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Case in point: On the night of Sept. 21, 2025, police officers in Lexington, Tennessee, executed a warrant obtained at the direction of Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems, handcuffed Larry Bushart and drove him to jail in Lexington. He was later transferred to a jail in Perry County, where he remained for 37 days on a $2 million bond. His alleged “crime”? Posting a political meme.

Bushart participated in a Facebook discussion following Charlie Kirk’s assassination. He posted a meme quoting Donald Trump’s comment from the day after a 2024 shooting at Perry High School in Iowa: “We have to get over it.”

The sheriff and his investigator knew at the time of Bushart’s arrest that the meme referenced a 2024 shooting in Iowa. But that didn’t stop them from arguing that Bushart was threatening, a year later, to shoot up Perry County High School in Perry County, Tennessee. Nor did it matter that the meme simply isn’t a threat on its face and can’t reasonably be read as one.

After the sheriff admitted that he knew all along that Bushart wasn’t threatening the local school, the district attorney’s office dropped the criminal charge and released Bushart from jail on Oct. 29, 2025.

With the help of our organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Bushart sued to vindicate his First Amendment rights. This week, FIRE announced a settlement under which Bushart will receive $835,000 in exchange for dismissing his complaint.

The First Amendment presumptively protects all speech, carving out a few limited, narrow categories of unprotected speech. True threats — serious expressions of an intent to commit unlawful violence — are unprotected. But the Supreme Court has long held that political hyperbole is not an unprotected true threat. ....

Free speech — and heated political rhetoric in particular — is essential to a free society. For one, majority rule in a democracy is only legitimate if minority voices have been able to make their case. For another, free flowing political speech acts as a check against consolidated political power. And free speech acts as a safety valve for dissent, offering a crucial alternative to violence.

Alarmingly, a December 2025 FIRE survey found that 9 out of 10 undergraduates believe that “words can be violence” — and this was after the Charlie Kirk assassination, an “extreme and tragic example of the sharp difference between words and violence.” When officials bring meritless prosecutions against the Larry Busharts and James Comeys of the world, they risk blurring that line even further.

Bushart’s meme and Comey’s seashells are not threats of violence — not even close. By pretending otherwise, government officials in both cases betrayed fundamental First Amendment law and free speech values. From a historical perspective, this is not surprising, but it is disappointing. Law enforcement must do better, and Americans must hold them accountable when they fail to respect the Constitution.