A Beverly Hills substitute teacher with three decades in the district is suing after being fired for anti-Trump Facebook posts written on her own time—while students who held a pro-Trump rally on campus and allegedly hurled racial slurs at Black classmates walked away with a warning.
The case lays bare the free-speech double standard that governs American institutions: dissent from the approved line, lose your livelihood. Support the prevailing current, get a pass. And the civil-liberties organizations that claim to defend expression for everyone? Nowhere to be found.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges Beverly Hills Unified violated Joanie Garratt's First Amendment rights and California labor law when it terminated her in November 2024. Garratt had been preparing students for the AP U.S. History exam. Her posts appeared on her personal Facebook page, outside school hours.
One day before her post, a group of mostly male students held a pro-Trump rally at Beverly Hills High School. They wore MAGA gear, toted Trump cardboard cutouts, and—according to the lawsuit and student testimony—harassed members of the Black Student Union. Students said they were called the N-word. A school security guard brandished a Trump banner. Roughly a dozen Black students told the Board of Trustees they were targeted with racial slurs and intimidation.
Principal Drew Stewart's response: a message to families saying the school would protect free speech but limit large gatherings. No one was fired. No one was terminated.
Garratt's offense? Writing on Facebook that pro-Trump students "harassed & intimidated many other non-maga students and specifically targeted the class where the Black Student Union was meeting, yelling all kinds of racial slurs."
"I loved my 30 years with the district," Garratt told the Los Angeles Times. "I could not believe that my school district would be so extreme with me over a Facebook post that I don't even consider a big deal."
The complaint alleges that "unlike a pro-Trump rally which took place on school grounds during school hours, nothing in Ms. Garratt's Facebook post disrupted or impacted any school activities."
The district hasn't responded to requests for comment.
The pattern extends beyond Beverly Hills. The Times notes that other educators have been fired or reprimanded for anti-Trump and anti-Israel remarks in recent years. A San José State professor terminated after Gaza-war protests was ordered reinstated by a faculty union—but only after a protracted fight.
And the purge isn't limited to one side. HuffPost reported this week that Julia Curlee, a senior CIA analyst who served two decades and briefed Vice President Mike Pence daily during Trump's first term, was fired from her National Security Council post in March 2025 after far-right activist Laura Loomer publicly called for her removal as a trans "Biden holdover." Curlee wrote in The Atlantic that Trump officials had known she was transgender from day one. "This hadn't been an issue until it was public—and then nothing else I'd done mattered," she wrote.
The common thread: institutional power crushes individuals who step outside the approved lane, whether it's a teacher posting on her own time or a career intelligence officer whose identity became politically inconvenient.
What's conspicuously absent from Garratt's case is the ACLU—the organization that built its brand defending free expression regardless of viewpoint. The left champions speech rights when the speaker checks the right boxes. When the speech cuts against institutional comfort, the civil liberties crowd vanishes.
Garratt is seeking unspecified damages. The question isn't whether her posts were provocative. It's whether Americans can speak on their own time without losing their jobs—and whether the institutions sworn to protect that right will ever show up when it actually costs them something.
