIA coups against democratically elected governments around the world that were unfriendly to U.S. corporations were normalized in U.S. foreign policy.
Now compare Eisenhower’s sins to those of Noam Chomsky.
The facts tell us that Chomsky had a stupid and embarrassing friendship with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. However, neither AWTT nor even Chomsky’s harshest critics such as Chris Hedges accuse Chomsky of himself being a sexual predator.
As I note in the earlier CounterPunch article, just as Malcolm X’s biographer Manning Marable tells us that Malcolm X should have known that Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam—who the African American Historical Society reports “impregnated seven women, including several of his teenaged secretaries, and fathered thirteen children outside of his marriage”—was a sexual predator and a monster, Noam Chomsky should have known that Jeffrey Epstein was a sexual predator and a monster. However, in contrast to what Marable and many of us conclude about Malcolm X—who I am happy to see AWTT also celebrates as a truth teller—Chris Hedges concludes that Chomsky not only should have known the truth of Epstein, but he did know and “he did not care”; however, this is speculation, not fact, about Chomsky’s state of mind.
Hedges himself is celebrated in the AWTT portrait gallery, despite the fact that in the New Republic in 2014, journalist Christopher Ketcham documents Hedges’s plagiarism (“The Troubling Case of Chris Hedges: Pulitzer Winner. Lefty Hero. Plagiarist.”). Five days after this exposé was published, the New Republic published Hedges’s response to Ketcham’s charges, which were followed by Ketcham’s and the New Republic’s disputations of Hedges’s response. As far as I know, none of the parties have filed libel suits; however, from this exchange, if I were on the jury, I would find Hedges not only guilty of plagiarism but dishonest in his attacks on Ketcham and the New Republic.
AWTT also celebrates Muhammad Ali—whom I greatly admire as a truth teller. However, worse than Chomsky, Ali maintained his relationship with sexual predator Elijah Muhammad after the ugly realities of Elijah Muhammad were publicly exposed by Malcolm X; and then Ali abandoned his friend Malcolm X after Malcolm X was driven out of the Nation of Islam, an abandonment for which Ali ultimately stated he regretted.
Given the AWTT’s rationale for the cancellation of Chomsky, it is also curious that it celebrates Mark Twain who had, as Linda Simon in the Paris Review described in 2017, a “disturbing passion for collecting young girls”—age ten to sixteen whom Twain called his “angelfish.” This passion is further detailed in Ron Chernow’s 2025 biography of Twain in which Chernow concludes, “Twain pursued teenage girls with a strange passion that, while it always remained chaste, is likely to cause extreme discomfort nowadays. . . . What made the angelfish obsession so disturbing was the strange intensity of his involvement with the girls.”
Neither Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Mark Twain, nor Noam Chomsky have been accused of being sexual predators, and they, along with Chris Hedges, can all be celebrated as “truth tellers” in many areas. However, all are personally flawed, as are damn near all human beings; as all human beings have emotional and ego needs that can result in embarrassing errors in judgment.
Why does the cancellation criteria of AWTT—and much of the Left—trouble me? I have seen how the criteria of a specific type of personal failing that is inconsistently applied while ignoring horrific policies and actions—as in the case of Eisenhower—has diminished the number of Left activists. I’ve talked with many young people who greatly value social and economic justice but tell me that they avoid public life and activism rather than subjecting themselves to Left cancellation humiliation for a poor judgment in their personal life. In simplest terms, they are reluctant to join a team that is so unforgiving for personal failings and which is inconsistently and unfairly punitive. The resulting shrinking Left activism has been useful for the Right, authoritarianism, and Trump insanity, which have been met by relatively weak resistance. And so an already unjust and dehumanized society has grown increasingly more so.
