It was 11:15 p.m. on a Sunday when police knocked on Larry Bushart’s door. Bushart, a 61-year-old retired Tennessee law enforcement officer, and his wife were planning on getting new carpet installed early the next day.
But he wasn’t there the next day, or the following one. Or the 35 days that came after. He was sitting in jail, missing the birth of his granddaughter and losing his post-retirement job providing medical transport. His “crime”? A Facebook post. One squarely protected by the First Amendment.
When Bushart arrived at the jail, an officer finally let him know what he’d been charged with: threatening mass violence at a school.
On Sept. 20, a week and a half after the assassination of MAGA activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk, Bushart shared a meme on a Facebook thread about a vigil in nearby Perry County, Tennessee. The meme quoted President Donald Trump saying, “We have to get over it” following a school shooting in January 2024. The meme included the commentary “This seems relevant today …”
Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems, who promoted the vigil on Facebook a few days earlier, apparently didn’t appreciate this sentiment. So he weaponized a recently passed Tennessee law about threats of school shootings to get a warrant for Bushart’s arrest.
As seen on body camera footage first obtained by The Intercept, when Bushart arrived at the jail, an officer finally let him know what he’d been charged with: threatening mass violence at a school.
A shocked Bushart responded: “At a school?”
In a county where the median household income is $50,000, Bushart’s felony charge came with an astronomical $2 million bail. (For comparison, a Tennessee judge set a $1 million bail — half of what Bushart got — for a suspect charged this fall with six counts of attempted first-degree murder.)
Weems justified the arrest in a statement to The Tennessean by claiming that Bushart’s post “created mass hysteria to parents and teachers” because the Trump meme Bushart used referred to Perry High School in Iowa, 700 miles away, where a shooting occurred 20 months earlier.
Perry County and its sheriff’s office have failed to respond to multiple public records requests, but its school district has. When my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), asked for records about the incident — anything that might substantiate the “hysteria” Weems claimed — the school district said it had no records at all. No emails from anxious parents, no urgent texts with the security chief, no reassuring letters home.
Even if parents did complain, the post still wouldn’t meet the legal definition of a true threat to warrant the nightmare Bushart endured. True threats are one of the very few exceptions to the First Amendment. The Supreme Court is clear that for a statement to meet the true threat threshold, a reasonable person would have to consider it threatening. A meme doesn’t become a threat just because a sheriff says it is.
We’re living in a time when the politics behind someone’s expression is a deciding factor in whether many people will defend it.
We’re living in a time when the politics behind someone’s expression is a deciding factor in whether many people will defend it. Folks reserve their indignation for their political allies.
Agree with the speech that landed someone in trouble? That’s an outrage!
Disagree with it? Well, they had it coming. That toxicity creates an environment in which free speech can’t flourish. Reason and debate wilt under the boots of an emboldened majority, as opposing beliefs are stomped out. It’s that kind of blustering fervor that led police to Bushart’s home in the dead of night. It’s easy to paint this as a problem confined to an overzealous police force in a small town in Tennessee. But assaults on free expression know no state boundaries. In recent years, police in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Vermont and more have arrested Americans for expression protected by the First Amendment. This kind of scenario — the midnight knock at the door for speaking your mind — happens in other countries. We cannot allow it to establish a foothold in the United States. We must fight it every single time. Nor can we allow horrific tragedies to dull our awareness of threats to our rights. Political winds change. Those in power today won’t be in power tomorrow, and unless we stand firm on our principles, our free speech rights will never truly be secure. If a 61-year-old former law enforcement officer can languish in jail for more than a month for a Facebook post, are any of us truly safe to speak our minds?
Daniel Burnett is the senior director of communications at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). 
