"Sure, I posted racist memes and comments on my public Facebook page while identifying myself as a Chicago firefighter. But firing me violated my 1st Amendment rights."

That's the essence of last week's 7th Circuit opinion in Inendino v. Nance-Holt. And while the court spent most of its time parsing constitutional doctrine, I came away thinking about something much simpler.

Sam Inendino spent 16 years as a Chicago firefighter and EMT. On his public Facebook page, where he prominently identified himself as a firefighter, he posted a series of racist and offensive comments directed at Black people, Asian Americans, immigrants, and others. Members of the public complained. The City investigated. He was fired. An arbitrator found just cause for his discharge. The 7th Circuit ultimately upheld it. 

The legal issue wasn't whether his posts were offensive. Everyone agreed they were.

The harder question was whether the 1st Amendment protected them.

Interestingly, the 7th Circuit actually gave Inendino more credit than the trial court had. It assumed that many of his posts—even crude, racist ones—touched on matters of public concern because they commented on current political controversies surrounding Black Lives Matter, policing, immigration, and public officials. 

But that's where many people stop reading.

The court didn't say, "Speech about public issues means you can't be fired."

Instead, it asked the next question: Does the government's interest as an employer outweigh the employee's interest in speaking?

For a firefighter whose job requires the trust of every member of the public, the answer was yes.

The court emphasized 7th facts that employers should remember. Inendino wasn't speaking anonymously. He publicly identified himself as a firefighter. His page featured photos of him in uniform on a fire truck. His comments were visible to everyone. And he served a predominantly Black neighborhood while posting content that openly demeaned Black residents—the very people he might someday be called upon to rescue. Under those circumstances, the City had a compelling interest in protecting public trust in its emergency services. 

All of that is important.

But here's what struck me.

Too often, cases like this are framed as though the employee is merely the victim of an employer's overreaction. The conversation becomes about cancel culture, free speech, corporate overreach, or constitutional rights.

Missing from that conversation is the most obvious point.

You are still responsible for your own choices.

No one forced Inendino to make his Facebook page public.
No one forced him to identify himself as a firefighter.
No one forced him to post racist memes.
No one forced him to keep them online.

Employees have rights. Employers have obligations. But neither erases personal accountability.

This wasn't a case about someone being punished for an immutable characteristic or an unpopular belief quietly held. It was about a series of deliberate, public decisions that predictably destroyed the trust essential to performing a public-facing job.

The law often protects people from the consequences of who they are. It rarely protects them from the foreseeable consequences of what they choose to do. That's especially true in employment law.

If you publicly associate yourself with your employer while broadcasting views that undermine your ability to perform your job or destroy the public's trust in the institution you serve, don't be surprised when those decisions have employment consequences.

That's not a post-mortem on free speech. It's a post-mortem on personal responsibility.

How employers pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion matters far more than whether they pursue it.

The EEOC's recent pursuit of Nike illustrates the point. The agency says that Nike's DEI program is illegal. That's not, however, what Title VII says.

According to a New York Times investigation, EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas has spent more than two years building a case that Nike's diversity initiatives amount to unlawful discrimination against white employees. The investigation didn't begin with an employee complaint. It began with a commissioner charge, followed by an expansive probe into Nike's hiring goals, internships, mentorship programs, leadership development, executive compensation, and layoffs.

The current administration's message is clear: DEI equals discrimination. Except that's not what Title VII says.

Under longstanding Title VII principles—not the EEOC's current enforcement position—a lawful DEI program isn't one that ignores race or sex. It's one that never uses race or sex to make employment decisions.

There is nothing illegal about wanting a more diverse workforce. There is nothing illegal about expanding recruiting efforts, offering mentorships, sponsoring affinity groups, measuring workforce demographics, or setting aspirational diversity goals.
Where employers get into trouble is when race or sex becomes the reason someone is hired, promoted, selected for a program, or laid off.

Ironically, the Nike investigation also provides employers with a useful compliance roadmap. In early 2025, Nike and the EEOC reached a settlement agreement under which Nike affirmed that its training and development opportunities would remain open to all employees and that it would encourage everyone to participate.

Then Trump took office. Because the EEOC had never countersigned the agreement, it withdrew the settlement and instead launched a sweeping investigation into nearly a decade of Nike's hiring, compensation, training, and layoff decisions.

Yet the proposed settlement reflects exactly what employment lawyers (including me) have been advising clients for years. If you're offering leadership development, mentorships, internships, or networking opportunities, make them available to everyone. Use objective selection criteria. Focus on expanding opportunity, not limiting it. Build inclusive programs, not exclusive ones.

The Supreme Court may eventually narrow what employers can do in the DEI space. The current administration clearly hopes so. The EEOC's enforcement priorities expressly seek cases that could reshape the law. But we're not there yet, and we may never get there.

Employers shouldn't treat every DEI initiative as radioactive. They should treat DEI like every other employment practice: design it carefully, administer it fairly, and make sure it complies with Title VII.

Because under Title VII, pursuing diversity isn't unlawful. Making employment decisions based on protected characteristics is.

Federal disability discrimination laws exist to ensure that people with disabilities are judged on their abilities—not their diagnoses. They require reasonable accommodations. They prohibit discrimination. They level the playing field.

What they do not do is excuse misconduct.

