Tag: memes

Prosecutors Drop Charges Against Tennessee Man Over Facebook Meme

Last month, Tennessee authorities arrested a man for posting a Facebook meme, a clear violation of his First Amendment rights, and held him on a $2 million bond. This week, prosecutors dropped the case, but that doesn’t negate the weeks he spent in jail on a bogus charge.

As Reason previously reported, police arrested 61-year-old Larry Bushart for posting a meme on Facebook. In a thread about the murder of Charlie Kirk, Bushart posted a meme with a picture of President Donald Trump and the quote “We have to get over it,” which Trump said after a January 2024 shooting at Perry High School in Perry, Iowa.

Sheriff Nick Weems of nearby Perry County said Bushart intentionally posted the meme to make people think he was referring to Perry County High School. “Investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community,” Weems told The Tennesseean.

On September 21, deputies arrested Bushart at his house and booked him on a charge of Threats of Mass Violence on School Property and Activities, a felony that carries at least a year in prison. In body camera footage posted online by Liliana Segura of The Intercept, Bushart is incredulous when presented with the charge. “I don’t think I committed a crime,” he tells the officer, jokingly admitting that “I may have been an asshole.”

“That’s not illegal,” the officer replies as he leads Bushart into a cell.

Unfortunately, it was no laughing matter: A judge imposed a $2 million bond. Getting out on bail would require Bushart to come up with at least $210,000. According to the Perry County Circuit Court website, Bushart had a hearing scheduled for October 9, where he could file a motion for a reduced bond, but a court clerk told Reason that the hearing was “reset” for December 4. As a result, Bushart sat in jail for weeks.

Right away, it should have been clear how flimsy the case was. But the sheriff doubled down.

As Segura reported at The Intercept, Weems personally responded to people on Facebook suggesting Bushart was arrested because authorities misread a picture that briefly referenced a prior news event on the other side of the country. “We were very much aware of the meme being from an Iowa shooting,” Weems wrote. But it “created mass hysteria to parents and teachers…that led the normal person to conclude that he was talking about our Perry County High School.”

“Yet there were no public signs of this hysteria,” Segura notes. “Nor was there much evidence of an investigation—or any efforts to warn county schools.”

Keep reading

Germany’s War on Satire: AfD MP Fined €11,250 for Meme While Leftist Magazine Is Celebrated After It Depicts Trump Giving Hitler Salute

Germany is no longer a democracy — it’s a warning. A German court has just fined AfD lawmaker Petr Bystron €11,250 for sharing a satirical meme online, while the country’s liberal establishment laughs as one of its biggest magazines once showed President Donald Trump giving the Hitler salute on its cover with the headline “Sein Kampf” (“His Struggle”).

That cover made international headlines in 2017. No prosecutor, no police, no criminal charge. It was called “art.”

But when Bystron — a conservative member of parliament — posted a meme mocking Ukraine’s former ambassador Andrij Melnyk, who had publicly defended a Nazi collaborator, the German justice system came crashing down on him.

Mock a Nazi Apologist? Get Convicted in Germany.

The meme, published in July 2022, showed German politicians “waving goodbye” to Melnyk after his recall from Berlin. Prosecutors said the waves looked like “Hitler salutes.” You can’t make this up.

Bystron’s real “crime”? Daring to expose hypocrisy in a system that protects globalists and punishes dissent.

Melnyk, the Ukrainian diplomat at the center of it all, had told a German interviewer that Stepan Bandera, a Nazi collaborator responsible for mass killings of Jews and Poles, was “no mass murderer.” That statement caused outrage in Poland and Israel — but in Germany’s woke establishment? Nothing. Melnyk stayed a hero. He was later promoted by Volodymyr Zelensky to Deputy Foreign Minister.

Bystron mocked that insanity — and Germany called him the extremist.

Keep reading

White House Speaks Out Amid Backlash Over Meme of Trump as Superman

The White House has responded after drawing ire and backlash over its recent memes, one of which included a fake movie poster depicting President Donald Trump as Superman.

In a post shared across its core social media accounts on Friday night, the White House said: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes,” alongside a picture of an announcement board that read “OMG, did the White House really post this?” In response, one X user argued that such memes show “how unserious this Administration is.” The White House’s defiant stance was also shared across the official POTUS accounts on X, Instagram, and Facebook.

The White House earlier on Friday posted an AI-altered image of Rep. Jimmy Gomez of California, a Democrat, after he criticized an ICE raid at a marijuana farm. The post featured a doctored image of Gomez crying, labeling him “cryin’ Jimmy.” The upload was condemned by many, with one Instagram user asking: “Why is the official White House page making these kind[s] of comments?”

Meanwhile, on Thursday night, the White House social team prompted reactions far and wide, some of the mocking variety, when it replaced actor David Corenswet with Trump in a meme of the poster for the new movie Superman. Where the original poster says “A James Gunn film” at the top, the Trump team’s alternative reads “A Trump presidency,” followed by the slogan: “Truth. Justice. The American Way.” The accompanying caption referred to “Superman Trump” as the “Symbol of hope.” The mock-up movie poster stood out amid a slew of other posts that focused on high-stakes matters such as the Trump Administration’s border patrol policies and the relief efforts for the devastating Texas floods.

Keep reading

Court Overturns Douglass Mackey Meme Conviction

A federal appeals court has overturned the conviction of Douglass Mackey, the man prosecuted for posting satirical memes ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on July 9 that the government failed to prove Mackey knowingly participated in a conspiracy, a requirement under the statute used to charge him.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

Mackey had been found guilty in 2023 of violating 18 U.S.C. § 241, a law dating back to Reconstruction that punishes conspiracies to deprive individuals of their constitutional rights. Prosecutors claimed that Mackey’s memes, which joked that Hillary Clinton supporters could vote via text, were part of a coordinated scheme to suppress votes.

That case has now unraveled.

“The mere fact that Mackey posted the memes, even assuming that he did so with the intent to injure other citizens in the exercise of their right to vote, is not enough, standing alone, to prove a violation of Section 241,” wrote Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston in the court’s opinion. Because Section 241 applies only to conspiracies involving “two or more persons,” the government had to prove that Mackey entered into an agreement with others, a threshold it did not meet.

Prosecutors attempted to tie Mackey to private Twitter message groups such as “War Room” and “Madman #2,” where users discussed political memes.

The court found no evidence that Mackey saw, let alone participated in, any of the conversations that allegedly formed the conspiracy. “This the government failed to do,” the panel wrote, noting that “Mackey did not send any messages in the War Room in the two weeks before he tweeted the text-to-vote memes.”

Keep reading