In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI. It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding, and navigating the intensive process was a steep learning curve for our small team to climb. Seth Larson, PSF Security Developer in Residence, serving as Principal Investigator (PI) with Loren Crary, PSF Deputy Executive Director, as co-PI, led the multi-round proposal writing process as well as the months-long vetting process. We invested our time and effort because we felt the PSF’s work is a strong fit for the program and that the benefit to the community if our proposal were accepted was considerable.
We were honored when, after many months of work, our proposal was recommended for funding, particularly as only 36% of new NSF grant applicants are successful on their first attempt. We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole. Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are core to the PSF’s values, as committed to in our mission statement:
The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.
Given the value of the grant to the community and the PSF, we did our utmost to get clarity on the terms and to find a way to move forward in concert with our values. We consulted our NSF contacts and reviewed decisions made by other organizations in similar circumstances, particularly The Carpentries.
In the end, however, the PSF simply can’t agree to a statement that we won’t operate any programs that “advance or promote” diversity, equity, and inclusion, as it would be a betrayal of our mission and our community.
We’re disappointed to have been put in the position where we had to make this decision, because we believe our proposed project would offer invaluable advances to the Python and greater open source community, protecting millions of PyPI users from attempted supply-chain attacks. The proposed project would create new tools for automated proactive review of all packages uploaded to PyPI, rather than the current process of reactive-only review. These novel tools would rely on capability analysis, designed based on a dataset of known malware. Beyond just protecting PyPI users, the outputs of this work could be transferable for all open source software package registries, such as NPM and Crates.io, improving security across multiple open source ecosystems.
In addition to the security benefits, the grant funds would have made a big difference to the PSF’s budget. The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14. $1.5 million over two years would have been quite a lot of money for us, and easily the largest grant we’d ever received. Ultimately, however, the value of the work and the size of the grant were not more important than practicing our values and retaining the freedom to support every part of our community. The PSF Board voted unanimously to withdraw our application.
Giving up the NSF grant opportunity—along with inflation, lower sponsorship, economic pressure in the tech sector, and global/local uncertainty and conflict—means the PSF needs financial support now more than ever. We are incredibly grateful for any help you can offer. If you're already a PSF member or regular donor, you have our deep appreciation, and we urge you to share your story about why you support the PSF. Your stories make all the difference in spreading awareness about the mission and work of the PSF.
Become a Member: When you sign up as a Supporting Member of the PSF, you become a part of the PSF. You’re eligible to vote in PSF elections, using your voice to guide our future direction, and you help us sustain what we do with your annual support.
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Sponsor: If your company uses Python and isn’t yet a sponsor, send them our sponsorship page or reach out to <a href="mailto:sponsors@python.org">sponsors@python.org</a> today. The PSF is ever grateful for our sponsors, past and current, and we do everything we can to make their sponsorships beneficial and rewarding.
The CEO of the nonprofit managing the Alamo resigned after a powerful Republican state official criticized her publicly, suggesting that her views aren’t compatible with the history of the Texas shrine.
Kate Rogers said in a statement Friday that she had resigned the day before, after Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick wrote a letter to the Alamo Trust’s Board of Directors suggesting that she either resign or be removed. Patrick criticized her over an academic paper questioning the GOP-controlled Legislature’s education policies and suggesting she wanted the historic site in Texas to have a broader focus.
“It was with mixed emotions that I resigned my post as President and CEO at the Alamo Trust yesterday,” Rogers said in a statement texted to The Associated Press. “It became evident through recent events that it was time for me to move on.”
Several trust officials did not immediately respond to email or cellphone messages Friday seeking comment.
Patrick had posted a letter to the board Thursday on X, calling her paper “shocking.” She wrote it in 2023 for a doctorate in global education from the University of Southern California. Patrick posted a portion online.
“I believe her judgment is now placed in serious question,” Patrick wrote. “She has a totally different view of how the history of the Alamo should be told.”
