Toledo Fire Lieutenant fired over Charlie Kirk comment files First Amendment lawsuit demanding reinstatement

The First Amendment strongly protects citizens’ rights to express opinions about political issues and any issues of public concern, even and especially when those opinions are controversial or upsetting to others. In enacting the First Amendment, our nation’s founders recognized that unpopular or controversial opinions would be the ones most likely to be punished by tyrants seeking to maintain an illegitimate hold on power. Our nation’s Supreme Court has therefore repeatedly affirmed that the First Amendment’s protections are necessary to ensure our “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” because such debate “is the essence of self-government.”

For these reasons, government employers are not permitted to terminate or discipline their employees in response to their employees’ off-hours speech on issues of public concern except in the rare cases that such speech can be shown to materially interfere with the government office’s operations.

Despite these well-established First Amendment protections, the Toledo Fire Chief and Safety Director approved Schroeder’s termination solely because he published a single Facebook comment, to a post by the local ABC affiliate, which he made without realizing that Kirk had died as a result of the shooting, and which stated, in whole, as follows:

This was nothing more than a hyperbolic and course expression of Schroeder’s opinion that the world would be better off without the divisive and hateful influence on public discourse that was held by a man who was on record stating that black women like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson “do not have the brain processing power to really be taken seriously,” that black people are unqualified to be commercial airline pilots, that “America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years,” and that the free practice of the Islamic religion is “a threat to America,” among other things. Regardless of whether one might find Schroeder’s comment about Kirk distasteful or offensive in its disregard for Kirk’s death, the First Amendment decidedly prohibits the government from policing citizens’ manners, from requiring that citizens express their opinions politely, moderately or in any particular way, as well as from taking sides in debates about matters of public concern.

And what makes the Defendants’ termination of Schroeder especially dangerous here is that they’ve purported to justify their actions with claims about how members of the public “interpreted” his post, which allegedly “resulted in widespread public outrage and condemnation, with over one thousand complaints from the public” after another highly divisive and influential public figure—Chaya Raichik, the owner of the widely followed “Libs of TikTok” social media accounts—was forwarded Schroeder’s comment and shared it with her millions of followers, urging them to contact the Toledo Fire Department to demand his termination.
It’s obvious that allowing Schroeder’s termination to stand under these circumstances would be to accept that our government can take any action at all in response to its employees’ political opinions as long as there are influential political figures who can rally enough of their followers to express their disagreement with those opinions. Such a phenomenon has thankfully been widely recognized by our courts as a “heckler’s veto,” which, if permitted to be enforced by government offices like the Toledo Fire Department, would result in the precisely the type of “odious viewpoint discrimination that cuts to the First Amendment’s core.” To hold otherwise would be to cede our public discourse to extremists and those who hold the most power over the flow of information, which would inevitably result in uniformity of opinion in our public offices and provide a license for governmental tyranny. We therefore expect our federal court system to deliver a swift rebuke to the City’s actions here, and for Schroeder’s First Amendment rights (and everyone’s) to be vindicated. The case is captioned Schroeder v. Armstrong, Case No. 3:26-cv-00209-JZ, Judge Jack Zouhary presiding. A copy of the filed complaint is available here, and a copy of a related motion for a Court order requiring that Schroeder be reinstated to his position is available here. Stay tuned to this page for further updates.