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The Anxious Fig Leaf of the Free Speech Union: How a Right-Wing Pamphleteer Performs the Communicative Inversions of "Academic Standards"

 



The Anxious Fig Leaf of the Free Speech Union: How a Right-Wing Pamphleteer Performs the Communicative Inversions of "Academic Standards"

By Mohan J. Dutta

Dane Giraud — a self-styled Free Speech Union board member who has previously called my employer to demand I be sacked, who publicly admitted as much on the FSU's own blog, and who now parades the resulting Substack post as evidence that my scholarship "cannot be referred to — in anyway — as academic" — has gifted us a near-perfect specimen of what the culture-centered approach (CCA) describes as communicative inversion: the strategic deployment of the language of rigour, freedom, and standards to do the precise opposite work — to erase, to silence, and to police the boundaries of who is permitted to speak as a knower.

This response is not a personal squabble. Giraud's piece is a textbook articulation of a transnational pattern in which racialised scholars who name white supremacy, Hindutva, and Zionist settler-colonial violence are subjected to coordinated campaigns designed to convert their scholarship into "polemic" by rhetorical fiat. It deserves a structural reply.

1. What the metrics say — when they are produced by institutions, not by invisible Substack-mates

I would not ordinarily begin a piece with my own credentials. The culture-centered approach has always been suspicious of the politics of expert performance, and I am keenly aware that bibliometric league tables, as critiqued in the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Leiden Manifesto, are imperfect instruments that often privilege the very Anglophone, Northern-hemisphere conventions the CCA exists to interrogate. With those caveats firmly in place, the citation record matters here for one specific reason: Giraud's whole rhetorical move is to claim that unnamed "senior academics" have helped him judge that my work "cannot be referred to — in anyway — as academic." That is the move I want to put in conversation with the assessments that institutions, rather than anonymous mates, have actually made.

Some of those institutional assessments, in the spirit of full disclosure:

These are not friendship-network endorsements. They are evaluations made by peer-elected committees of communication scholars across the globe, by bibliometric services that operate independently of any individual researcher's social circle, and by funding bodies that subject every grant to anonymous expert peer review. They reflect what the Aotearoa research evaluation system, under the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF), describes as the standard by which research quality is to be assessed: peer judgement informed by transparent bibliometric and qualitative evidence.

I lay this out not to claim infallibility — no scholar has it, and the CCA explicitly rejects the cult of the singular expert — but to draw attention to the structure of Giraud's rhetorical move. He waves at a phantom council of "senior academics" whose names he does not give, whose qualifications he does not produce, whose track record in international peer-reviewed journals he does not document, and whose own h-indices, field-weighted citation impact (FWCI), or citation counts are not visible to anyone — including, presumably, him. We are asked to take his word that they exist, and that they are senior, and that they agree with him.

This is the oldest move in the playbook of what the late Charles W. Mills called the racial contract, and what scholars like Sara Ahmed, Stephen Brookfield, and Frances Henry and Carol Tator call the racialisation of expertise: when a brown scholar with documented international standing names structural racism, the response is to invoke the authority of an unnamed white peer group — a "we" that is conveniently invisible to scrutiny but rhetorically positioned as the real arbiter of what counts. The move works precisely because it cannot be checked. It is the conjuring of legitimacy through proximity to an imagined collective whiteness.

Whiteness, in the scholarship of Cheryl Harris, Robin DiAngelo, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and indeed in my own peer-reviewed work on Aotearoa, is not a skin colour but a property regime — including a regime over what counts as knowledge. Giraud's rhetorical performance is an instance of that regime in operation: a board member of a lobby group, with no peer-reviewed scholarship in communication, in postcolonial studies, in extremism studies, or in any adjacent field, claims authority to declare that someone with the credentials listed above is "not academic." He is able to claim that authority because the audience he is writing for already accepts the underlying premise that the racialised scholar must justify their standing while the white pamphleteer's standing is presumed.