It is the latest episode in an ongoing conflict over how the U.S. tells its history. Patrick’s call for Rogers’ ouster follows President Donald Trump’s pressure to get Smithsonian museums in Washington to put less emphasis on slavery and other darker parts of America’s past.
The Alamo, known as “the Shrine of Texas Liberty,” draws more than 1.6 million visitors a year. The trust operates it under a contract with the Texas General Land Office, and the state plans to spend $400 million on a renovation with a new museum and visitor center set to open in 2027. Patrick presides over the Texas Senate.
In San Antonio, Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, the county’s elected top administrator, decried Patrick’s “gross political interference.”
“We need to get politics out of our teaching of history. Period,” he said in a statement Friday.
In the excerpt from her paper, Rogers noted the Texas Legislature’s “conservative agenda” in 2023, including bills to limit what could be taught about race and slavery in history courses.
“Philosophically, I do not believe it is the role of politicians to determine what professional educators can or should teach in the classroom,” she wrote.
Her paper also mentioned a 2021 book, “Forget the Alamo,” which challenges traditional historical narratives surrounding the 13-day siege of the Alamo during Texas’ fight for independence from Mexico in 1836.
Rogers noted that the book argues that a central cause of the war was Anglo settlers’ determination to keep slaves in bondage after Mexico largely abolished it. Texas won the war and was an independent republic until the U.S. annexed it in 1845.
Rogers also wrote that a city advisory council wanted to tell the site’s “full story,” including its history as a home to Indigenous people — something the state’s Republican leaders oppose. She said she would love the Alamo to be “a place that brings people together versus tearing them apart.”
“But,” she added, “politically that may not be possible at this time.”
Traditional narratives obscure the role slavery might have played in Texas’ drive for independence and portray the Alamo’s defenders as freedom fighters. Patrick’s letter called the siege “13 Days of Glory.”
The Mexican Army attacked and overran the Texas defenses. But “Remember the Alamo” became a rallying cry for Texas forces.
“We must ensure that future generations never forget the sacrifice for freedom that was made,” Patrick wrote in his letter to the trust’s board. “I will continue to defend the Alamo today against a rewrite of history.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — The imposing Shrine of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic church a short drive from the White House, was intended to be a sanctuary for worshippers. Now, its mostly immigrant congregation is steeped in fear.
Church leaders say more than 40 members of their parish have been detained, deported or both since federal law enforcement stepped up their deployment in August.
Many parishioners are too scared to leave home to attend Mass, buy food or seek medical care, as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown targets their communities.
Cardinal Robert McElroy, who leads the Archdiocese of Washington, said the government was using fear to rob immigrants “of any sense of real peace or security.”
“It really is an instrument of terror,” he told The Associated Press.
Trump’s federal law enforcement surge technically ended on Sept. 10. But National Guard troops and federal agents remain in the nation’s capital. That includes immigration authorities, who continue to prowl near Sacred Heart, which sits in a vibrant Latino community flanked by two neighborhoods — Columbia Heights and Mt. Pleasant — that have been home to successive waves of immigrants.
The parish was established more than 100 years ago by Irish, Italian and German immigrants. Today, most of its 5,600 members came from El Salvador, but also from Haiti, Brazil and Vietnam.
The immigration raids have upended lives and worship at Sacred Heart. Families grieve for missing loved ones. Attendance at Masses, which are held in several languages, has dropped dramatically, visible in the many empty pews under the domed church’s colorful mosaics.
“About half the people are afraid to come,” said the Rev. Emilio Biosca, the church’s pastor.
But the church community rejects being reduced to powerless victims. During the crisis, pastors and church volunteers have attended immigration court hearings, covered rent and legal fees, and donated and delivered food to those fearful of leaving home.
“Our role here at the church has changed, also dramatically,” Biosca said. “Because we have so many people who are adversely affected by that situation, we cannot possibly go on as business as usual.”
Active church volunteers face deportation
On a recent day, parishioners dedicated a rosary to the detained and deported church members. They pray daily on Zoom because so many are fearful of stepping outside their homes.
