A retired Tennessee law enforcement officer who spent more than a month behind bars for posting a meme quoting President Donald Trump has been released after prosecutors dropped the felony charge against him.
Larry Bushart, 61, of Lexington, Tenn., was arrested late September and charged with threatening mass violence at a school, a felony under a 2024 state law. The charge stemmed from a meme he shared in a local Facebook group following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The meme featured an image of Trump with the caption: “We have to get over it,” referencing the president’s response to a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, earlier this year. Bushart added the line, “This seems relevant today.”
Though Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems admitted in a Wednesday interview that the meme contained no explicit threats and that investigators knew it referred to a past shooting in Iowa, he defended the arrest as necessary to calm fears in the community.
“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 told News Channel5 investigations in Nashville in an interview.
Weems acknowledged that the meme contained no explicit threats and that his department knew it referenced a real Iowa tragedy.
“We knew,” he told News Channel5. “The public did not know.”
Still, Weems argued, Bushart’s refusal to delete the post left authorities little choice. “Whenever we sent Lexington Police Department out to speak to him and he refused to do that — I mean, what kind of person does that? What kind of person just says he don’t care?”
Bushart was taken into custody at his home and held on a $2 million bond. Body camera footage captured him telling officers, “I play on Facebook. I threatened no one.”
Free-speech advocates and civil libertarians denounced the arrest as a chilling example of law enforcement overreach.
“Larry Bushart’s arrest and confinement violate the First Amendment,” Matthew Cavedon, the director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice, wrote earlier this week in a post titled “‘Facebook Jail’ isn’t supposed to be a real place.” “The Supreme Court has made it crystal clear that only true threats are exempt from the freedom of speech — not hyperbole and political bombast.”
Prosecutors dropped the charge this week without explanation, and Bushart was released Wednesday. In an email to the New York Times, Bushart’s lawyer confirmed the release but did not add any additional details.
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