Following the murder of Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, conservative activists and politicians hunted down social media posts by ordinary people who expressed their negative feelings about Kirk. The goal? To get them fired from their jobs. And to a large extent, it worked. But a growing number of those fired in the wake of this campaign are fighting back with lawsuits challenging their removals as a violation of their free speech rights.
“We have been inundated with requests for help,” said Will Creeley, legal director for The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech nonprofit that provides legal aid to people whose civil rights have been violated.
Public employees in Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina and South Dakota have already filed lawsuits challenging their dismissals, with more expected to come. A federal judge already ruled that the University of South Dakota must reinstate a tenured professor fired over comments he made on Facebook.
FIRE, which originated as a campus free speech organization, has seen an “even larger increase” in the number of requests for help from government employees, including “professors and students and those who work on campus,” than they normally do at this time of year, said Zach Greenberg, a faculty and student association defense counsel at FIRE. The organization has also sent letters to numerous schools informing them of their employees’ free speech rights and is helping connect public employees to representation through their internal team of lawyers and their volunteer network.
