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Larry Bushart Jr. was just freed from a Tennessee jail cell after spending more than a month behind bars — for a Facebook post.
The 61-year-old retiree and former cop — who had a penchant for posting provocative progressive memes that made him stand out in his deeply conservative community southwest of Nashville — was accused in September of threatening to shoot up a local school.
The evidence, which the county’s elected sheriff used to hold Bushart in a cell on a $2 million bond, is a meme accusing President Donald Trump of dismissing the lives lost in a 2024 school shooting in Perry, Iowa, while pushing punishment for critics of slain right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk.
The charges were dropped and Bushart was released from the Perry County Jail in Linden, Tennessee, only after Sheriff Nick Weems acknowledged in a TV interview that there was no true threat. Weems initially claimed that Bushart’s post set off “mass hysteria” that he was plotting a shooting at the local Perry County High School.