"Tennessee Man Jailed 37 Days for Trump Meme Wins $835,000 Settlement"
Larry Bushart, a retired law enforcement officer from Tennessee, has received an $835,000 settlement after being jailed for 37 days over a meme he posted. His arrest was deemed a violation of his First Amendment rights, as the meme was misinterpreted as a threat. The case highlights the importance of protecting free speech in a democratic society.
- ▪Larry Bushart was jailed for 37 days for posting a meme related to a school shooting.
- ▪He received an $835,000 settlement after filing a federal civil rights lawsuit.
- ▪The sheriff admitted he knew the meme referred to an incident over 500 miles away.
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| Original publisher | Reason Magazine |
| Canonical URL | https://reason.com/volokh/2026/05/22/tennessee-man-jailed-37-days-for-trump-meme-wins-835000-settlement/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 18:28:17 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T18:32:02.758Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T18:32:02.758Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | QEFn4VKt01nj · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Free Speech "Tennessee Man Jailed 37 Days for Trump Meme Wins $835,000 Settlement" Eugene Volokh | 5.22.2026 2:28 PM From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Wednesday: After spending 37 days in jail for nothing more than posting a meme, retired Tennessee law enforcement officer Larry Bushart has won a substantial settlement from the county and sheriff behind his arrest. Represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Phillips & Phillips, PLLC, Larry Bushart filed a federal civil rights lawsuit last December against Sheriff Nick Weems, Investigator Jason Morrow, and Perry County, Tennessee, for violating his constitutional rights in retaliation for his protected speech.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Reason Magazine.
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