You may not have heard of or at least thought much about the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) because they don’t tend to generate a lot of political headlines. Their primary function, as the name implies, is to publish and distribute official government publications to Congress, federal agencies, federal depository libraries, and the public. But they’re making some headlines this week for all of the wrong reasons. There have reportedly been some workers there who have been sporting swastikas and other Nazi propaganda while extolling the virtues of Adolph Hitler. The management apparently knew about this but did nothing to suppress the behavior and now some other workers have filed a lawsuit in protest. (Government Executive)

Employees at the Government Publishing Office engaged in racist and discriminatory behavior, including extolling Adolf Hitler and using Nazi symbolism, and management throughout the agency failed to take action, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.

Two current GPO employees and one former brought the suit to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, naming current Director Hugh Halpern and former staffer Samuel Mewshaw as defendants. Mewshaw was at the center of the allegations, facing accusations that he harassed employees by distributing antisemitic materials, displaying pornographic images and making racist comments. The actions were alleged to have taken place at the GPO library bindery in Washington and brought to the attention of top supervisors at the facility, who discouraged employees from voicing their concerns.

This is a pretty shocking report, even after seeing all of the madness unfolding at Harvard and some of the recent protests in large cities. And all of this activity at the GPO was taking place long before Hamas invaded Israel, so that’s not the root cause. The two primary alleged Nazis, Wingo and Mewshaw, had reportedly been very open and unapologetic when it came to their beliefs and practices. Their supervisor, Hugh Halpern, was reportedly negligent in curbing this behavior.

Mewshaw was finally fired earlier this year, but before that he had been making other workers, particularly Jews and minorities, very uncomfortable. He would greet coworkers with a Nazi salute and he left provocative literature on his desk. The literature included The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and pamphlets downplaying the severity of the holocaust. He once reportedly stood at his desk and proclaimed that, “Hitler was the greatest white man who ever lived.”

Another now-fired worker, Dylan Wingo, is accused of making similar racist, sexist, and antisemitic remarks. Halpern himself hasn’t been accused of such behavior, but he clearly knew it was going on. He went so far as to send out a memo to the staff in March criticizing people for making “unkind remarks” to colleagues (without mentioning any specifics) but took no further action.

It’s possible that the management at GPO was concerned over First Amendment free speech issues, but that’s a weak defense at best. Particularly in the workplace, while free speech is always protected, discussions in the office or the shop are typically supposed to be work-related. The courts have ruled that employers cannot abridge the First Amendment rights of workers, but the workers are not protected from “the natural consequences of their decisions.” So private sector employers are within their rights to fire workers who engage in such speech.

Even for non-work discussions, there has always been something of an unwritten rule when it comes to this topic. We’ll stand up for your right to your own opinions on most things, but we draw the line at Hitler and the Nazis. Once you’ve crossed that line you’re on your own. How that didn’t occur to the management at the GPO is something of a mystery, whether they were oblivious or tacitly endorsing such positions. But the pending lawsuit will likely provide the answers and I would expect the plaintiffs to prevail.