Please Tell Curmie This Is the Worst Case of Police and Prosecutorial Overreach This Year. Please.

 

Seriously, posting this is what generated a felony charge.

You will recall, Gentle Reader, that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there was a flood of backlash against anyone who dared to suggest on social media that the late Mr. Kirk might not have been the Second Coming.  Curmie wrote specifically about Darren V. Michael, who was fired by Austin Peay State University for having the temerity to point out the irony that someone who proclaimed that “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment” should himself be the victim of gun violence.  There were plenty of other cases, as well, of course, but punishing a tenured theatre prof who sometimes says things that administrators don’t like sorta resonated at Chez Curmie.

Curmie, a retired tenured theatre prof did, after all, write that he “is not ‘celebrating’ the death of Kirk, although he does believe the world to be a better place without his racism, misogyny, trans- and homophobia, Christian nationalism, mendacity, and general assholitude.”  That comment might have gotten him in big trouble had he still been employed at a state university in a red state at the time. 

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons… APSU officials backed down, a little, when it became clear that their action was not within hailing distance of due process.  Michael’s termination was changed to a suspension; Curmie has been unable to find any more details.  [UPDATE: Michael sued and settled out of court for a hefty chunk of change.]  He did learn that a substantial majority of Faculty Senators voted “no confidence” in the university president, Mike Licari.  The motion “failed” because the vote was 23-12; a two-thirds majority is required for such resolutions.  Curmie is well aware that such votes have only symbolic significance, anyway: the Faculty Senate, Chairs Council, Deans Council, and Staff Council at Curmie’s former employer all voted “no confidence” in a president unanimously, and the Regents kept him around… until they let him go a few months later with a fat buyout and a promise to totally lie say good things about him to prospective employers. 

As it happens, however, Mike Licari isn’t the biggest freaking idiot in Tennessee, and Darren Michael’s suspension isn’t even close to the harshest and most illegitimate punishment for obviously protected speech.  Curmie only found out a couple days ago about the case of Larry Bushart, a retired police officer (!) who was incarcerated for 37 days with a $2,000,000 bond for posting a meme.  Yes, really.

The specifics: Bushart, who posts a lot of memes, some of them in rather poor taste, posted one to a message thread about a vigil for Charlie Kirk of then-candidate Trump saying, a day after a school shooting in Iowa, that “We have to get over it.”  Bushart, who was as unimpressed as Curmie was of the orgiastic keening over Charlie Kirk, appended a note: “This seems relevant today…” (That’s the post at the top of this page.) Bushart’s son notes the obvious: that his father was pointing out “the hypocrisy in honoring Charlie Kirk while ignoring other tragic incidents of mass violence.”  That can get you arrested in Tennessee, of course.  Sixth-graders are expendable, after all.  Sleazy millionaire podcasters are important!  The official charge was Felony Insufficient Sycophancy “Threatening Mass Violence at a School.” 

That’s a result of an overbroad law that only grandstanding Republicans could support.  Children’s advocates opposed the legislation.  The ACLU argued that “This legislation is worded so broadly that it could potentially criminalize a wide range of adults and children who do not have any intent of actually causing harm or making a threat -- people who are actually just exercising their constitutionally-protected right to free speech.”  But this is Tennessee; of course, this inanity became law.

So… this case…  You see, Gentle Reader, in what passes for a brain in Sheriff Nick Weems (what a delightfully Dickensian name for this buffoon!) and Sheriff’s Investigator Jason Morrow, “This was a means of communication, via picture, posted to a Perry County, TN Facebook page in which a reasonable person would conclude could lead to serious bodily injury, or death of multiple people.”  Uh, no.  No reasonable person would conclude that.  

The good news is that there are, apparently, precisely zero people in the community who interpreted the meme the way these bozos did.  Indeed, as Liliana Segura writes for The Intercept article linked above, “there were no public signs of this hysteria. Nor was there much evidence of an investigation — or any efforts to warn county schools.”  FIRE requested the school district for any communications pertaining to the case, including the terms “shooting,” “threat,” and “meme.”  The response: no records.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch. 

The most succinct encapsulation was this, from a local resident commenting on the story on radio station WOPC’s page: “A man is in jail because the sheriff didn’t use google.”  Weems was still trying to spin it that Bushart created “mass hysteria to parents and teachers,” and that he did so intentionally.  That makes the sheriff both an incompetent idiot and a liar.  Curmie awaits Donald Trump’s appointment of Weems to a high-level position in the FBI, ICE, or ATF.  He has all the credentials that seem relevant to Dear Leader, after all.

