Retired Police Officer in Tennessee Hit with a $2 Million Bond and 37 Days in Jail for Sharing a Meme

​“I didn’t seek to be a media sensation,” 61-year-old Larry Bushart told local media after the retired Tennessee police officer spent 37 days in jail and was hit with a $2 million bond – all for reposting a meme on a Facebook thread.

At 11 p.m. on Sept. 21, officers came to Bushart’s Linden, Tennessee, home, handcuffed him, and locked him up for “threatening mass violence at a school.”
Did he?

Consider: Bushart’s post came after the assassination of Charlie Kirk and centered around a vigil in Perry County, Tennessee. The meme included a quote from then-candidate Donald Trump in the aftermath of a school shooting in Iowa, saying: “We have to get over it.”

When we checked candidate Trump’s remarks, we found that this quote was plucked from a longer and more sympathetic statement. But when it comes to taking something out of context, the Perry County Sheriff’s Department is unexcelled. You might find the shared meme highly offensive, or you might nod in agreement. But one thing it is not is a threat of mass violence at a school.

Nevertheless, the arrest affidavit for Bushart states that a “reasonable person would conclude [it] could lead to serious bodily injury, or death to multiple people.” Please tell us, where do we find these “reasonable people”? Probably only in the Perry County Sheriff’s office.

Meanwhile, in the more than five weeks Bushart spent in jail, he missed the birth of his granddaughter and lost a post-retirement job providing medical transportation. The charges against Bushart were finally dropped, but only after the case began to receive national notoriety.

“A free country does not dispatch police in the dead of night to pull people from their homes because a sheriff objects to their social media posts,” said Adam Steinbaugh of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which is representing Bushart’s in his lawsuit to defend his rights.
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As this case moves forward, these local authorities in Tennessee may well find their infringement on Bushart’s speech to be expensive. Consider that a raid on a small-town newspaper in Kansas recently resulted in a $3 million settlement.

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