Four police officers arrived at Larry Bushart’s Tennessee home in the dead of night. They cuffed the former cop and led him off to jail, where he remained for the next 37 days.
He couldn’t afford his $2 million bond. So he missed his granddaughter’s birth and his wedding anniversary and lost his job, all while incarcerated.
Download the SAN app today to stay up-to-date with Unbiased. Straight Facts™.
Point phone camera here
His crime? Bushart reposted a meme on a Facebook post about a Charlie Kirk vigil in Perry County, Tennessee.
Bushart’s troubles began Sept. 20. Ten days earlier, Kirk, a prominent conservative activist, had been shot to death on a college campus in Utah. Bushart, who worked in law enforcement for 34 years, reposted the meme, which showed an image of President Donald Trump and his reaction to a January 2024 shooting at a high school in a different Perry County, the one in Iowa: “We have to get over it.”
Bushart added four words of commentary: “This seems relevant today…”
Bushart, 61, was charged with threatening mass violence on school property. But Bushart did not create the meme. And the meme was about a different shooting in a different year in a different state.
A prosecutor decided not to pursue the charges. But this week, Bushart filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Perry County, Tennessee, and its sheriff, Nick Weems, alleging they violated his constitutional right of free speech.
“I was arrested for nothing more than refusing to be bullied into censorship,” Bushart has said.
First Amendment experts say Bushart has a strong case.
“It is difficult to comprehend the defense in this case,” Jeffrey Robbins, a First Amendment attorney who has represented clients on both sides of free speech cases, told Straight Arrow News. “Even in the purely civil context, punishing one who has engaged in political speech is — and ought to be — difficult to justify. There was no reasonable expectation of imminent harm to anyone as a result of this use of social media, and there is no evidence that any such harm was intended or perceived.”
Perry County officials did not respond to SAN’s request for comment.
In October, however, the sheriff defended Bushart’s arrest in an interview with WTVF-TV of Nashville.
“This has everything to do with a guy coming onto a Perry County page posting this picture leading people in our community to believe that there was a hypothetical Perry County High School shooting that caused fear in our community — and we done something about it,” Weems said.
First Amendment crackdowns
About 600 people across the nation were admonished, investigated, suspended or fired over comments considered insensitive or critical about Kirk’s death, according to a Reuters review of court records, public statements, local media reports and interviews with 24 people who received punishment. Reuters reported that many Republican officials endorsed the punishments of people who they said were glorifying violence.
“The wave of censorship post-Charlie Kirk incident, specifically, has been something that we haven’t seen of this scale,” Cary Davis, one of Bushart’s attorneys at the free-speech advocacy group FIRE, which is representing Bushart pro bono, told Straight Arrow News.
“Free societies don’t haul people to jail in the middle of the night because they engaged in political speech that a sheriff disagrees with,” Davis said. “Whether you agree or disagree with Larry on his opinions, the idea that a rogue sheriff can have somebody arrested purely based on their opinions and political discourse online is something that should alarm everybody, regardless of your politics.”
Typically, judges set bond amounts depending on the severity of the alleged crime. “A $2 million bond is astonishing,” Davis told SAN.
“The bond is an outlier,” he said. “Normally you’d expect this kind of bond maybe for someone accused of murder, something like that. This was a pure political meme on Facebook.”
Amid a public outcry after Bushart’s arrest made headlines, the local district attorney, Hans Schwendimann, filed a motion to drop the charges. Bushart was released that same day.
Knowing his rights
Bushart formerly worked for two Tennessee law enforcement agencies, as well as the Tennessee Department of Corrections.
“He’s someone who has great respect for the law … that’s important to him,” Davis said. “He knows his rights, and this was pure censorship.”
Case law seems to support Bushart’s position.
“The Supreme Court has been really clear that even extreme political hyperbole is protected speech,” Davis said. “Only when the speech is a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence does that cross over to an unprotected true threat. Larry had no such intent here, and any reasonable officer with the same information that was available to the officers here would have known that Larry did not intend to threaten anybody or any place at all.”
In Snyder v. Phelps, a 2011 landmark decision, the Supreme Court established that even outrageous, hateful comments made on public property cannot be the basis of litigation claiming harm or emotional distress.
“[This] decision of the Supreme Court, upholding the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to hurl insults at a soldier’s funeral, would appear to make restrictions on free speech, where they purported to address matters of public concern, impermissible even where the restrictions on such speech were merely civil in nature,” Robbins said.
“But [Bushart’s case] is an even more extreme case,” Robbins added, “where the individual engaged in what is pretty clearly protected speech was deprived of his physical liberty for weeks. The plaintiff has a strong case that his First Amendment rights were violated, that the defendants reasonably should have known that they were violating his First Amendment rights, and that he is entitled to damages.”