OK, two things in the category of “the best Curmie can do to excuse this idiocy”: 1). Mr. Bushart is, at least at times, a self-described “asshole.”  2). The meme references “Perry High School”; one of the local schools is Perry County High School.  You will note, however, Gentle Reader, that as even the arresting officer declares, assholitude “is not illegal,” absent legitimate threats of violence or similar intentions of criminality.  And the high school referred to in the meme is, as noted above, not in Tennessee, but in Iowa.  Bushart’s comment makes it clear that he was referencing that event from over a year earlier.

OK, Curmie’s distaste for Charlie Kirk is evident.  That doesn’t mean that his murder was anything but abhorrent, or that those who idolized him and mourned his loss publicly shouldn’t be allowed to do so.  But posting a meme shouldn’t get you fired, and it sure as hell shouldn’t get you arrested.  What’s worse, of course, is the active collusion of multiple figures in the (in)justice system.  True, Nick Weems would come in third in a battle of wits with a broken stapler and a corn dog.  Hell, he’d even lose to Mike Licari.  

But there’s also an unnamed prosecutor who not only didn’t laugh in Weems’s face but actually requested a delayed hearing in response to Bushart’s lawyer’s reasonable claim that bail of $2 million for a nothingburger case like this might be un peu de trop.  And there’s General Sessions Judge Katerina Moore, who granted that request.  Someone should have stopped this absurdity before it embarrassed everyone involved.  They didn’t, at least until the coverage went viral.

This case is so ridiculous, it’s almost inevitable that FIRE got involved.  Charges against Bushart have now been dropped, but that’s clearly not enough.  He lost his post-retirement job, was confined for over five weeks on an absurd charge because bail was set at a level no normal person could afford,  and missed the birth of his granddaughter.  He’s going to sue, with FIRE’s assistance, and he’s going to collect.  Bigly.  

Chris Eargle, who created the “Justice for Larry Bushart” Facebook page, posted on the “Re-Elect Weems for Sheriff” page, “Unwise persecution of people for their political views will cost the taxpayers millions of dollars.  He should never be allowed near public office again.”  He’s right, of course, on both counts.  If only the problem were limited to one boneheaded sheriff in a jerkwater county in Tennessee…

Facebook and Other Censorious Asshats

Curmie is indebted to Ken White at Popehat for the term “censorious asshat” that serves as part of the title of this piece.

Here’s the deal. When Curmie awoke this morning he checked in with Facebook, as usual. One of Curmie’s posts on the Facebook page had been deemed “false” by “an independent fact-checker,” specifically by that paradigm of journalistic mediocrity, USA Today. The offending meme, riffing on the anti-maskers, shows a soldier carrying a donkey across a field. The cutline reads:

This picture is from World War II, a soldier carrying a donkey. It is not that the soldier loves donkeys or has some sort of perversion. What’s happening is that the field is mined and that if the donkey was allowed to wonder [sic.] as it pleased, it would likely detonate a charge and kill everyone. The moral of the story is that during difficult times the first ones you have to keep under control are the jackasses who don’t understand the danger and do as they please.

Ah, but the geniuses who have no understanding of humor decided to point out that the photo wasn’t really from World War II. [I know, the horror!] OK, first off, Curmie doubts that anyone looking at that meme, especially anyone seeing it on Curmie’s page (I attract a pretty intelligent clientele, if I do say so myself), unquestioningly believed that the details provided in the meme were literal fact. They existed not to be regarded as truth, but to set up a joke. No one cares that it was really the French in Algeria, or even that the field wasn’t actually mined. Seriously, if we were talking about a gag that starts “A priest walks into a bar,” these morons would feel compelled to point out that there’s no solid evidence of such an event, that all we know is that the man was dressed as a priest, that it’s true that he entered but we don’t know if he walked, and really, it was more of a pub than a bar. Curmie also awaits Facebook’s revelation that Abraham Lincoln didn’t really say not to believe everything you see on the Internet.