Among them was a woman who hasn’t returned to the church since last month, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained her husband while the couple sold fruits and vegetables from a stand that was their main source of income.
They entered the U.S. illegally nearly two decades ago to escape gang violence in El Salvador. They met at Sacred Heart, where they both have been active volunteers, often leading retreats and programs. For years, her husband helped coordinate popular Holy Week processions.
When her husband was detained, the first person the woman called was her pastor. Since then, the church has helped to pay her rent. She is now preparing to move to Boston with family members as her husband faces deportation from a Louisiana detention center. Barring some unforeseen change that would allow him to stay in the U.S., she plans to move back to El Salvador to be with him.
“It’s been a very difficult, bitter month of crying and suffering,” she said, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear she could be deported. “Our lives changed from one day to the next. We had so many dreams.”
In her apartment, she clutched rosary beads, surrounded by the cardboard boxes she had been packing with their belongings. On her desk near a makeshift altar of the Virgin Mary, she keeps a prayer card of Pope Leo XIV, who has vowed to “stand with” migrants.
When someone on the Zoom worship read a name from a long list of the detained, she flinched and whispered sadly: “That’s my husband.” Above her hung a framed photo of the couple, smiling joyfully on their wedding day at Sacred Heart.
The Catholic Church supports migrants
A top archdiocesan leader, Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjivar, crossed into the U.S. illegally in 1990 after fleeing El Salvador. His journey to the church hierarchy — after working odd jobs and obtaining asylum and then U.S. citizenship — has made him an important symbol for the area’s Catholic immigrants.
Of the recent ICE detainments, Menjivar said, “That could have been me, you know.”
He recently helped lead a procession in support of migrants and refugees that began at Sacred Heart.
He said the parish feels like home to him. “It holds a very special place not just for me, but for many, many immigrants.”
The Catholic Church staunchly defends the rights of migrants, even as it acknowledges the rights of nations to control their borders. U.S. Catholics depend on foreign-born priests to serve parishes. In the Washington Archdiocese, which includes D.C. and parts of Maryland, more than 40% of parishioners are Latino.
Tricia McLaughlin, Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary, said via email that “DHS law enforcement in Washington, D.C. is targeting the worst of the worst violent criminal aliens.”
Biosca, Sacred Heart’s pastor, had thought the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement would target violent criminals. But then, he said, they began to go after his congregation.
“It became very unbearable,” he said, adding that the targets seemed like anyone who “just looked Hispanic.”
At the Sacred Heart School, principal Elias Blanco said at least two families withdrew their children because they didn’t want to risk being detained while dropping them off.
“There’s certainly a lot of fear with our parents,” he said.
Many of the children at the school are U.S. citizens who have parents in the country illegally. In case they are detained, some parents have signed caregiver affidavits, which designate a legal guardian, in hopes their children stay out of foster care.
“It’s like a ripple effect,” Blanco said of the immigration detentions. “It might be one person, but that individual is the father of someone, the husband of someone, the brother, and then it impacts the whole family.”
Clergy join immigrants at court
Church leaders have accompanied congregants to immigration court, where, in cities nationwide, masked ICE officers have arrested immigrants as they leave hearings.
The Rev. Carlos Reyes, a Sacred Heart priest originally from El Salvador, attended a hearing with a 20-year-old congregant who recently arrived in the U.S. illegally from Bolivia.
Thanks to support from Reyes and Sacred Heart, she said her hope and her Catholic faith have deepened.
“It’s a refuge for me because it’s all I have here, because I don’t have anyone,” she said, sobbing after a Sunday Mass. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she has another court hearing soon and fears deportation.
Parishioners make deliveries to those in hiding
On a recent Saturday, volunteers gathered in the church basement. They formed a circle to pray before they packed bags of donated food.
Then they made deliveries to immigrant congregants who hadn’t left their homes in weeks, not even to buy groceries. Some recipients stepped out to thank the volunteers, cautiously looking around for ICE personnel.
