this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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Next edition of An Anarchist FAQ needs to scrub every mention of this fucking scumbag 🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Michael Parenti's Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media has always been better than Manufacturing Consent, which is what Chomsky is most known for anyways. Chomsky has always been terrible as a leftist. Highly recommend On Chomsky.
Honestly, even from a purely anarchist perspective, Chomsky had a lot of trash takes. Like I would have previously described him as an "anarcho"-liberal. Chomsky was really only useful in my view to convince liberals averse to communism to seek out other anarchists.
It's been on my reading list since I first found out that Chomsky's on the Epstein list. If you don't mind me asking, how does Parenti's book differ from Chomsky's in terms of the content?
The limits of Chomsky are in his rejection of dialectical materialism, as well as his liberalism, which you accurately call "anarcho-liberalism." This frame of analysis severely limits the extent of Chomsky's own analysis. Parenti isn't burdened by such a limitation. From On Chomsky:
All of this is a horrible butchering of Marxism, and easily verified as incorrect (such as the idea that Marx never used the word "dialectics:"
I actually did read On Chomsky. I was asking specifically about the contents of Inventing Reality vs Manufacturing Consent.
Parenti gets nearer to the truth by describing propaganda as fabricating a new version of reality, "alternative facts," while Chomsky focuses more on bias, minimization, and exaggeration. While Chomsky is correct on a lot of it, Parenti completes the thought, so to speak, leaving it more complete.
Awesome. I can't put a deadline on it since engineering school is a thing, but I'll get around to it eventually
No worries, and good luck on your studies!