Amazingly even this post is a reflection of the discourse around Kirk. There are replies equating any criticism of Kirk to celebrating his death and glossing over his past nasty behavior. All seems to detached from reality.
People outside the U.S. should care about this because so much social media is based in the U.S..
i.e. If you post an anti-MAGA meme to Facebook or reddit from an identifiable account you could be charged as this man was. Perhaps the U.S. will try to extradite you. (I would hope most nations have sensible checks and balances to prevent extradition over this sort of thing, but it would still be a PITA.) However, the U.S. might also choose to wait and then arrest you if you ever travel to or through the U.S..
The U.S.'s slide away from freedom of speech could have a huge global impact on people who might think it doesn't effect them. We are far too reliant on American social media.
Canada, the E.U., etc. should be looking at protections to prevent social media companies operating servers in their jurisdictions from sharing information with the U.S. government. It's no longer a hypothetical situation. There is a real threat that is clearly evident now.
"Investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community"
Someone tell the LHC at CERN folks to avoid Tennessee...
I wish the article would show a screenshot of what was posted, however 'uncivil'.
Found this on a linked facebook post - no clue if it's accurate.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=25571453995778528&se...
Due to Tennessee law, he has to come up with $210,000 himself to get bail from a bondsmen. And he loses $10,000 of that permanently. TN law is designed to keep non-rich folks in jail. He likely won't get his trial for months in TN. Also by design.
The comments on this article are horrifying. It's clear people have lost their damn minds.
$2m should be the minimum compensation he is entitled to when the dust settles.
There is a little bit more context here in a different article where the sheriff explains how the posts were interpreted as a threat
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2025/09/23/tennessee-l...
No one is safe in this environment
Is there a legal defence fund?
Here are some "I-told-you-so"s regarding Douglass Mackey's original guilty verdict for posting Twitter memes, who, since then, was acquitted on appeal. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43531283
How on earth does this get past a grand jury?!?
If/when this gets tossed - does the have grounds to sue (and who would he be suing) on wrongful arrest, or something else?
This is just crazy! Just look at the actual post: https://x.com/aaronterr1/status/1970272191884468241. There is no way this can be interpreted as "Threats of Mass Violence on School Property and Activities". How should anyone trust law enforcement and the judicial system when they fabricate cases like this?
Once more, it demonstrates that MAGA only cares about free speech as long as it serves their own interest. This is almost comical when you think about J.D. Vance' speech in Munich.
Thanks to reason.com for strongly calling out the BS!
Obviously an interesting test case for the US, especially in light of Vance, Musk, and Farage attacking the UK (especially) and the EU for apparently lacking free speech.
Funfact:
Icon backgroundcolor of targetsite reason.com seems to be the same as HN icon backgroundcolor :-D
This thread is looking at this from a political angle, but he was arrested and charged for threats of mass violence. This seems to be a case of over zealous policing regarding school shootings in a very tense environment rather than a guy arrested over offensive memes.
> Bushart did not elaborate, but the context seems clear: Why should I care about this shooting, when the sitting president said I should "get over" this other shooting?
From one perspective, this is clearly bad governance. He's using his free speech rights that generations of us died for, to point out hypocrisy.
I'm going to say it, and we'll see if I get arrested for it. Charlie Kirk was one of the useful idiots groomed from high school to push conservative propaganda. One of his assignments was to minimize the cultural impact of school shootings. He died in front of thousands in a school shooting.
Maybe that irony is something and maybe it is nothing. But the essence of conservative propaganda, that will survive any individual propaganda and any individual regime, is the central idea that some of us have rights and freedoms and some of us don't. So any deviation from that idea must be punished very severely.
This Sheriff Weems is either a fool or a knave.
I looked at the pictures, and even with no context, it was obvious that he was pointing out the hypocrisy of Trump with that meme.
Ain't no way people looked at the picture, and genuinely thought "Is he threatening to shoot up the school?". But then again, there are some incredibly stupid people out there.
To me, it mostly seems like manufactured outrage. Someone saw him posting edgy memes, got offended, and called to the cops that the guy was posting about doing a school shooting.
I want to be living in the 80s again. The world is an absolute shit show at the moment
The Kirk assassination was awful, as well as the plainly false things said about his life by some parts of the media. But nobody is obligated to have a particular political opinion and Kirk himself would have pointed out that civil disagreement is this man's right as an American.
Trump's America. Don't forget to wipe your phone before travelling. You don't need to break any laws to have your life ruined, you just have to stumble into the crosshairs of the most vindictive leader we have ever had to endure.
The excuse for why he was arrested (some school in the area shares the same name as the one that Trump was downplaying a shooting at) is, of course utter bullshit.
Its amazing how far people are willing to bend over backwards to explain how the speech of these public figures is harmless and non-threatening and none of us have anything to worry about (despite their actions putting the lie to it), but apply an entirely different set of standards to people criticising them.
Much of Kirk's public life and the life of his political allies was devoted to minimizing the impact of and the empathy we should feel for school shootings (because the ends justify the means of furthering his political agenda). He went on to die in one.
feels like i'm back on /r/politics
The guy made multiple posts, which, taken together, made people supposedly consider him as making threats. The journalist here decides to cover this story, but only mention the content of one of his posts, and completely ignoring and not mentioning the contents of the other posts.
Surely the other posts are completely benign and there's nothing of interest in there, right? Surely the journalist had a reason for only reporting on the contents of one of his posts, and not the others, and that choice wasn't intentional in order to present a biased interpretation of reality. Surely.
I think this is an example of using slow trials as a nonjudicial weapon. The defendant did not break the law and isn't likely to be convicted (at least not on appeal), but they can hold him in jail for months because they got mad at his Facebook post.