“These people are losing their dignity,” said a congregant who helped deliver the food and is a legal U.S. resident. She spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing her U.S. citizenship process could still be disrupted.
“As people of God, we can’t just sit and watch,” she said. “We have to do what we can.”
___
Associated Press video journalist Jessie Wardarski contributed to this report.
___
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
“Cardinal Robert McElroy, who leads the Archdiocese of Washington, said the government was using fear to rob immigrants “of any sense of real peace or security.”
“It really is an instrument of terror,” he told The Associated Press.”
175,000 monthly downloads. Top 10% of 700,000 PyPI packages. Still a weekend project.
Two years ago, I wrote about the unexpected joys of open source when redlines went briefly viral. Last month, I discussed adapting it for AI agents. But I haven't talked about what "success" actually looks like from the maintainer's side.
Here's what top 10% means—and doesn't mean.
Being in the top 10% of PyPI packages sounds impressive. Out of nearly 700,000 packages, redlines performs better than 630,000+ others in terms of downloads and usage.
But here's what that ranking doesn't tell you:
No revenue. Enterprise companies use redlines and contribute $0. That's fine for open source—but it surprises people who think "popular" equals "profitable."
No team. I'm the only maintainer. Seven contributors have submitted pull requests over three years, which I'm grateful for, but day-to-day maintenance is solo work done on free time.
No roadmap. There's no 6-month product plan or quarterly OKRs. Features get built when someone needs them badly enough to contribute a PR—or when I need them for my own work.
Defining tight scope sounds simple in theory. But what should that scope actually include? Here's what three years of maintenance taught me.
Lesson 1: Scope is Your Most Important Feature
Redlines does ONE thing: compare two text strings and show the differences. Like track changes in Word, but in Python.
That narrow scope isn't a limitation—it's the reason the project still exists.
I've been tempted by features that seem obvious. I even opened issues for PDF, HTML, and Word document handling myself. They remain open because I haven't found a way to implement them that preserves redlines' core reliability—and that's the discipline narrow scope requires.
Learning to say "no" professionally is harder than building features. As one maintainer put it: "Every line of code is a long-term liability." Every "yes" today means maintenance forever.
Here's how I respond these days: You're welcome to build it yourself—it's open source! But it's not my focus.
Lesson 2: Boring Problems Often Have Bigger Audiences Than Exciting Ones
Nobody calls text comparison "exciting." There are no TechCrunch articles about "revolutionary new way to show changes just like Microsoft Word"
But hundreds of people need it. They're solving problems like:
Comparing contract drafts without uploading to third-party services
Tracking legislative changes (PLUS Explorer uses redlines for this)
Building AI tools that need to show what changed
Working in Jupyter notebooks without Word
The gap between enterprise legal tech ($50K/year platforms) and solo practitioners ($0 budgets) is enormous. That gap needs filling.
Lesson 3: Validation Comes from Utility, Not Credentials
I rarely check redlines' download stats. When I discovered it was top 10%, my first reaction wasn't pride—it was surprise. "Is this even real?"
144 GitHub stars feels modest. I've seen projects get thousands in weeks. I'm a lawyer who codes, not a software engineer. When I presented redlines at GeekCamp Singapore, people asked, "Wait, you're a lawyer?"
That surprise stuck with me. So did the question: do these numbers actually mean I belong?
Here's what I learned: I was looking for validation in the wrong places.
What doesn't sustain you:
GitHub stars (comparing yourself to "real" projects)
Recognition from developers (proving you belong)
Download metrics (abstract numbers that feel unreal)
Top 10% rankings (impressive but hollow)
What does sustain you:
Solving your own problem first
Discovering unexpected use cases you never imagined
Seeing people accomplish things they couldn't do before
Utility over validation
I built redlines for my own legal legislation comparison work. Then people learning AI started using it to track how LLMs rewrote their prompts. That use case never occurred to me.
That's what kept me going. Not stars. Not payment. Not even recognition from the developer community.
