We wrote about this stuff under Biden, so must here—and yes, it’s still creepy. In Tennessee, a retired police officer posted what The Washington Post described as an anti-Trump meme. Hell, the local police department saw it as such, and they reportedly jailed him for it. He was imprisoned for almost 40 days on suspicion that he was “threatening mass violence.” It was a comment on a Facebook page about a local vigil for Charlie Kirk, the TPUSA founder who was assassinated last September, that led to this police visit, one that, regardless of political differences, wasn’t warranted. The Washington Post grabbed onto this story last December (via WaPo):
Attorneys for Larry Bushart, 61, filed a lawsuit in federal court … against a sheriff, an investigator and Perry County, which lies about halfway between Nashville and Memphis. The suit alleges that they violated Bushart’s First and Fourth Amendment rights when they ordered his arrest in September and held him for five weeks on charges of threatening mass violence — all in response to what Bushart contends was a harmless social media meme.
“In America, we do not jail people for political speech,” the lawsuit states. “Yet Larry Bushart spent 37 days behind bars simply for speaking his mind. It took a national uproar about his detention for Perry County officials to drop the charge against Mr. Bushart — a charge officials knew from the outset was unfounded.”
[…]
Law enforcement officers knocked on Bushart’s door on Sept. 21 because Perry investigators were interested in one of the more than 100 posts he had published that day.
In a local Facebook group, Bushart had commented on a post about a local vigil held the day before for Kirk, the charismatic organizer who helped lead a conservative youth movement on American campuses. Bushart replied with a preexisting meme that depicted Trump and quoted a remark Trump had made — “We have to get over it” — after a deadly January 2024 shooting at Perry High School in Iowa.
The post include the phrase, “This seems relevant today ….”
Weems said some people in Perry County, Tennessee, interpreted the meme as a threat to their local high school, which is named “Perry County High School.” He told Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 that “multiple people” had complained but did not specify how many.
[…]
“I spent over three decades in law enforcement, and have the utmost respect for the law,” Bushart said … in a statement provided by attorneys from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is representing him. “But I also know my rights, and I was arrested for nothing more than refusing to be bullied into censorship.”
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Yeah, not the most sensitive comment, but Bushart has the right to make it. As for us, well, liberals and leftists are supremely annoying, but they have the right to engage in these antics, and we have the right to mock them. Now, the difference is that one side—the Left—has started to engage in domestic terrorism and political violence. They killed Kirk, they shot up an ICE detention facility in Dallas, Texas, and they assassinated two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC.
Still, what Bushart did was legal. And when Biden’s FBI was harassing people for posting memes that mocked the former president, that, too, was creepy. Though I’m sure not as much ink was devoted to these stories in the Post.
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