That's the important takeaway from Brantley v. University of Texas at Austin, a recent 5th Circuit decision that rejected a student's attempt to use the Rehabilitation Act as a shield against discipline for repeatedly harassing a professor.

The facts are difficult.

After taking one of the professor's classes, the student continued emailing him. Not once or twice. According to the court, hundreds of times.

The emails ranged from academic topics to deeply personal discussions of trauma, mental health, and self-diagnosis. The professor repeatedly tried to establish boundaries. He provided information about campus mental health resources. He asked that future communications be limited to academic matters. Eventually, he pleaded with her to stop contacting him altogether, explaining that the constant emails were causing him "a tremendous amount of distress."

She kept emailing.

The university ultimately placed her on disciplinary probation.

Her lawsuit didn't deny the conduct. Instead, she argued that her disabilities—including ADHD, complex PTSD, and PMDD—caused her communication patterns, and that disciplining her without accommodating those disability-related behaviors violated the Rehabilitation Act.

The 5th Circuit wasn't persuaded.

Relying on long-standing ADA precedent from the employment context, the court reiterated an important principle: disability discrimination laws do not require employers—or universities—to tolerate harassment simply because the person engaging in it has a disability.

As the court put it, federal anti-discrimination law cannot be used to "immunize" someone from the consequences of harassing another person.

That's exactly right.

This principle matters well beyond higher education. Employers routinely face similar arguments when employees engage in threatening, abusive, or otherwise inappropriate workplace conduct and later claim the behavior stemmed from anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, or another medical condition.

The ADA requires employers to consider reasonable accommodations that help qualified employees perform their jobs. It does not require employers to excuse misconduct that violates legitimate workplace rules or infringes on the rights of others.

That's not because disability rights are unimportant.

It's because everyone else has rights too.

Coworkers have the right to work free from harassment. Supervisors have the right to establish reasonable professional boundaries. Employers have the obligation to maintain safe, respectful workplaces.

Perhaps most importantly, arguing that disability should excuse harassment does a profound disservice to the millions of employees living with disabilities who never engage in this type of conduct.

Most people with ADHD don't harass their supervisors.

Most people with PTSD don't ignore repeated requests to stop contacting coworkers.

Most people with mental health conditions understand and respect professional boundaries every day.

When litigants suggest that disability itself excuses harassment, they reinforce exactly the kind of harmful stereotypes disability laws were enacted to eliminate—that people with disabilities cannot control themselves or should be held to different standards of conduct.

That's wrong as a matter of law. It's even worse as a matter of public perception.

Disability accommodation and workplace accountability are not mutually exclusive. Good employers can—and should—provide reasonable accommodations while also enforcing neutral conduct rules that protect everyone in the workplace.

The ADA isn't a license to harass. And courts are right to keep it that way.

🎶 I get knocked down, but I get up again… 🎶

Like just about everyone else of a certain age, I know every word to Tubthumping. It's one of those songs that still somehow finds its way into bars, sporting events, wedding receptions, and random playlists nearly 30 years later.

And because of that, I always assumed Chumbawamba was exactly what it appeared to be: a one-hit wonder with one incredibly catchy song.

I was wrong. Very wrong.

The other night, after Tubthumping came on while we were driving home from dinner, I asked Siri to play more Chumbawamba.

I was completely unprepared for what came next.

Why did no one ever tell me that Chumbawamba is actually a really good band?

I expected a few more songs that sounded like Tubthumping. Instead, I got a musical identity crisis—in the best possible way.

Punk? Yes.
Techno? Yes.
New wave? Yes.
Folk? Yes.
Choral music? Somehow… yes.

Their catalog lurches from one genre to another with complete confidence, and yet it all somehow works. It's chaotic, unpredictable, and more creative than I ever would have guessed from the band that gave us one of the biggest singalong anthems of the 1990s.

Then I did what we all do after discovering something unexpected: I went to Wikipedia.

Turns out Chumbawamba spent decades as an anarchist collective, releasing fiercely political albums long before Tubthumping accidentally made them international stars. They never really seemed interested in becoming famous, and after cashing the checks from their one massive hit, they largely went back to making exactly the music they wanted to make.

Honestly, that explains a lot. Tubthumping wasn't the beginning or the end of the story. It was just the one song that happened to break through.

Sometimes the internet gets it wrong.
Sometimes radio gets it wrong.
Sometimes we get it wrong.

Sometimes a band you dismissed as a one-hit wonder has an entire catalog that's smarter, stranger, and far more interesting than the one song everyone remembers.

I think there's a workplace lesson buried in all of this. We all have a tendency to reduce people to a single data point—the one presentation, the one mistake, the one success, the one reputation. But people are almost always more complicated than that.

The best managers stay curious long after everyone else has stopped paying attention.

So, employers, stay curious. You never know what you might discover when you look beyond the one thing everyone else remembers.These disabled workers lost their jobs. They say AI targeted them — via USA Today

A white man gets fired. His employer has a DEI program. Therefore, the DEI program caused his termination.

That argument has become increasingly common in employment discrimination cases. It's also usually not enough.

But Chavers v. WestRock Services shows what happens when a plaintiff brings more than complaints about corporate diversity goals.

"Boys will be boys" is not a harassment defense AI Isn't the Problem. Lazy Lawyering Is. Apple v. OpenAI offers a master class in spotting trade secret theft before it's too late WIRTW #802: the 'it's a small world' edition When the boss gets involved, the investigation is already in trouble.