Nearly every theorist has been problematic in some regard. Chomsky ran cover for a pedophile. Hannah Arendt was a zionist. Karl Marx was kinda a sex pest. Virginia Held veers way off the rails codifying the ethics of care to say some stuff about authority and capital that no anarchist could possibly take seriously, especially in the context of that justice stems from caring for and loving others. bell hooks veered off the rails from giving real and fresh critiques of the ways feminism in the second wave and abandoned women of color to say some ignorant things about lower class Black men. Frederick Douglass didn't listen good to the women in his life. Harriet Tubman never wrote anything down because she was busy engaged in some of the most hardcore praxis you can possibly imagine and didn't think there was any real value to theory.

All your beloved favorites have some skeleton in their closet. You have to listen a person when they state their biases and come into it aware of the biases they're going to bear. You have to recognize when the worst person you know has a great point. If you spend your whole life purity testing everyone and everything you will find yourself only able to engage in things that have been approved by some hegemony. Your thinking will become rigid and stale.

I have terrible news for you about Prodhoun, Kropotkin, and Bakunin.

Yeah I'm aware 😞. Hence why we should read these texts critically and skeptically (every text in every field of endeavor forever, actually) with a historical understanding of the author's flaws and biases. In my view, these thinkers actually made original contributions to anarchist thought, unlike Chomsky with the exception of Manufacturing Consent. Frankly, I actually do think that, unless you are doing historical research into how anarchists used to think, we really need to recommend and consult contemporary works as much as possible. I.e., anarchism absolutely has a problem with the ghosts of problematic white men infecting our thoughts.

Most anarchists I know aren't obsessed with purity of character the same way hierarchical ideologies deify and airbrush their founders.

Neither am I...but Chomsky is absolutely beyond the pale. Like okay you don't have to be perfect or even that good, but come on... Chomsky's cooked.

it is possible for someone to roast and eat babies and still be able to say true and insightful things about politics. Moral failings do not make one politically impotent, and moral virtue is not a replacement for intellectual insight.

Yeah, some moral failings absolutely do, at least without some attempt at rehabilitation and fixing what was broken, for the simple reason that it demonstrates that the intellectual doesn't seriously believe in what they are arguing against. Again, we can absolutely disagree on the parameters of what moral failings makes someone politically impotent, but they certainly exist, e.g. roasting and eating babies... and I'm certain based on my perusals of the Epstein Files that Chomsky has provided one of the best practical examples in recent memory!