Politics ‘The Right Way’? How Charlie Kirk’s Professor Watchlist Censors and Harasses Academics of Color
The years-old 1200-name blacklist has ruined professors’ lives, chilled speech, and previewed exactly how the Trump administration is responding to Kirk’s killing today.
Days after Charlie Kirk’s murder, A.D. Carson, a professor of Hip-Hop at the University of Virginia, told his students about a professor watchlist he was on. The list cited things like Carson’s rap album dissertation with “racially-charged lyrical compositions,” including those that mentioned Trayvon Martin, a Black Florida teenager killed by a neighborhood watchman, and another that described systematic racism.
As he told his students about the watchlist, he noticed them checking to make sure the classroom door was locked out of fear.
That list was put together by Kirk’s own organization, Turning Point USA.
Since his horrific killing two weeks ago, figures across the political spectrum have lauded Kirk, insisting he championed free speech and the open exchange of ideas. That, as New York Times columnist Ezra Klein suggests, he did politics the right way.
Yet one of Kirk’s lasting legacies is the nearly 1,200-person “watchlist” expressly created to “expose and document college professors,” or as professors themselves told Zeteo, to intimidate, threaten, and shun them from the public square.
Carson, who found out he was on the Turning Point “professor watchlist” in March 2024, says just last week someone online threatened to shoot him.