A free speech story we all need to follow

There is a man sitting in jail in Tennessee right now over a Facebook meme he posted in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination. Free speech lawyers say Larry Bushart's incarceration makes no sense. Bushart's son says it's an "egregious violation of his First Amendment rights." But the sheriff at the center of the case defended the arrest in an interview with the CBS affiliate in Nashville (TN). The Intercept's Liliana Segura described Bushart as a former police officer and a progressive keyboard warrior who, after Kirk's death, "posted furiously, repeatedly, about why the right-wing activist did not deserve to be lionized — and warning about the escalating assault on free speech." One of Bushart's memes resulted in an arrest warrant for "threatening mass violence at a school," though he didn't do that; the meme merely quoted President Trump's words after a previous school shooting. He is still in jail more than a month later because bail was set at $2 million, "a shocking amount, wildly beyond his financial capacity," Segura wrote. Among other things, this case is a reminder that the brief burst of online energy around cancelling Kirk critics is having long-lasting consequences.