from the party-of-free-speech,-local-sheriff-edition dept
We know there’s a concerted effort to punish anyone who dares to show anything but complete, unqualified reverence for Charlie Kirk’s corpse. The man who made millions by denigrating anyone who wasn’t as white, straight, and “Christian” as he was is apparently above reproach now that he’s been murdered.
That would be stupid enough on its own. But government officials — ranging from local level officials to the Trump administration itself — have piled on, turning Charlie Kirk into a martyr and using their power to silence his critics.
Tennessee resident Larry Bushart Jr. personally found out how far certain Charlie Kirk fans are willing to go to punish people who aren’t fans of Charlie Kirk. Here’s how that went for him once the local sheriff got involved.
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.
Bushart’s crime? Directly quoting Donald Trump on this Facebook page.
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.
That’s all it took for the local sheriff to get busy abusing his power. After all, Bushart had insulted one of his personal heroes.
The post caught the attention of Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems, who had publicly mourned Kirk and shared information about the vigil.
Weems abused a terrible Tennessee law that was written to curb school shootings but has more often been used to punish people for engaging in what should be protected speech. Law enforcement officers love to play ignorant when they’re confronted about apparently illegal arrests or searches. But Weems definitely knew this law could be used to toss a person he disagreed with in jail.
Claiming the post had resulted in “mass hysteria” in the area due to its reference to Perry High School (the one in Iowa, although there’s nothing in the meme specifying its geographic location), Sheriff Weems justified the arrest and the month Bushart spent in jail by, well, lying.
In an interview with a local news station, Sheriff Weems said this:
In his interview with NewsChannel 5, Sheriff Weems insisted all of this could have been avoided if Bushart had just deleted the meme that some people in Perry County found objectionable.
“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. “What kind of person just says he don’t care?”
He also referenced the public reaction to Bushart’s post, which the sheriff claims resulted in people thinking the post was about a shooting in the area. Those who actually viewed the post and the page have pointed out that no one commented on the meme with anything that resembled concern Bushart might be referencing the local high school.
Sheriff Weems has continued to insist he’s done nothing wrong, despite body cam footage from the arresting officers making it clear the sheriff lied to journalists during this interview and while making other comments to the press.
Lexington police told The Intercept that Weems had lied when he told local news outlets that the forces had “coordinated” to offer Bushart a chance to delete the post prior to his arrest. Confronted with the bodycam footage, Weems denied lying, claiming that his investigator’s report must have been inaccurate, NewsChannel 5 reported.
Weems later admitted to NewsChannel 5 that “investigators knew that the meme was not about Perry County High School” and sought Bushart’s arrest anyway, supposedly hoping to quell “the fears of people in the community who misinterpreted it.” That’s as close as Weems comes to seemingly admitting that his intention was to censor the post.
You know you’ve fucked up when even those on the same side of the “thin blue line” are willing to call you a liar in public. Sheriff Weems, however, appears to have learned nothing from this experience. Every subsequent comment is just more doubling down on an already-disproved narrative.
And public records obtained from other sources make it clear the Sheriff’s claims of “mass hysteria” were just as free of facts — something made up to justify an apparently personal vendetta against a local man (and former police officer) who offended the sheriff himself with his social media posts.
Although the Perry County Schools District did not respond to messages from The Intercept, attorneys with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a series of open records requests with the school district asking for any communications to or from staff pertaining to the case — including terms like “shooting,” “threat,” and “meme.” In response, the director of schools wrote that there were no records related to Bushart’s case. “The Perry County Sheriff’s Department handled this situation,” he wrote.
It’s one thing when one of your neighbors thinks you’re kind of a prick. It’s quite another when that person happens to be the local sheriff. This bogus arrest — coupled with a ridiculous $2 million bail — cost Bushart 40 days of his life. That meant he not only missed the birth of his grandchild, but also lost his post-retirement job.
All that’s guaranteed now is that Sheriff Weems is getting sued. No doubt he’ll claim the state law can be read expansively enough to cover his actions and all the lies he told to defend them. And with a nation full of Charlie Kirk acolytes looking to take their anger out on anyone who doesn’t treat him like a minor deity, there will be more of this in the future.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, censorship, charlie kirk, donald trump, free speech, larry bushart, perry county, school shooting, sheriff nick weems
