TN Man Finally Free After Month In Jail For Mean Comment About Saint Charlie Kirk
There goes newshero Phil Williams, breaking innocent people out of jail!
The monthlong saga of America’s Stupidest Overreaction (Maybe) To Charlie Kirk’s Murder came to an end yesterday, as the district attorney’s office for Perry County, Tennessee, dropped a felony charge of “threats of mass violence on school property” against a retired cop who never threatened mass violence anywhere, but whose politics the local fuckhead sheriff didn’t like.
Retired cop Larry Bushart, 61, was set free as a result, after spending more than a month in jail on a ridiculous $2 million bond in the case. (Until he was suddenly released yesterday, that bond wasn’t even set to be addressed until December 4.) Bushart’s alleged crime involved a snarky September 21 Facebook post about a candlelight vigil for the holy martyr Charlie Kirk. In a local “What’s Happening in Perry County” Facebook group, Bushart posted a bunch of snotty comments about the vigil, including one where he wrote “Seems relevant today” over a meme of Donald Trump saying “We have to get over it,” in reference to a January 2024 school shooting in Perry, Iowa.
You may be asking yourself, “How was that a threat of mass violence?” You may also ask “What is that large automobile?” and “My God, have I done?” But you would have to be a much weirder person than David Byrne in 1980 to decide that the meme’s reference to a 2024 shooting in Perry, Iowa, was a threat to shoot up Perry County (Tennessee) High School in 2025.
Most normal people would recognize that Bushart was mocking the weird ritualized mourning of Kirk, who like Trump dismissed mass shootings as an acceptable price to pay for our beautiful Second Amendment. But Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems was exactly not normal enough to decide that the words “Perry High School” signaled a threat, context be damned.
Sheriff Weems even had a fairly new state law to apply to the offending social media post! Following the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, the Tennessee Lege couldn’t be bothered to do something pointless like regulate guns in the slightest, so instead it went after transgender people, proposed laws to get more guns everywhere, and made “recklessly making a threat of mass violence” a felony, with a statute written so broadly that multiple stupid prosecutions have resulted. In one case, an overzealous sheriff’s office criminally charged some middle school cheerleaders over a 45-second TikTok video that “dramatized” (with much giggling) a school shooting. There were no threats made or implied in the video, but the 11- and 12-year-olds had to be charged to teach them that adolescent sick jokes are bad.
In an affidavit requesting an arrest warrant against Bushart, Perry County Sheriff’s Investigator Jason Morrow explained that he received a message from Weems about the Facebook post, and insisted against all reason that “This was a means of communication, via picture, posted to a Perry County, TN Facebook page in which a reasonable person would conclude could lead to serious bodily injury, or death of multiple people.”
Why yes, Sheriff Weems had himself been promoting the vigil for Kirk in the Facebook group, and shortly after Kirk’s murder had posted an overwrought lament that evil people are everywhere!!! “Evil could be your neighbor,” he warned. “Evil could be standing right beside you in the grocery store. It could be your own family member and you never even know it.”
Or it could be some annoying guy posting memes making fun of a vigil for a martyred rightwing shitposter for whom a local law enforcement officer appears to have strong parasocial feelings. Such evil must be punished!
Weems seems to have relished his role as a kind of Fuckhead Javert, proclaiming to local radio station WOPC the day after Bushart’s arrest that “One of the images posted by Mr. Bushart eluded [sic] to a hypothetical shooting at a place called Perry High School,” although we’ll give the sheriff a pass on the spelling, since the WOPC story is full of similar errors. Weems insisted that the message “caused considerable concern within the community and we were asked to investigate,” although it’s still not clear whether the terribly concerned “community” extended beyond Weems’s own head.
Weems even replied to Facebook critics of the arrest, claiming that the meme was deliberately crafted to confuse Perry, Iowa, with Perry County, Tennessee, insisting in a now-deleted post that it “created mass hysteria to parents and teachers … that led the normal person to conclude that he was talking about our Perry County High School.” He also told The Tennessean that “Numerous reached out in concern” over the Facebook post, and that “investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community.”
But nah, nobody seems to have noticed any of that hysteria coming from anyone but the sheriff. Not even administrators at Perry County Schools, who responded to a public records request from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression by saying only, “the sheriff handled that case and there are no records.”
By complete coincidence, the charges were dropped just one day after noted newshero Phil Williams of local TV station WTVF ran a WTF teevee interview with Weems, who didn’t exactly come across as Joe Friday.
Here’s that video, and yikes, there might be one or two Southern Idjit Cracker Sheriff stereotypes Weems missed, but we didn’t have a checklist. Especially impressive is the bit where Weems says, “This has everything to do with a guy coming onto a Perry County page posting this picture leading people in our community to believe that there was a hypothetical Perry County High School shooting that caused fear in our community — and we done something about it.”
Weems seemed at a loss when he was asked to explain why his department didn’t simply reassure the public that the Facebook post was about Iowa in 2024, not their own beloved Perry County schools.
“Because here's the thing: Whenever you're dealing with something like this and you've got multiple people that is now scared to send their kids to school, we tried to take a different approach and go and speak to this guy and say, ‘Hey, look, this is what you're doing.’”
Once again, there’s no indication that anyone was keeping their children out of school.
Weems also claimed that no charges would have been brought if Bushart had simply taken down the Facebook post, and told reporter Phil Williams, “We sent Lexington Police Department out to speak to him and he refused to do that, I mean, what kind of person does that? What kind of person just says he don't care?”
Chris Eargle, a South Carolina guy who started a “Free Larry Bushart” Facebook page after hearing about the case, pointed out that if law enforcement really believed someone made a real threat of violence, it wouldn’t resolve the public safety threat to simply ask the suspect to take down a social media post.
While we first heard about this godawful fuckery from the Intercept, it’s probably not a coincidence that charges were dropped but directly after Phil Williams shined a light on them. Bless him and good luck IN JAIL!
[Tennessean / WTVF-TV / Intercept / ProPublica]
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Take a look at the lawman
beating up the wrong guy.
Oh man!
Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show.
"But man, proud man,
Dress'd in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep"
— Pinkie Pie