More than a month after he was arrested for sharing a meme on Facebook, 61-year-old Larry Bushart Jr. walked out of the Perry County jail in Linden, Tennessee, on Wednesday, where his wife was waiting to take him home. He wore a weary smile and the same white T-shirt he had on the night he was jailed. A reporter from a local news station, which had previously splashed his mugshot on its website, approached for an interview.
“Thanks to all and any supporters out there,” Bushart said. “And very happy to be going home.”
“I didn’t seek to be a media sensation,” he added. “But here we are. Yeah, that’s about all I can say right now.”
Bushart’s case raised a firestorm of controversy after he was arrested, jailed, and slapped with a $2 million bail for a social media post. His supposed crime: making a threat of mass violence against a school in a neighboring county. In reality, all he had done was repost a meme. On Saturday, September 20, he had visited a community page, “What’s Happening in Perry County, TN,” and trolled a thread about an upcoming vigil honoring Charlie Kirk.
One of his posts was a photo of President Donald Trump, along with the quote “We have to get over it,” drawing from his response to a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, in 2024. The post caught the attention of Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems, who had publicly mourned Kirk and shared information about the vigil. Armed with a Tennessee law that was aimed at preventing school shootings but which has ensnared numerous people for their social media activity, the sheriff got a warrant for Bushart’s arrest. According to Weems, the words “Perry High School” in the meme were interpreted by locals as a threat to a high school in Perry County. In statements to the press, Weems claimed Bushart had caused “mass hysteria.”
Yet there was no evidence of any hysteria. The local school district had not received any communications from the sheriff’s department warning them of a threat, nor had it sent any warnings to the school community. Although the sheriff insisted that parents and teachers had been gripped with fear by the meme, he has shown zero evidence to support his claims.
Bushart’s case attracted several rounds of media attention, from the days immediately following his September arrest to this past week, when Weems sat down for a TV interview to defend his actions. But the Intercept was instrumental in publicizing his case; it was the first to provide a detailed account of the response to the meme within the closed Facebook group — which showed no reaction to the meme in question, let alone panic or fear — and to report that the local school district had no records of any communications with the sheriff over an alleged threat. The Intercept was also the first to obtain body camera footage undermining the sheriff’s claims, in which officers from the Lexington Police Department appeared to distance themselves from the prosecution in the neighboring county.
The tipping point came less than a week later, after Nashville’s CBS affiliate NewsChannel 5 aired a sit-down interview with Weems, conducted by veteran investigative reporter Phil Williams. Sitting at his desk in front of a huge “thin blue line” American flag painted on his office wall, Weems defended the arrest, insisting that there were people “scared to send their kids to school” as a result of Bushart’s post. But he also put a new spin on the case, casting Bushart as a callous man who had rebuffed reasonable attempts by the police to deescalate the situation.
“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 Williams, apparently referring to an initial visit by Lexington police. According to the sheriff, the officers asked him to take down the offending post. “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 Williams. “What kind of person just says he don’t care?”
Weems repeated the claim to Nashville’s ABC affiliate, WKRN, saying that he “coordinated” with the Lexington Police Department to offer Bushart a chance to “clarify his public messages and calm the situation that was causing multiple, reasonable citizens to be in fear of their children’s safety at school.” But when the news outlet asked the Lexington Police chief whether his department had been involved in this way, “the chief responded, ‘No.’”
“It’s just control over people’s speech.”
To Chris Eargle, who launched a Facebook group called “Free Larry Bushart” in early October, the sheriff’s account made no sense. By Weems’s logic, the supposed threat would have been somehow nullified if Bushart had just taken down the post. “If you think it was a threat, why would removing it make any difference?” he told Williams.
“Nick Weems basically threw out any semblance of a case,” Eargle told The Intercept. The sheriff’s account amounted to: “If you say something I don’t like, and you don’t take it down, now you’re going to be in trouble,” he said. “I mean, it’s just control over people’s speech.”
It isn’t clear why the office dropped the charge against Bushart when it did. The prosecutor in charge of the case, 32nd Judicial District Attorney Hans Schwendimann, did not respond to messages from The Intercept. But the media attention and Facebook group undoubtedly played a role by generating public pressure to abandon the case. Eargle galvanized members of the group to contact the sheriff’s department as well as Schwendimann’s office. He posted the DA’s phone number, urging followers to “Tell him (politely!) to drop this farce of a case. … No threats. No abuse. Just truth. Let’s make noise the right way.”
“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.”
On Wednesday morning, before the charge was dropped, Weems posted an update on his personal Facebook page. “I was elected to serve and protect Perry County. Not a biased, one sided news outlet and definitely not people that’s not even from this community.” He insisted he is “100% for protecting the 1st amendment. However, freedom of speech does not allow anyone to put someone else in fear of their well being.”
But as Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told The Intercept, “People’s performative overreaction is not a sufficient basis to limit someone else’s free speech rights.” FIRE closely monitored the case and filed open records requests, including the ones that revealed there was no communication with the school district about the supposed threat. In a statement following Bushart’s release, Steinbaugh said, “We are relieved that Larry Bushart has been freed after nearly 40 days in jail, and subject to a $2 million bond, over a Facebook post clearly protected by the First Amendment. 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.”
Reached by The Intercept on Tuesday afternoon, Bushart’s wife declined to comment on her husband’s release. But Eargle said she called him earlier that day just before 2 p.m. “She was beyond ecstatic.”
“I got a message from Larry’s wife — it seemed really urgent — saying ‘Call me,’” he said. “I was worried something had happened, and I called her. And she told me she’s on her way to pick up Larry.”
Bushart’s incarceration has already taken a toll. Although he retired from a decadeslong career in law enforcement last year, he was working as a medical driver before his arrest — a job that he has since lost. In Perry County, meanwhile, the sheriff’s actions have put residents on notice that they may be targeted for their speech. According to Eargle, who does not live in Tennessee, the Free Larry Bushart Facebook group includes numerous members who have been posting anonymously: “There’s a lot of people that are actually afraid of speaking out because of retribution.”
Back home, Bushart is back to posting again. By early Thursday morning, he had posted nearly a dozen times. His first two posts were not political. He shared a celebratory post about his new grandchild, who was born while Bushart was in jail. Then he posted a live Elton John video from 1985: “I’m Still Standing.”
