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Assange is a man of what I once called the Chomskyan left and what modern critics call the regressive left.

But concerned platitudes about the need to redress liberal failures miss that Putin, Trump, Farage, Assange and their many imitators are not always brainwashing their followers in a Chomskyan fashion.

Some languages — the Amazonian Pirahã, for in­­stance — seem to get by without Chomskyan recursion.

So far, so survivalist/Swiss Family Robinson/Republican nightmare; but no, Ben is actually a Chomskyan libertarian leftist, and he puts no less emphasis upon his children’s intellectual development, educating them with everything he says and does.

Since writing the book, I have moved further from the Chomskyan notion that language is uniquely human to finding the basis of mental time travel even in the ability of rats to “replay” and perhaps “preplay” trajectories in spatial environments.