The Times, a newspaper from the United Kingdom, reported that in recent years, law enforcement officers in Great Britain were making “more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts on social media and other platforms” — a figure that translates to about 12,000 arrests per year.
From a U.S. vantage point — with the First Amendment and a culture more amenable to freedom of speech — these figures are disturbing. But such arrests and prosecutions are happening on our shores. Americans must demand it stop by exercising their First Amendment rights and defending free speech for all, including their political opponents.
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.
Unfortunately, modern-day law enforcement continues to reach for this old, old device to police disfavored political speech.
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.
Sixty years ago, a young man named Robert Watts attended a discussion group concerning police brutality at a public rally on the grounds of the Washington Monument. Watts noted that he had received his draft classification and stated to the group, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ.” He was arrested and convicted for threatening President Lyndon B. Johnson.
The Supreme Court in Watts v. United States held that the First Amendment protected Watts’ speech because political speech “is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact.” Watts’ “only offense” was “a kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President.”
You would think that law enforcement would get the message. But as Justice William O. Douglas wrote in his Watts concurrence, “Suppression of speech as an effective police measure is an old, old device, outlawed by our Constitution.” To borrow one of Justice Douglas’ examples, one fifteenth-century innkeeper was “hanged, drawn and quartered” for telling his son, “Tom, if thou behavest thyself well, I will make thee heir to the crown.”
Unfortunately, modern-day law enforcement continues to reach for this age-old tactic to police disfavored political speech. Bushart’s case is one example. But he’s not the only one.
On April 28, 2026, the Department of Justice indicted former FBI Director James Comey for posting a picture of seashells spelling out “86 47.” “86” is a slang term meaning “get rid of,” while “47” refers to the 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump. “Get rid of the president” is about as tame as political speech gets. Yet the indictment claims — incredibly — that this collection of shells amounts to a threat on Trump’s life.
First of all, “86” doesn’t necessarily mean “kill.” Just ask SpongeBob: A call to “86 those patties” is not a call for murder. But even if the shells unambiguously spelled out “kill Donald Trump,” they still would be protected political speech. Political rhetoric can be intense. But unless words rise to the high bar of an unprotected true threat, the First Amendment stops government officials from targeting political expression they don’t like.
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.
Cary Davis is a staff attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).