Princeton's Richard Falk called Khomeini's circle 'moderate' and 'progressive' — then got a UN appointment. Chomsky dismissed Cambodian genocide survivors as unreliable — then kept his MIT chair and advised Epstein. The same intellectual machinery that whitewashed theocracy and mass murder now labels Ezra Klein a white supremacist, proving that elite credentialing systems reward ideological purity over accuracy.
Read Top Post →In February 1979, Princeton’s Richard Falk told NYT readers Khomeini’s inner circle was ‘uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals.’ Within months: mass executions, forced veiling, the secular left crushed. By 2020, Falk was still calling the revolution ‘one of the great de-westernizing achievements of the last 75 years.’ The UN made him a Special Rapporteur. The institutional lesson: ideological alignment matters more than being right.
Mar 01, 2026 · 8 min
Students for Justice in Palestine accused Ezra Klein — co-founder of Vox, two-decade liberal voice — of being ‘an apologist of white supremacist views’ for speaking at a conference with Derek Thompson and a Republican governor. On Bluesky, Jesse Singal found ‘near-unanimous belief’ that Klein is ‘a firmly right-wing pundit.’ The same purity machinery that gave Khomeini and the Khmer Rouge intellectual cover now eats the left’s own most effective communicators.
Feb 01, 2026 · 3 min