I am happy, as the CCA insists, to be evaluated by communities, by peers, by editors, by ethics boards, by funders, by the International Court of Justice's evidentiary standards, by the Royal Society's Marsden panels, by scholars at risk networks, by my own students, and by readers in the affected communities. I am not willing to be evaluated by Giraud's anonymous mates rallying behind a shady far-right astroturf that owes its beginnings to advocating for the speech rights of far-righ Islamophobes.

2. What the culture-centered approach actually is — and why Giraud cannot see it

The culture-centered approach is a meta-theoretical and methodological framework I have been building since 2004, with roots in subaltern studies, postcolonial theory, and Marxist political economy. It is articulated across multiple peer-reviewed journals — Communication Theory, Communication Methods and Measures, Health Communication, Journal of Health Communication, Journal of Multicultural Discourses — and across several monographs with Routledge, Polity, and Wiley-Blackwell. It has been deployed in over fifty community partnerships across seventeen countries, funded by research councils, reviewed and re-reviewed by panels of disciplinary peers.

The CCA's central wager is simple: dominant communication infrastructures systematically erase the voices of communities at the margins, and the work of justice is to build communicative infrastructures of listening that reverse those erasures. The CCA names the structures that carry out the erasure — colonialism, capitalism, casteism, Hindutva, Zionism, white supremacy — not as slurs but as analytic categories with extensive scholarly genealogies.

Giraud encounters none of this in his piece. He has not read a single article. He has not read the methodology chapters. He cannot define the framework he claims to be invalidating. His move is instead to point at a blog post — a venue I use precisely because the CCA insists on a parallel infrastructure of public, accessible, community-facing knowledge that does not gatekeep through paywalls — and declare it to be "all there is."

This is the first inversion: he confuses the blog with the body of work, then pretends the body of work does not exist. It is the digital equivalent of pointing at a researcher's tweets and announcing that they have published nothing.

3. The "settler colonialism" framing he deems "polemic" is a recognised scholarly field

Giraud writes as though calling Zionism a settler-colonial project were my eccentric invention. The framing is in fact one of the most established analytic traditions in the contemporary humanities and social sciences. A non-exhaustive partial bibliography:

Major human rights bodies — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B'Tselem — have arrived at convergent analyses using the lens of apartheid and ethno-supremacist regime. The International Court of Justice is currently adjudicating South Africa's case alleging genocide. The UN Special Committee has described Israel's methods of warfare as "consistent with the characteristics of genocide".

For Giraud to declare that this analytic register is by definition not academic is to declare that an entire generation of scholars across Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Arab, and global universities — including Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and the Israeli organisation B'Tselem — are non-academic. The claim collapses on contact with the scholarly record.

This is the second inversion: he positions a small, ideologically committed minority view as the universal standard of "academic", and the well-established critical literature as the deviant fringe.

4. "Activism masquerading as research" — or research that names structures the right finds inconvenient?

Giraud's "verdict" rests on a curated list of supposed academic failings: lack of "precision of terms", failure to "build trust" with communities his framework treats as the victims, and reliance on "blogposts and hashtags" rather than fieldwork. Each fails on its own terms.

On precision. The convergence of Hindutva, Zionism, and white supremacy as articulating ideologies is not an accusation; it is a documented empirical phenomenon traced across a growing body of scholarship. Scholars like Banu Subramaniam, Thomas Blom Hansen, Christophe Jaffrelot, Achin Vanaik, and Audrey Truschke have documented the global circulation of Hindutva as a far-right project. The links between Hindutva, the Israeli state, and the global far right are mapped in The Caravan, The Wire, Al Jazeera's investigations, and across peer-reviewed political science. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League — neither of them anti-Zionist — have separately documented the convergence of right-wing transnational networks. This is not "guilt-by-taxonomy"; it is taxonomy as social science does it.

