Black Students, Workers Hit in Trump’s Speech Crackdown – Capital B News

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A Black student was expelled from Texas Tech University.
Another was disenrolled from Texas State University.
A Black fire chief in Cleveland, Ohio, was placed on paid leave.
In the days since the killing of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, numerous stories have surfaced of people getting kicked out of school or losing their jobs over their comments about the assassination. The firings and suspensions have come as President Donald Trump and members of his administration have made a broad push to crack down on certain kinds of speech.
Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday drew thousands of supporters, including Trump and other top Cabinet officials.
Several high-profile figures have faced professional repercussions. On his talk show, Jimmy Kimmel accused Trump and his “MAGA gang” of trying to benefit from Kirk’s death; the show was indefinitely suspended last week, but then ABC announced that it would return tonight. The op-ed columnist Karen Attiah announced that she had been fired by The Washington Post after she posted on social media about “political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns” following Kirk’s death.
Vice President JD Vance and other members of the Trump administration have said that Kirk’s detractors have gone too far in their responses to his death and should be punished for mocking or celebrating it: “Call them out, and, hell, call their employer,” Vance said last week.
Trump suggested last week that television networks that cover the president negatively could have their broadcast licenses revoked, raising fears that any criticism of his administration will be punished and eliciting some opposition from voices on the right. This silencing has major implications for Black Americans who have often been at odds with the administration.
Avatara Smith-Carrington, assistant counsel of strategic initiatives at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told Capital B that the country is in a very “scary place” right now, as the administration seeks to chill speech that it disfavors.
“One of the foundational pieces of the First Amendment is the ability to associate, the ability to speak freely, the ability to critique your government,” they said. “But we’re seeing this kind of anti-speech approach from the administration.”
This sentiment was also the core of a statement from the Congressional Black Caucus. Long considered the “conscience of the Congress,” the group condemned the political environment that has emerged in recent days.
“The American people are tired of this kind of cynical politics. It’s disheartening to see a tragedy used to further divide the country and suppress honest debate,” the group said.
Read on to learn about how some Black Americans are responding to Kirk’s killing and how the administration’s crackdown exemplifies a larger “anti-speech” trend, according to political analysts. But first, here’s what to know about free speech rights.
The First Amendment prohibits government officials from infringing on a person’s right to free speech and expression.
Additionally, the First Amendment says that government officials can’t restrict speech that they find disagreeable. The Supreme Court also reaffirmed in 2024 that government officials can’t try to pressure or coerce private employers into stifling views or opinions that they don’t like.
It’s this legal precedent that has some legal observers questioning whether the administration crossed a line last week when the chair of the Federal Communications Commission waded into the Kimmel controversy by warning Disney of possible disciplinary action.
Brendan Carr, the chair of the commission, threatened Disney, the owner of ABC, over Kimmel’s comments. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. The network suspended Kimmel a few hours later.
Similarly, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed that the U.S. Department of Justice will go after anyone who engages in “hate speech” and that people who say “horrible things” about Kirk should be penalized. “It’s free speech, but you shouldn’t be employed anywhere if you’re going to say that. And employers, you have an obligation to get rid of people,” she said. “They shouldn’t be working with you.”
Bondi later walked back some of her remarks, saying that she was referring only to “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence.”
The First Amendment, notably, doesn’t apply to private employers.
“The majority of employees in the U.S. are at-will,” Robert Baldwin III, the founder and managing attorney at Virtue Law Group, where he focuses on civil rights, told Capital B. “This means that the employer or the employee can terminate the employment for any reason at all, as long as it’s lawful.”
Decades of case law support people who are silenced by the government in violation of the First Amendment, said Baldwin, but defending their free speech rights would be no easy task, given the challenges that come with bringing a case.
“When we’re talking about access to the courts, we’re talking about legal fees, court costs, attorney costs,” he said. “We’re also talking about general accessibility, because the court can be intimidating to a lot of people and emotionally tolling. Who would have the wherewithal [money and resources] to go through litigation to protect a tweet or a TikTok video they want to send out?”
Anthony Luke, the Cleveland fire chief, was placed on paid leave last week after he posted a political cartoon on social media that was critical of Kirk.
In a statement, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, a Democrat, maintained that Luke’s post — which featured an image of a large assault rifle and a message demanding society to “bring out the next sacrifice” — had “crossed the line.”
