Students are receiving death threats and being “told to kill themselves” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after a satirical April Fools’ article in the student newspaper and a comedy video caused an uproar over their mockery of immigration, race, and class issues on an easily triggered campus.
University officials fiercely denounced the satires and promised an official investigation to determine accountability and consider “next steps,” backing down only after national free speech organizations complained. There is no indication that the university has offered support beyond “well-being checks” to the students being threatened, despite one of the students’ mothers publicly expressing concern about the death threats.
The free speech organizations criticizing university administrators’ initial public response say it may violate North Carolina law and the university’s own policies. Just the same, the student groups who published the satires responded to the uproar by issuing groveling apologies, renouncing their “white privilege,” adding DEI training, and bringing in professional “advisers.” The university has now belatedly declared its support for free speech, but not before the offending students had completely capitulated.
The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s student newspaper, published its annual satire issue on April 1, featuring an April Fools’ article reporting that “Trump orders ALE in Chapel Hill to be replaced with ICE agents.” The piece, which was harshly critical of ICE, featured a federal agent mistakenly arresting “a white girl who was sporting a suspect dark fake tan,” and fraternity brothers requiring “their most liberal pledge to paint banners reading ‘ICE no es Bienvendio aquí.’” ALE, or Alcohol Law Enforcement, is a state agency despised by many students—the parallels to Immigration and Customs Enforcement are satirical.
Just as controversial was a satirical skit—an April Fools’ video published by Hill After Hours, a student-run faux late night show—in which the DTH opinion editor played an entitled white sorority girl touring the university’s freshman budget housing area, accompanied by bodyguards. The sorority girl character calls the area a “shithole” and a “third-world country” and is condescending toward Hispanic students she encounters.
The loudest campus voices were almost unanimously outraged at the satires, claiming that sensitive issues such as immigration enforcement, race, and class should not be satirized. Activist groups like Students United for Immigration Equality issued strongly worded petitions. Local media outlets like CBS17 and the News & Observer offered sympathetic coverage of the aggrieved.
UNC senior vice provost for student success James Orr—effectively the dean of student life—condemned the “racist and insensitive nature” of content that is “not consistent with [UNC’s] values as an institution” in a forceful April 6 statement. Orr, who called the content “completely unacceptable” and “deeply hurtful … to the well-being of our broader community,” pointed out that the DTH is a private company and outside UNC’s jurisdiction. However, he pledged to “investigate” Hill After Hours, since it is an organization under university purview and to consider “next steps.” Orr also said he is “deeply saddened” by the satires.
The DTH and Hill After Hours quickly folded, taking down the offending content, issuing multiple apologies and, in the case of the DTH, announcing it will be bringing in adult supervision. Specifically, the DTH said that it is going to give its editors DEI training in coordination with UNC’s journalism school, and that it’s bringing in a professional “adviser,” extraordinary steps for the 133-year-old newspaper that has traditionally stood up for its independence.
The administration’s condemnation of the satires and statement that it is “investigating” the students behind the video and considering “next steps” appear to violate Article 36 of the Equality Within the University of North Carolina policy. Adopted in 2024, the policy was imposed by the UNC system’s Board of Governors, which is appointed by the state legislature and has long tangled with the liberal Chapel Hill campus. The Equality policy replaced UNC’s previous “Diversity and Inclusion Policy”—which was repealed—and requires university officials to remain neutral on “political controversies of the day.” The establishment of the Equality policy also disbanded UNC’s George Floyd-inspired Racial Equity Task Force, and ordered UNC to eliminate much of its extensive DEI operation.
“Provost Orr’s ‘Statement on Behalf of the University’ certainly appears to violate the UNC system’s commitment to institutional neutrality,” special counsel for campus advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Robert Shibley, said in an email to the Washington Free Beacon. He added that FIRE plans to launch an investigation into the incident, since the reaction “seems likely to chill freedom of expression at UNC.”
Orr’s response to the satirical articles may be a form of censorship, Shibley said. “It starts to potentially infringe on the rights of other students … when you begin to call for the silencing of the people that you disagree with.”
