THIS ISN’T HOW SERIOUS SCHOLARS RESPOND TO LEGITIMATE CRITICISM OF THEIR WORK: Narrator: Duke’s Nancy MacLean isn’t a serious scholar.

Steve Teles, by the way, is a liberal-leaning political science professor at Johns Hopkins. Geoffrey Kabaservice has a Ph.D. in History from Yale and is the author of two well-regarded books. I’m waiting to see how MacLean and her allies try to smear Stanford history professor Jennifer Burns, author of a devastating recent review of the book Teles and and Kabaservice also criticized, MacLean’s Democracy in Chains. MacLean also seems to think it’s a “conflict of interest” for anyone writing about her book to have any possible ideological priors that may color their views, which makes it odd that she never mentions her history of activism with the far-left International Socialist Organization.