Noam Chomsky’s take on America’s coronavirus response, in hands of ‘megalomaniac’ Trump
- Left-wing thinker Noam Chomsky says we will recover from pandemic, but not deleterious effects of global warming
- He warns of ‘enormous’ amount of potential control and surveillance in the future
The United States is on a chaotic path with no federal plan against the coronavirus pandemic as it reduces public health funding and ignores the advances of climate change, according to activist scholar Noam Chomsky, considered the founder of modern linguistics.
What follows are extracts, edited for clarity, from an AFP interview with the 91-year-old leftist intellectual, who has authored more than 100 books and is currently a professor at the University of Arizona.
For two months he’s been confined in Tucson with his Brazilian wife Valeria, his dog and a parrot who can say “sovereignty” in Portuguese.
Question: How do you read the current situation in the United States, where coronavirus has killed more residents than any other nation in the world?
Answer: There’s no coherent leadership. It’s chaotic. The presidency, the White House, is in the hands of a sociopathic megalomaniac who’s interested in nothing but his own power, electoral prospects – doesn’t care what happens to the country, the world.
The president himself has said that it’s none of his business. He’s said that the federal government can’t do anything.