More than 40 years ago, a singing group called The Police released a chart-topping song with the following lyrics: “Every breath you take / And every move you make / Every bond you break / Every step you take / I’ll be watching you.”
That song came to mind when, on Sept. 25, I read a Boston Globe story that ran under the headline, “Charlie Kirk put Massachusetts professors on a watchlist. Now, some teach in fear.” The article explained that the organization Kirk founded, Turning Point USA, keeps a list of “professors who Turning Point claims ‘discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda.’”
The song lyrics seemed an apt description of a world in which “professors are targeted for their research and commentary on issues, spanning the war between Israel and Hamas, Palestinian rights, transgender rights, and racial justice.” That feeling was strengthened when I visited the Turning Point USA website. There, I found a “Submit a Tip” page where people can identify professors they feel should be included on the list, to “help us expose” offending teachers.
Such an invitation encourages students and others to become informants. “Every word you say … I’ll be watching you.”
Living in such a world is terrifying for all who dare deviate from the orthodoxy of the moment. But there is little that we can do about the proliferation of watchlists. What we can do is to make sure that when someone is targeted, we do not abandon them or turn away in fear. It is not easy to do so, as many fear guilt by association.
The Turning Point USA list has the names of more than 300 faculty members from schools around the country on it. They are grouped in such categories as “Terror Supporter,” “LGBTQ,” “Antifa” and “Socialism.” Soon after he started the watchlist, Kirk defended it as “an awareness tool,” “not a professor blacklist. … We’re not calling for the termination of these professors. Let the schools make their own decisions.”
But what decisions exactly did he mean? The question in itself is an implied warning.
Call it a watchlist or call it a blacklist, the effect is still the same. Professors whose names appear on the Turning Point site have received death threats and hate mail. Some justifiably worry that they will lose their jobs. And in the wake of the tragic death of Charlie Kirk, those concerns have ramped up.
Watchlists are a sign of something deeply worrisome — namely, of a society growing increasingly less tolerant of difference and becoming more suspicious of those around us. When anything anyone does can be posted online and, in an instant, publicized around the world, watchlists can quickly become blacklists, whatever the intention of those who compile them.
America has seen what happened when blacklists became a political weapon before.
More than a hundred years ago, after a series of coordinated violent attacks on judges and public officials across the country, the attorney general of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer, created a unit in the Justice Department to compile lists of people suspected of being radicals or anarchists. The unit headed by J. Edgar Hoover, who would subsequently go on to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation, carried out secret investigations that fueled the so-called Palmer Raids in 1920, a massive roundup of people because of their political views.
Sound familiar? At the end of last month, President Trump directed his Justice Department to investigate liberal groups with an anti-fascist agenda.
And during the Red Scare of the early 1950s, people who were suspected of having communist sympathies were blacklisted and lost jobs in government, universities and the entertainment industry. Around the same time, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered “the investigation, interrogation and systematic removal of gay men and lesbians from the federal government.” It became known as the “Lavender Scare.” Immigrants often suffered as well.
In our time, it seems that an era of blacklisting has returned. Now we have a chance to learn from our history, and when we see anyone come under suspicion, to remember what Benjamin Franklin said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “(W)e must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we will hang separately.”
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.