On Monday, UNC pointed the Free Beacon to a letter its deputy general counsel, Kara E. Simmons, sent to FIRE on Friday, April 10. The letter is a near complete reversal from the university’s outraged April 6 statement from Orr.
“Please be assured that we are not investigating any student or student group for the articles that appeared in the April 1, 2026 edition of The Daily Tar Heel or the recent Hill After Hours video,” Simmons wrote to Marie McMullan, a lawyer for FIRE. Simmons wrote that UNC “is committed to upholding the First Amendment rights of our students and our student groups … even when, as here, we believe those instances of expression may be deeply offensive.”
“Our prior statement was in no way intended to chill the free expression rights of our campus community,” the letter adds.
UNC declined to comment on the reported death threats, citing federal law. Alli Pardue, the DTH editor in chief, told the Free Beacon that “editors and writers have been receiving dozens of death threats” and that “our meetings with UNC leadership have been nothing more than well-being check-ins.”
Many of the harshest threats were reportedly directed toward Hill After Hours, which produced the Saturday Night Live-style skit featuring Sydney Baker, an aspiring comedy writer who is also the DTH opinion editor.
Baker’s clearly satirical skit made a mockery of wealthy and entitled white sorority sisters who live in high-end student housing and look down on lower income students of color.
Baker’s mother, Joanie Cutright Baker, revealed the death threats in a Facebook post.
“It is a shame it was misunderstood and that people are hurt and angry, but it is being terribly misconstrued. These kids are receiving death threats, being told to kill themselves and horribly attacked on social media and 99% of those who are outraged have not read the articles in full to understand or just miss the intent, purpose and real target of the satire,” Cutright Baker wrote.
Neither Sydney nor Joanie Baker responded to multiple requests for comment for this article.
Campus activists are also personally attacking the woman author of the DTH ICE piece. A viral video by Mary Esposito, a microcelebrity with almost 380,000 TikTok followers and recipient of a Morehead-Cain Scholarship, UNC’s highly prestigious, merit-based honor, tagged the author, Drew Sherrod, as Esposito denounced the article. One commenter tagged Sherrod and wrote “shame on you. i am wishing awful things on you and your family. i hope it gives you even a SHRED of the terror you have no trouble inflicting on others.” Another wrote that Sherrod “looks inbred, so of course she didn’t see any issues with using this as a joke.” She has since made her social media private.
Both current student body president Adolfo Alvarez and incoming president Devin Duncan issued individual statements condemning the ICE satire and calling on the DTH to “immediately delete the articles.”
“I don’t think people were snowflakes. I think people were affected by these things. And I think that the microaggressions were something that bothered people,” Alvarez said in an interview with the Free Beacon, adding that many students thought that it was time to “boycott” the DTH.
Duncan said that he received many messages and emails from people assuming that he supported the DTH, since he had not immediately issued an individual statement, which he later did.
“Of course, when you don’t say something, people start to assume things, starting like, ‘Oh, you’re, you support this,’ or, ‘Oh, you’re friends with the Daily Tar Heel,’ all sorts of different rumors,” he said.
So far, 23 student organizations have signed onto a letter from Students United for Immigration Equality demanding that the DTH “confront the power and privilege they hold when writing and sharing their work” and “apologize and restore with impacted communities.” SUIE declined to comment. A joint statement from several black student organizations at UNC said they were “disturbed” by the issue and that the articles are part of a trend of “student journalists marginalizing and denigrating minority communities on campus which has persisted for decades.”
Students unaffiliated with activist groups also expressed disapproval, drawing parallels to the general distaste for satirizing the Holocaust. “ICE is straight up, like, Nazis, you know? I mean, like, no, but, like, if they were, like, ‘Let’s do a satire about having Nazis at He’s Not Here,’ like, that’s crazy,” a UNC student and member of the campus comedy community told the Free Beacon. He’s Not Here, a legendary Chapel Hill bar, has been targeted, fined, and suspended by ALE over the years.
The public-facing response to the uproar from the DTH and Hill After Hours was nothing less than complete surrender: retraction, abject apologies, acknowledgments of privilege and promises to pursue self-betterment.