On "trust-building". The CCA does not exist to "build trust" with the dominant ideologies whose violence its participant communities are documenting. It exists to build communicative infrastructures with those whose voices have been erased — Muslim communities in India enduring lynching campaigns, Palestinian families under siege, Adivasi and Dalit communities resisting land grabs, Pasifika and Māori communities navigating racialised health and housing systems, and migrant workers in Singapore and Aotearoa enduring precarity. To frame the absence of "trust" with Hindutva or right-wing Zionist constituencies as a methodological failing is to mistake the project for its opposite. The CCA is not "neutrality research"; it is openly normative, in the same way critical race theory, feminist standpoint epistemology, and decolonial methodology are openly normative — none of which Giraud appears to have heard of.

On blog posts. The piece I've written that Giraud reduces to a "single sentence from Amnesty International, laced to the colonial-settler thesis" is one entry in a blog series that runs alongside — not in place of — peer-reviewed publications, white papers, keynote addresses, and community-engaged research. To pretend the blog is the research is the inversion that does the polemical work; the rest of his piece relies on it.

5. Academic freedom, in law and in practice — what Giraud confidently misstates

Giraud writes that "academic freedom protects the right to speak, not the quality or status of what is uttered". He then proceeds to argue that quality and status should be reassessed by him, on a Substack, in dialogue with anonymous commenters, and that the conclusion should determine whether someone "should ever be allowed anywhere near" a research centre. The contradiction is total.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, academic freedom is not a vague workplace courtesy; it is a statutory right under the Education and Training Act 2020, descended from the Education Amendment Act 1990, which defines academic freedom as:

"the freedom of academic staff and students, within the law, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas and to state controversial or unpopular opinions"

and which obliges universities to perform their role as "the critic and conscience of society". This is among the strongest legislative protections of academic freedom in the world — stronger than what exists in the US, the UK, or Australia. The Tertiary Education Union and the New Zealand Universities Academic Audit Unit have repeatedly underlined that "controversial and unpopular" speech is precisely what the protection was designed to cover.

The protection does not require that a critic be liked, that they be moderate, or that they pass the methodological taste-test of a board member of a lobby group. It requires that the university not bow to pressure to discipline scholars for their substantive intellectual positions. The current ACT-led push to "strengthen" speech protections at universities is, as I have documented elsewhere, a near-perfect inversion of the actual statutory tradition: it deploys the language of academic freedom to discipline the critic-and-conscience role rather than to protect it.

Giraud's central move — the one that makes his piece intelligible as right-wing politics rather than as scholarly critique — is to invent a hierarchy of "academic speech" with three categories (peer-reviewed work, public scholarship, "private" tweets), to file my work into the lowest tier without examining the higher tiers, and to declare that the lowest tier carries "no automatic academic halo". The hierarchy is his own invention. New Zealand's statutory definition contains no such tiering. The UNESCO 1997 Recommendation on the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel — to which New Zealand is a party — defines academic freedom as encompassing "the right to express freely their opinion about the institution or system in which they work" and "to participate in professional or representative academic bodies" without censorship. There is no clause about Substack assessors.

This is the third, and the most consequential, inversion: the statutory protection of the critic-and-conscience role becomes, in Giraud's hands, a license for non-academics to police academic speech.

6. The racialised undermining of expertise — what's really happening

It is no accident that Giraud's project requires the de-credentialing of a brown scholar from the Global South who works on race, caste, and empire. The pattern is so well-documented it is now a sub-field. Brown, Black, and Indigenous scholars who name structural racism are routinely subjected to manufactured campaigns that demand "neutrality", "balance", and "rigour" as proxies for compliance with the dominant ideological frame. See:

In Aotearoa specifically, my own academic freedom has been the subject of organised online harassment campaigns by Hindutva-aligned actors, adjudicated on by the New Zealand Media Council in my favour, and reported in the New Zealand Herald and Newsroom. The FSU was conspicuously silent during all of it. Giraud, on his own account, was never silent — he was actively contributing to the targeting infrastructure by tagging my employer in 2023 and demanding an institutional response.

