Noam Chomsky, the renowned scholar and MIT professor emeritus, said people who didn’t vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to block a Donald Trump presidency made a “bad mistake.”
Chomsky told Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan there’s a “moral issue” in voting “against the greater evil” ― Trump, in this case ― even if you don’t like the other candidate. But he also said there was a factual question regarding this year’s candidates, pointing out Trump and Clinton’s “very different” records.
“I didn’t like Clinton at all, but her positions are much better than Trump’s on every issue I can think of,” Chomsky said.
Chomsky said in January he’d vote for Clinton if he lived in a swing state, despite his support for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who ran against Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary.
“Every Republican candidate is either a climate change denier or a skeptic who says we can’t do it,” Chomsky said. “What they are saying is, ‘Let’s destroy the world.’ Is that worth voting against? Yeah.”
Chomsky criticized Trump in May, calling his refusal to accept the science behind climate change “a death knell for the [human] species.” Chomsky has also been critical of the Republican Party, saying the GOP’s policies pose “serious danger to human survival.”
Chomsky told The Huffington Post in February, Trump’s success could be attributed to his ability to appeal to “deep feelings of anger, fear, frustration, hopelessness, probably among sectors like those that are seeing an increase in mortality, something unheard of apart from war and catastrophe.”