In the NYT today: The story of the ex-cop who spent more than a month in jail over a meme

In my 25 years defending free speech, I have seen a lot of overreach. I have never seen anything quite like this.

Lexington Police Department bodycam footage showing Larry Bushart’s arrest on September 21, 2025. Screenshot: Lexington Police

In The New York Times today, I’ve got an op-ed that should send a chill down every American’s spine: the story of a 61-year-old retired police officer who spent five weeks in jail for a meme.

Larry Bushart, a retired cop from rural Tennessee, shared a political image on Facebook last September in a thread promoting a vigil for Charlie Kirk. The meme paired Donald Trump’s comments after a 2024 school shooting at Perry High School in Iowa — “We have to get over it” — with the caption, “This seems relevant today…”

For that, the local sheriff had him hauled out of his home just before midnight on September 21.

The police claimed that some of the public read the meme as threatening “mass violence” at the local Perry County High School, roughly 700 miles away from the Iowa school that Trump had been talking about. (Mind you, when FIRE requested records from the school related to that claim, the school said it had no responsive records.)

Bushart’s bail was set at $2 million — twice the amount, by the way, that was set for a Tennessee suspect recently charged with six counts of attempted murder. Let that sink in.

Unable to pay this exorbitant amount, Bushart sat in jail for 37 days before prosecutors finally dropped the charge.

FIRE and local counsel are preparing a federal civil-rights lawsuit seeking damages and a judicial declaration that the sheriff’s conduct violated the First Amendment. That accountability matters not only for Larry Bushart, but for the next person a sheriff is tempted to drag off to jail over a Facebook post.

Unfortunately, there probably will be a “next person.” We’re in a stunningly illiberal moment. A Reuters review found that more than 600 Americans have been fired, suspended, or otherwise punished by employers for comments about Kirk’s assassination. At FIRE, we’ve recorded 81 attempts to sanction scholars for their remarks about Kirk, resulting so far in 40 sanctions and 18 terminations.

Meanwhile, the State Department has revoked visas for foreigners who celebrated the assassination online. The Pentagon is reviewing dozens of service members’ posts and has already suspended or relieved several over their comments. When speech about a public figure’s death leads to firings, visa cancellations, and jail, the message is unmistakable: Certain speech is off-limits.

Recently, I visited Utah Valley University, the very place where Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking to students. The horror and fear that act inspired are real — I would know; I was there. But we cannot answer political violence with a campaign to criminalize or purge speech. The “eternally radical idea” at the heart of our constitutional order is simple and fragile: In a free society, we answer speech with more speech, not with prison or violence.

In my quarter-century at FIRE, we had never seen an outright murder of a campus speaker like Mr. Kirk’s in the United States. And Mr. Bushart’s lengthy detention — he would be spending Thanksgiving in jail if public outrage had not convinced prosecutors to finally abandon the case — reflects the willingness of officials to violate civil rights, trusting they will not face meaningful consequences.

America’s great break with most of human history is that we tried something different. Instead of treating dissent as heresy, we wrote a Constitution that says you can think what you will and say what you think. Over the past century, our law has steadily moved toward a simple rule: The government does not punish you for political speech unless you are threatening violence or trying to spark it.

As I wrote in the Times, Charlie Kirk “was shot to death while speaking — apparently, for speaking — to students on a college campus. That violence sent a chilling message. It’s the same message that jailing Mr. Bushart sends: Some ideas are too dangerous to express, and those who give voice to them may lose their lives, their liberty, or their livelihood.”

See the op-ed, “Five Weeks in Jail for a Meme,” in The New York Times.

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Bridget Phetasy

sporting our fantastic “Free Speech Makes Free People” socks — available now at the FIRE store, along with plenty of other free speech-friendly items! (You may recognize the FIRE polo which I never miss an opportunity to wear!)

The photo was actually flagged on X as potential “adult content,” which I think says it all! FIRE merch: Too hot for X.