Newsroom's recent investigation of the FSU observed precisely this pattern: "it's often people of a right-wing political persuasion who benefit by being given a public platform to say things that marginalise already vulnerable parts of society — with few consequences." That is the pattern at work here. Giraud's "free speech" is selective: a freedom from criticism for the dominant, and an obligation to silence for the marginalised.

7. The "joke" of the Free Speech Union — and the inversion at its core

The Free Speech Union of New Zealand was founded out of the Taxpayers' Union office in Wellington by lobbyist Jordan Williams. Media Bias/Fact Check rates it as Right-biased with mixed factual reporting. Its origin event was the defence of Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, two figures with extensive documented histories of white supremacist association. Its stable of platformed speakers in Aotearoa has included Roy Kaunds, a Hindutva ideologue who appeared on the far-right hate channel Counterspin Media, promoting The Kashmir Files — a film widely critiqued for circulating Islamophobic propaganda used in genocidal incitement against Indian Muslims.

The FSU's "free speech" is, in practice, a one-way valve. It mobilises against academics like me when we critique the right; it goes silent when racialised academics are subjected to targeted campaigns by Hindutva and white supremacist networks. It claims to defend "the right to offend" while enthusiastically tagging employers of those whose speech offends them. Giraud's apology for that tagging — which his own piece flaunts as both a confession and a dare ("my colleagues felt an apology was unnecessary") — is the perfect crystallisation.

This is communicative inversion at the level of an organisational mission statement. The CCA has described this pattern for two decades: dominant communicative infrastructures perform their opposites. "Free speech" produces silencing. "Academic standards" produce de-credentialing. "Anti-extremism" produces the targeting of the scholars who study extremism. It is a feature, not a bug.

8. On the Hamas-on-October-7 framing: a deliberate misreading

Giraud opens his piece by accusing me of being "ecstatic" over the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, and quotes the phrase "powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance" — apparently from a tweet whose context, as is standard, he flattens. The October 7 attacks were horrific, and the killing of civilians is unequivocally condemnable under international humanitarian law — a position I have stated repeatedly in academic work and public commentary. My analytic framing of armed resistance as constitutive of decolonial struggles, including in the work of Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Aimé Césaire, and the entire Algerian, Vietnamese, Mau Mau, Dhofari, and South African traditions of liberation theory, is not endorsement of any specific act. It is the lingua franca of the field within which Palestinian, Sahrawi, Tibetan, Kurdish, and West Papuan struggles are theorised. Giraud either does not know this, or does not care.

What he is doing is the classic McCarthyite move: produce a single decontextualised line, present it as the totality of an analytic position, and use it to argue for de-platforming. The pattern — pioneered against communists, exported against Black radicals during COINTELPRO, refined against Muslim-American academics post-9/11, and now retooled against critics of Israel — is not new. What is new is the speed at which Substacks and X threads can manufacture it.

9. The serial canceller as free-speech advocate: Giraud's grievance politics

There is a particular irony in being lectured on academic standards by Dane Giraud. The pattern that runs through our interactions is not — as he stages it — the noble dissident calling out a careless professor; it is a serial campaign of attempts to have me sanctioned, fired, or otherwise removed from public discourse, paired with the elaborate performance of being himself the persecuted party.

The record:

What is remarkable across all of this is the simultaneous performance of grievance. Giraud's piece spends considerable time staging himself as the wounded party: he is "personalised", "targeted", attacked as a "white supremacist propagandist", subjected to my "wild claims". The literature on right-wing grievance politics — from Ahmed to Cas Mudde to Nancy Fraser — has a name for this manoeuvre: the dominant party who has just attempted to weaponise institutional power against a marginalised speaker re-emerges, in the next sentence, as the real victim of that speaker's response. The campaign of cancellation is rebranded as resistance. The targeting becomes courage. The lobby group's blog post becomes a David-and-Goliath narrative.

