Just like many Trump supporters, U.S. liberal intellectuals exist in a fantasy world in which a leading purveyor of “international terrorism” – the U.S. government – is perceived as a fundamentally benign force, Noam Chomsky told RT.

“Just as you can’t get the Republican mobs to admit that the election was lost, you can’t get liberal American intellectuals to recognize that the United States is a leading terrorist state,” Chomsky told RT’s, Chris Hedges.

The facts are that for almost the entirety of its history as a sovereign state, the U.S. has waged a war of aggression against somebody, Chomsky said. The so-called ‘War on Terror’, which Ronald Reagan made the focus of his foreign policy, was Washington dealing with “resistance to U.S. terrorism in Central America and also in South Africa.”

Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist by the US until 2008, long after the apartheid regime was dismantled. The U.S. clandestine war on Nicaragua was ruled by the International Court of Justice a breach of international law.

“What the Reagan administration was doing was the peak of terrorism by our own definitions,” Chomsky said. “But the New York Times ran an editorial saying we can dismiss the judgment of the court because it’s a hostile forum. Why is it a hostile forum? Because it condemned the U.S.”

Another victim of the U.S. is Cuba, which endured a decade-long blockade and a sustained U.S. campaign to undermine its government and cause an uprising. In the U.S., those actions are perceived as the CIA hatching silly plots to take away Fidel Castro’s beard. “It was not that, it was a serious terrorist war that almost led to the destruction of the world” with the Cuban missile crisis, Chomsky pointed out.