Larry Bushart, the Man Jailed 37 Days for a Single Trump Meme, Has Filed His Inevitable Lawsuit

In late September, 61-year-old retired police officer and Tennessee resident Larry Bushart posted a meme to a local Facebook group. It was in the aftermath of the shocking assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, and in a group planning a Kirk vigil in a small Tennessee community, Bushart posted an existing meme: An image of President Donald Trump, highlighting Trump’s comments following a Jan. 2024 school shooting at Perry High School of Perry, Iowa, in which Trump insisted “we have to get over it.” It was, frankly, an extremely basic bit of internet trolling from a surprisingly liberal-aligned man, considering his background as a former cop, and status as a rural, senior citizen white male. But to anyone with a functioning brain cell, the meaning of the meme was obvious: Bushart was pointing out the hypocrisy of conservatives performatively caring about one shooting, while minimizing another. That obviousness is what made it so shocking when Larry Bushart was subsequently arrested by the police department of a small-town sheriff on the same day he made the post, and charged with “threatening mass violence at a school,” which supposedly had caused “mass hysteria” in the area. He was held in a local jail for 37 days, on a ludicrous $2 million bond, while said sheriff doubled and tripled down on his nonexistent justifications for jailing Bushart because of one Trump meme. This was the meme in question, by the way:

By the time Larry Bushart was released from jail on Oct. 30 (with no statement or explanation from the sheriff’s office), his life had already been turned around. He lost his job as a medical driver, missed his wedding anniversary, and missed the birth of a grandchild, while being incarcerated because of a Facebook post completely unrelated to any kind of conceivable threat. When we wrote about the case last month, we opined that Bushart would no doubt end up filing (and almost certainly winning) a massive civil rights lawsuit in the subsequent months on First Amendment grounds, his right to free speech having resulted in absurd punishment by a local sheriff run amok. Bushart has already become a symbol of the post-Charlie Kirk assassination wave of free speech repression and politically motivated firings and punishments, and a high-profile lawsuit would no doubt both make him rich and serve as an important piece of precedent to be used against police violating the constitutional rights of Americans. Today, Bushart filed the federal civil rights lawsuit we had been waiting for, with the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, against Perry County, Tennessee and Sheriff Nick Weems, for violation of his constitutional rights. You can read the full text of the suit here.

“I spent over three decades in law enforcement, and have the utmost respect for the law,” said Bushart in a statement. “But I also know my rights, and I was arrested for nothing more than refusing to be bullied into censorship.”

Bushart refers to an incident seen in the police bodycam footage from that night in September, when local police paid him a visit and demanded that he remove the offending meme. When Bushart refused, the police returned several hours later with a warrant, justified by Weems claiming that “mass hysteria” had somehow been happening across the county in the preceding hours. There is, suffice to say, essentially no evidence of any kind for Weems to fall back on that suggests anything even remotely akin to this–when investigating members of the media contacted the local high school seeking records of communications from the sheriff’s department that would have notified them of this “threat” or the supposed hysteria, there were none to be found. There weren’t even any reactions on Facebook to Bushart’s supposedly inciting meme! The total lack of justification for his jailing, or the absurdly high bail, is almost impossible to believe, but it represents an obvious threat to the liberty of citizens and a terrifying bit of precedent that must be corrected.

“If police can come to your door in the middle of the night and put you behind bars based on nothing more than an entirely false and contrived interpretation of a Facebook post, no one’s First Amendment rights are safe,” said FIRE senior attorney Adam Steinbaugh in a media statement along with the filed lawsuit.

If a large media uproar and swell of grassroots social media support hadn’t coalesced around the case of Larry Bushart, then it’s entirely probable that the Tennessee man would still be sitting in jail today, awaiting a trial on some of the most profoundly corrupt charges you will ever see. His case is an important marker of what kind of tyranny we will allow our hyper-polarized political landscape to translate down to at the level of local policing. Can a rural sheriff simply decide what speech they want to be legal or illegal, when no reasonable person would characterize that speech as a threat? Do the rights afforded to us by the Constitution still mean something? Bushart’s lawsuit will hopefully affirm that there is still a line that is too far for a small-town tyrant wielding the heraldry of law enforcement to cross.

“This lawsuit goes beyond Larry,” said FIRE attorney David Rubin in a statement. “It’s about making sure police everywhere understand that they cannot punish or intimidate people for sharing controversial opinions online. Law enforcement across the country should be on notice: Respect the First Amendment, or prepare to face the consequences.”