As it turns out, you can’t toss a man in jail for posting a meme.
Felony charges were dropped Wednesday against Larry Bushart, a Tennessee man who spent the past five weeks behind bars after being arrested for posting a meme that shrugged off conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder by quoting President Donald Trump.
Bushart, a retired law enforcement officer and outspoken gun control proponent, responded to a social media post about a local vigil for Kirk with an old meme featuring Trump saying, “We have to get over it” in response to a 2024 school shooting in Iowa.
“This seems relevant today,” Bushart captioned the post.
And while Bushart—who built a reputation for posting left-leaning memes across social media—was using Trump’s words to react to Kirk’s death, parents seemed to take it as a threat against a local high school.
At least, that’s the claim.
Related | The right wants to ruin your life if you don't mourn Charlie Kirk
The meme that landed the 61-year-old behind bars was originally created after a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, in which a child and an administrator were killed. Trump’s very real quote in response came one day after the shooting at Perry High School.
Bushart posted the meme in a Perry, Tennessee, community Facebook group, where Perry County High School resides. And instead of local residents understanding that another town in the U.S. is also named Perry, they took the meme as a threat to their local high school.
However, while Perry County Sheriff's department officials admitted to knowing the “concern” over the meme was overblown, that didn’t stop Bushart’s arrest on a felony charge of threatening mass violence at a school—or his bail from being set at $2 million.
Sheriff Nick Weems told News Channel 5 Investigates that even though the department knew Bushart was recycling an old meme about an event that took place in a different state, he was arrested due to the community’s fearful reaction.
“Whenever you're dealing with something like this and you've got multiple people that is now scared to send their kids to school, we tried to take a different approach and go and speak to this guy and say, ‘Hey, look, this is what you're doing,’" Weems told the outlet.
Sheriff’s deputies visited Bushart to request he take down the meme, and arrested him after he refused.
“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?" Weems asked. "What kind of person just says he don't care?"
The reporter responded, "Maybe a person who doesn't think he's done anything wrong."
Even the arresting officer admitted on bodycam footage that he didn’t understand why Bushart was being arrested.
But Bushart’s targeting was just one example of the conservative outrage over free speech after Kirk’s assassination.
The far-right commentator was shot dead during the kickoff of his “American Comeback” college campus tour.
Many on the right mourned Kirk’s death while the left called the public tributes hypocritical compared to MAGA’s silence around the political assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman.
That didn’t stop MAGA luminaries including Vice President JD Vance from calling for people to snitch on others who joked about Kirk's death in order to get them arrested or fired from their jobs.
And many, including journalists, did suffer consequences for the crime of sharing their opinions.
Even late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was briefly removed from the airwaves after he made a quip about the shooter’s political affiliation.
While Bushart is finally free again after more than a month behind bars, the right’s push for punitive action over free speech continues to mark a dark chapter in our nation’s history.