This is what the FSU's communicative inversions look like at the individual level. The serial canceller poses as the cancelled. The well-resourced lobby-group board member poses as the lonely truth-teller. The unnamed white peer-network is invoked as the standard of academic legitimacy, while the actually peer-evaluated, internationally-cited, ICA-Fellow, NCA-Distinguished-Scholar, Stanford-top-2%-listed brown academic is positioned as the dangerous fraud who must be removed from extremism research.

Giraud closes his piece with the rhetorical flourishes of a man who knows his audience. He calls me "puerile" and "unserious"; he speculates that my analytic framework rests on "the worst accusation [I] can dream up". These are not arguments. They are signals — to a particular ideological constituency — that a brown professor who keeps publishing, keeps being recognised, keeps speaking on Hindutva, keeps speaking on Zionism, keeps speaking on white supremacy, must be subjected to the discipline that the institutional centres of communication studies, of academic freedom law, and of community accountability have so far refused to impose.

What the academic community must offer, in contrast, is engagement with the actual scholarship. Engagement looks like reading Sabbagh-Khoury, Wolfe, Veracini, Pappé, and the HRW, Amnesty, and B'Tselem reports, and producing a counter-argument from primary sources. Giraud has not done this. He has produced a press release for an audience that wants the press release.

That is the gap between activism and scholarship his piece purports to police. He stands on the wrong side of it.

10. Should I "ever be allowed anywhere near such a centre again"?

Giraud closes by demanding that I be permanently barred from extremism research centres in New Zealand. He has every right to write the demand. The state, the universities, and the research community have every reason to refuse it.

Refuse it because the request is itself a textbook attack on academic freedom: it asks the state to assess a scholar's scholarship by their public political positions and to deny them research roles accordingly. This is precisely the definition of political interference that Aotearoa's 1990 academic freedom legislation was built to prevent. It is what David Seymour is currently being criticised by Anne Salmond and many others for attempting to do to the public broadcaster.

Refuse it because the move — naming a scholar of extremism as an extremist to disqualify them from extremism research — is itself a documented far-right tactic. See: the targeting of Disinformation Project researchers in Aotearoa. See: the de-platforming of Holocaust scholars who critique Israeli state violence. See: the firing of Maura Finkelstein at Muhlenberg for an Instagram repost. The pattern is real, it is global, and the FSU is, in this country, one of its instruments.

Refuse it, finally, because the work continues regardless. The CCA is not a brand attached to a person; it is a methodological framework deployed across a global network of scholars. The communities I work with — Muslim communities in India, Pasifika communities in Aotearoa, migrant workers in Singapore, Adivasi communities in Bengal and Jharkhand — will keep speaking. The scholarship will keep being peer-reviewed. The white papers will keep being written. The courses will keep being taught.

Giraud's Substack will keep being a Substack.

Coda: who, in the end, gets to decide what counts as academic?

The deepest claim in Giraud's piece is not about me. It is about who has the authority to decide the boundary between scholarship and "polemic". His answer is: he does, with the help of "senior academics" he does not name, on a Substack, with the FSU as his amplifier and the right-wing political establishment as his audience.

The CCA's answer is different. The boundary is decided by peer review, by community accountability, by statutory protection, by disciplinary debate over years and decades, and by the communities whose voices the work was built to amplify. It is decided slowly, painfully, in journals and seminars and field sites, with everyone's evidence on the table.

That is the system the FSU's communicative inversions seek to short-circuit. They short-circuit it because they cannot win in it. Their press releases would not survive peer review. Their evidence base would not survive a methods seminar. Their conclusions would not survive a community accountability meeting.

So they go to Substack. And then they tell us that we are the ones hiding behind the gown.

The fig leaf is theirs.

Mohan J. Dutta is Dean's Chair Professor in Communication and Founding Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand. His work spans more than fifty community partnerships across seventeen countries. The views expressed are his own and offered in his capacity as critic and conscience under section 267 of the Education and Training Act 2020.

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