“I firmly believe in free speech, and the First Amendment protects every individual’s right to express opinions — even those that are unpopular, provocative, or difficult to hear,” Bibb said. “But with rights come responsibilities, especially for those who hold positions of public trust and leadership. A public safety leader is not just another citizen: they are a standard-bearer for what the City of Cleveland stands for, what we teach our children, and how our neighbors should expect to be treated — and protected.”
Andrew Geronimo, the director of the First Amendment Clinic at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law, told Ideastream Public Media that Luke’s situation is much more ambiguous, since his job demands greater interaction with the public and might be held to a higher standard.
“Generally, you don’t forfeit your First Amendment rights to speak as a private citizen when you take government employment,” he said. “But when you’re speaking in the course of your job duties especially, or when your speech will impact the efficient workings of your office, then courts will generally say you’re not speaking as a private citizen there.”
Luke didn’t respond to Capital B’s request for comment. Texas Tech University said that the student involved in the incident is no longer enrolled at the school and that “any behavior that denigrates victims of violence is reprehensible, has no place on our campus, and is not aligned with our values.” Texas State University also said that the student in question is no longer enrolled.
Hakeem Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, lamented how some private employers appear to be “carrying the administration’s water.” He said that he wonders how this climate of heightened censorship might bode for Black employees who might want to speak up about the country’s long and ongoing history of racial inequality.
Some say that Attiah, the former Washington Post columnist, was already on thin ice because of her section’s more conservative turn earlier this year.
“In [Attiah’s case], she was just quoting [Kirk’s] own words, basically,” Jefferson said, referring to Kirk’s past comment that Black women don’t have “brain processing power.”
He added, “If the right had any commitment to free speech — a true commitment, an unbridled commitment — it wouldn’t be canceling The 1619 Project or banning books or using the apparatus of the state to punish people engaging in speech it doesn’t like.”
Some observers, including the television host W. Kamau Bell, see Kimmel as a canary in the coal mine — a warning for Black Americans and other vulnerable groups of what is to come.
“If they’re telling us, ‘We’re not afraid of rich white men,’ what can the rest of us do? How can we expect them to treat the rest of us if we say the wrong thing on social media or if we make the wrong joke in front of the wrong person?” Bell said at the Atlantic Festival last week.
Before Kirk’s assassination, the administration had established a pattern of challenging the rights of some cultural institutions to express their points of view, calling them anti-American, according to Smith-Carrington, with the LDF.
“We’ve seen the way that the administration has had an eagle-eyed focus on Black museums, archives, and historical sites,” they said. “The focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are attacks on speech that’s disfavored by the administration, too.”
Trump signed an executive order in March accusing the Smithsonian Institution of being “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and advancing “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
The order empowers Vance to review Smithsonian programs and centers and ultimately purge them of what the order claims is “improper ideology.”
More conservative-leaning organizations and right-wing actors also have criticized the administration’s behavior, underscoring incursions into free speech rights.
“AG Bondi’s calls to prosecute hate speech and FCC Chair Carr’s threats of ABC’s license that are tied to the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel’s shows” present “significant First Amendment concerns,” Jennifer Huddleston, a scholar at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, said in a statement. She added that “even without further action,” Bondi and Carr’s comments “risk a chilling effect on important political discourse.”
Similarly, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, characterized Carr’s threats as “unbelievably dangerous” and likened them to “mafioso” tactics. “If the government gets in the business of saying, ‘We don’t like what you, the media, have said. We’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like,’ that will end up bad for conservatives,” he said on his podcast.
The right-wing commentator Candace Owens — a Kirk supporter who has been accused of spreading a variety of conspiracy theories — also has been critical of the way in which his death has been used to restrict people’s constitutional rights. “ I just want the attacks on free speech to stop,” she said on her podcast.
Jefferson, the Stanford professor, shared some of Smith-Carrington’s concerns. He described this moment as a “long winter of backlash.” Kirk’s death, he said, has given the right new pretext for doing what it has always wanted to do: quash speech pertaining to truth-telling about power and identity.
“It’s about a desire to maintain a kind of discursive power where the right gets to shape narratives about race and racism,” Jefferson said. “It’s not about Kirk. It’s about a desired hierarchy. It’s a reminder to all of us of our places in that hierarchy — a reminder that we better be careful about what we say and what we do, lest we face some sort of punishment.”

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Brandon Tensley is Capital B's national politics reporter. More by Brandon Tensley
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