According to some students who spoke anonymously to the Free Beacon, many of the editors and producers from the DTH and Hill After Hours—who lean left—were shaken by the reaction and concerned they would face professional repercussions when applying for jobs in mainstream—and overwhelmingly liberal—media, or when applying to graduate or professional schools. They were also fearful of being boycotted or socially ostracized.
A same-day apology letter from Pardue, the DTH editor in chief, claimed the ICE article “hurt the very communities that we intended to uplift and platform” by a newsroom team that “undoubtedly exists in positions of power and privilege on this campus.” Pardue told the Free Beacon that the DTH was committed to better administering “DEI trainings and workshops.”
To the DTH’s incoming editor in chief, Regan Butler, the statements from Pardue and the DTH were far from enough. “It is no question,” Butler wrote (an editor might have suggested she write “there is no question”) “that I care deeply about our audience and community.” Butler, currently the university editor, “vehemently denounced” the April Fools’ edition. “We are almost all white,” she wrote. “It is no wonder that a piece of content so horribly insensitive slipped through the cracks if almost all of us are operating from perspectives of privilege.” The “DEI coordinator” was insufficiently involved, she said, and the one person of color in management was off on the day the satires were being proofread.
Butler blamed the opinion section, “but we all should have said something, and our leadership should have made us feel like we had the authority to, too” (an editor might have suggested she write “like we had the authority to do so”).
Butler finished her statement with a grammatically tangled flourish: “Real satire is witty criticism of the institutions and actors relevant in the news cycle, most effective when those oppressed by these systems are the authors.”
But in the immediate hours after publication, the DTH editors were pleased with the controversy the April Fools’ issue had stirred, internal communications reveal. In a leaked DTH Slack chat that appeared on Yik Yak, an app that trades in campus gossip, Pardue wrote that “these pieces are some of the most critical pieces of social commentary that we write.” Baker (the opinion editor who also performed in the Hill After Hours skit) expressed pride. “We expected this reaction, and this discourse and massive amounts of attention mean we got people talking,” she wrote.
This was before the outrage reached critical mass, and exploded.
On Monday, Pardue told the Free Beacon that while she is “not proud of the satire edition as a whole,” she does “take pride in our satire writers.” She said she first considered the response to the April Fools’ issue to be “run-of-the-mill criticism” before she recognized the issue’s “harmful impacts.”
“In the direct aftermath of the edition’s release, I was not aware of the full scope of the satire edition nor of its harmful impacts on the community,” Pardue said. “I jumped straight into defense mode, as our satire writing is often controversial. It seemed like run-of-the-mill criticism at first.”
Despite Pardue’s pride in her satire writers, the DTH announced in its April 8, augmented apology statement that it “will not produce satire articles for at least the remainder of the semester. The DTH has proven itself incapable of using this form of opinion writing sensitively for the time being …”
Not all students agree with the widespread condemnation of the satires. “Anyone who’s seen anything like the Simpsons or the Onion would know that it’s a normal satire article,” Jason Charwin, a sophomore studying data science and a registered Democrat, told the Free Beacon. The backlash, he said, “is a microcosm of the larger state of activism, political identification, and what it is on our campus. It’s not this one instance. It’s overall a bigger problem, and it really helps inspire groups like Turning Point.”
“People will think you’re a Republican because you disagree with them about the article,” a left-of-center student wishing to remain anonymous said.
This past Friday, nine days after April Fools’, Orr, the senior vice provost, held a “conversation” with concerned student groups. Mirroring the about-face from the university general counsel’s office, Orr struck a completely different tone from the explicit condemnation of the content—and suggestions of an investigation and possible discipline—that he’d earlier expressed.
“We can’t curtail that speech, and that’s part of it for us,” he said. “That’s the First Amendment right that students have. But what we can do is to look for ways that we identify learning opportunities, and part of today’s meeting is for us to engage in a conversation with me, being new to the university, to hear about not just this incident, but things that we can do to make the student experience better.”
Perhaps Orr, who joined UNC from Ohio State just over a year ago, was apprised by his colleagues of the university’s Equality policy. An Instagram version of his original statement, posted on an official UNC account, omits the two most strongly worded paragraphs in Orr’s original statement. It no longer says the content is “completely unacceptable.”
Ashley Dowdney is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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