Chomsky’s followers are not as powerful as they used to be so you can say this sort of opinion without losing your job as a linguist. That said, this objection

Chomsky’s followers are not as powerful as they used to be so you can say this sort of opinion without losing your job as a linguist. That said, this objection does not directly contradict Graham’s point. There are issues with Chomsky’s theories, but they are non-obvious and we learned a lot along the way. Would it have been reasonable to have dismissed these theories out of hand? Maybe but we false positives and false negatives exist as a trade off, and we would miss things if we try to lower our false positive rate too aggressively.