A brief thread on Gilley et al. The one thing to keep in mind is that at the most basic level they have no qualifications or expertise in the fields to which they claim to be contributing. This is not about freedom of speech, it’s about basic academic standards. 1/

Gilley is a political scientist whose actual research focuses on modern China - which begs the question why @RLPGBooks thought he was the right person to edit a series on 'Anti-Colonialism'...2/

Jeff Fynn-Paul is an economic historian of medieval and early modern Spain who has now reinvented himself as a 'centrist' apologist for settler-expansion and a genocide-denier in The Spectator - which perhaps explains some of his more bizarre takes. 3/

Likewise Nigel Biggar, who is Prof of Moral and Pastoral Theology, but who passes as an expert on colonialism - despite the fact that his defence of Cecil Rhodes was made off the back of a couple of popular biographies and his was denied funding by Oxford Uni for his project. 4/

This is not about academic gate-keeping, because it is not actually an academic debate. Even I am not so arrogant as to think I'm suddenly qualified to make revisionist claims about modern China, the Iberian Peninsula in the middle ages, or indeed theology. 5/

Gilley, Fynn-Paul, Biggar etc. want to be taken seriously on the back of their academic credentials, yet at the same time they do not even have the conviction of their own beliefs to do the required research, let alone engage with the relevant literature. 6/

You will note that they never actually engage with the substance of the criticism levelled against them and their arguments and instead build their entire grift on attacking a variety of lazy strawmen. They are charlatans, not intellectuals. 7/

This is what the identity-politics of the right looks like - its about feelings rather than facts. And that is why we should not debate them. 8/

PS: These people - and the newspapers and publishers who provide them with a platform - are obviously entitled to their views. But they're not entitled to being taken seriously. You don't talk fashion with the naked emperor.