Regents Terminate Professor for Criticizing Dead Friend of President

“Fuck Charlie Kirk. He was a hate-spreading Nazi.”

Is that really a fire-able statement? The South Dakota Board of Regents thinks so. USD art professor Michael Hook said something like that (we don’t have the exact quote, since the media namby-pamb around saying he used an “expletive”, and since the professor’s social media post has since been deleted), after the hate-spreading Nazi was sacrificed at the altar of the Second Amendment, and the Board of Regents swiftly booted him for a political expression no less robust and impassioned than Charlie Kirk’s minions and patrons use:

Hook, formerly listed as a professor of Art at USD, was placed on administrative leave over a Facebook post about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The now-deleted post included an expletive and referred to Kirk as a “hate-spreading Nazi.”

The South Dakota Board of Regents said they intend to terminate Hook based on SDBOR policy 4.4.8, which covers “unprofessional conduct.”

“The board and its administrators possess the inherent power to discipline employees, including faculty members, who fail to adhere to expectations for competent, productive, effective and ethical teaching, research or service, who violate laws, rules or policies implicated in university operations, or who engage in misconduct, neglect of duty, insubordination or otherwise unacceptable conduct,” the policy states [Gracie Terrall, “USD Professor’s Firing Sparks First Amendment Debate,” KELO-TV, updated 2025.09.16].

Unprofessional conduct? So when Trump dropped an f-bomb at the White House on camera this summer, he should have been terminated?

If case law means anything more than the whims of six bitter robed Trump toadies any more, the Board of Regents is in trouble:

In a social media post on Friday, USD political science professor Ed Gerrish pointed to Supreme Court case Pickering v. Board of Education as precedent on free speech for educators. In the 1968 case, a teacher was fired for writing to a local newspaper, criticizing BOE policies. He was later reinstated after the Supreme Court ruled on the case.

“A teacher’s exercise of his right to speak on issues of public importance may not furnish the basis for his dismissal from public employment,” the court opinion reads.

In his post, Gerrish said, “When your employer is the government, then the government has a special duty to protect free speech when not in your place of employment” [Terrall, 2025.09.16].

Evidently, the Board of Regents is capitulating to the fascist regime, defending not just the dictator but the dictator’s dead friends from any public criticism. Their firing of Professor Hook is just another brick in the scary wall of thoughtcrime that the current dictator is building to erase any expression that threatens its vision of an unchallengeable white manly America.