Curmie would be pleased to send them all a box of laxative and get on with his day, except that having the post labelled as “false” means that Curmie’s posts, already seldom seen by more than 10% of the people who like his page, will show up on the feeds of even fewer folks who don’t actively seek out his posts. Oh, by the way, the photo you see here: taken from someone else’s Facebook page; there’s no disclaimer on that page. Ah, equity…

This is, by the way, the third time Curmie’s posts have been questioned. In one of the other cases, Curmie did post something from a clearly partisan source that seemed at the time to be a little devoid of context. It was not intentionally misleading (on my part, at least), and indeed the “ruling” from the Grand Poobahs of fact-checking was only “partly false.” Still, it was a moment of intellectual laziness, and Curmie was rightly dinged for it.

The other time, Curmie posted something that looked interesting but a little suspicious: and he said so, specifically requesting his readers who knew more about the subject would help separate fact from fiction. Ah, but he posted something that turned out to be incompletely contextualized (fact-checkers care about context when it suits them to do so; otherwise, they’re the quintessence of literality). The fact that Curmie labelled it as questionable is irrelevant to the bot that enforces the “rulings” of PolitiFact (or whoever). [Note: Curmie has had his issues with PolitiFact in particular for some time. See here, here, and here, for example.]

Of course, there’s one category of posters who aren’t subject to Facebook’s faux interest in the truth: politicians and their minions. It’s right there on FB’s self-righteous ”Business Help Center” page:

Posts and ads from politicians are generally not subjected to fact-checking. In evaluating when this applies we ask our fact-checking partners to look at politicians at every level. This means candidates running for office, current office holders - and, by extension, many of their cabinet appointees - along with political parties and their leaders.

Why, you ask? Well, free speech, of course! A candidate for office is even allowed to post outright lies: “If a claim is made directly by a politician on their Page, in an ad or on their website, it is considered direct speech and ineligible for our third party fact checking program — even if the substance of that claim has been debunked elsewhere.” Riiiiiiiiiiight. Trump or Biden or their respective parties can repeat nonsense that was proven to be false months ago—and a). it’s actual mendacity rather than a misinterpretation or an unintentional omission of context, and b). the falseness of the statement is actually relevant—but the likes of Curmie will be censured because a joke meme misidentifies a soldier in a way that doesn’t change a thing.

Still, not to worry. Surely only three such instances (even if two of them shouldn’t count at all) over a period of several months shouldn’t make much difference, right? Well, this is Facebook, so who knows.

But the day’s saga doesn’t end there, Gentle Reader. It’s Thursday, and Curmie has taken to posting reminders on Wednesday or Thursday to remind Curmiphiles to vote for the Political Asshole of the Week. So I went to the Facebook page to re-post last Saturday’s link. Gone. Indeed, Sunday’s post had disappeared, as well. In fact, I can’t post anything from this blog, either to the Curmudgeon Central page or on my own personal page. Of course, I received literally no notification that (or when) the posts had been removed. When I went to post directly from the blog to either of my Facebook personae’s pages, I got a pop-up that said it was a violation of Facebook’s community standards. That’s it. Nothing more specific than that, and not just the inability to post a particular article, but to post literally anything from manjushri924.blogspot.com. I honestly have no idea what’s going on. Curmie has never advocated violence or criminality, and whereas there’s some adult language now and then, the blog itself is behind a warning that “This post may contain sensitive content.” You’ve got to say you’re OK with that to see the posts themselves.

Were I of a cynical disposition, of course (perish the thought!), I’d suspect that some pol who got nominated as Political Asshole of the Week decided to throw his weight around. Oh, by the way, the fun folks at Opinion Stage shut down the poll because it’s been seen too many times? Yeah, right. The days when Blogspot had their own polling apparatus are missed. Or perhaps it’s time to migrate to another platform? We shall see…

Anyway, readership here will likely go down, as Facebook has been the principal means by which most readers find their way here. But Curmie writes mostly for himself, anyway, to keep his writing skills sharp and to clarify his own thinking on matters of the day. And who knows? Maybe someday Curmie will be told what exactly is so offensive about this blog, so he can either fix it or tell Zuckerberg to perform an action best suited to particularly limber hermaphrodites. In the meantime, Curmie will try to revive his dormant Twitter account to announce his blog posts, to continue to post to his Facebook page but list this page as manjushri924 dot blogspot dot com in doing so, and to urge you to follow this page directly. Oh, and to try to figure out how to do the Political Asshole of the Week poll without having to pay for it.