People were solving real problems with something I built. The problems were different from mine. The users had different backgrounds. None of those differences mattered. The solution worked.
Your impostor syndrome wants you to seek validation from credentials, metrics, and community acceptance. That's the wrong game. You're not building to prove you're a "real developer."
You're building to address real needs. When it works, validation comes from utility—someone, somewhere, using your code to accomplish something they couldn't do before.
For lawyers who code: your background isn't a deficit requiring proof. It's why you see problems others miss. Build for those problems. The right users will find you.
Top 10% didn't make me feel like I belonged. Watching AI learners solve problems I never anticipated—that did.
The Honest Call to Action for Lawyers who Code
Don't start with a roadmap or a GitHub repo. Start smaller:
What problem are you solving manually right now? What do you copy-paste three times a week? Build something that saves you 15 minutes. Make it work for you first.
Then share it with one person. A colleague. A friend in another firm. Someone in a legal tech Slack. Not to prove you can code—just to see if it helps them too.
That's how 175,000 monthly downloads happened. Not from a grand plan. From tackling my own boring problem, sharing it once, and being surprised by who it helped.
You don't need to become an open source maintainer. You don't need top 10%. Just solve your problem, show someone, and see what happens.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Guide: Microsoft Teams is about to deal a heavy blow to those who like to work from home for peace and quiet. In a new feature update rolling out December 2025, the platform will track a worker's location using the office Wi-Fi, to see whether you're actually there or not. From a boss' perspective, this would eliminate any of that confusion as to where your team actually is. But for those people who have found their own sanctuary of peaceful productivity by working from home, consider this a warning that Teams is about to tattle on you. According to the Microsoft 365 roadmap: "When users connect to their organization's Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in." The location of that worker will apparently update automatically upon connecting.
It's set to launch on Windows and macOS, with rollout starting at the end of this year. "This feature will be off by default," notes Microsoft. But "tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in."
From a red-throated loon landing on water, to good and bad hair days and an airborne squirrel, here is a selection of the finalists in this year’s Nikon Comedy Wildlife awards. A winner will be announced on 9 December
By the time the cops showed up to arrest him for sharing a derisive meme responding to the killing of Charlie Kirk, Larry Bushart Jr. had posted on Facebook more than 100 times on Sunday alone.
It was past 11 p.m. on September 21, and Bushart, 61, was still up with his wife at their home in Lexington, Tennessee, a small city halfway between Nashville and Memphis. It had been a normal weekend. On Saturday, they went to see a community theater performance of “Arsenic and Old Lace.” The next day, they moved furniture to prepare for a new carpet delivery. And, as he did almost every day, Bushart spent hours on his phone, posting on Facebook a torrent of liberal memes.
Born and raised in West Tennessee, Bushart worked as a police officer and sheriff’s deputy for 24 years, then spent another nine with the Tennessee Department of Correction before retiring from law enforcement last year. His politics made him an outlier among his neighbors. Like many people, he reserved his most strident opinions for the internet. On Facebook, Bushart slammed President Donald Trump and his followers, whom he likened to a cult. He quarreled with vaccine skeptics and fought with election deniers. As things took a darker turn during Trump’s second term, Bushart posted memes decrying the president’s increasingly authoritarian moves. After Kirk’s killing on September 10, Bushart posted furiously, repeatedly, about why the right-wing activist did not deserve to be lionized — and warning about the escalating assault on free speech.
His posts were not limited to his own feed. That Saturday morning, in a Facebook group called “What’s Happening in Perry County,” Bushart spotted a thread about an upcoming candlelight vigil honoring Kirk in the county seat of Linden, a small town some 45 minutes away. He fired off a rapid series of trollish memes. One showed a scene from “The Sopranos.” “Tony, Charlie Kirk died,” Carmela Soprano says. “Who gives a shit,” Tony replies. Another quoted Kash Patel’s press conference after Kirk’s murder, where he said, “I’ll see you at Valhalla,” depicting the FBI director in a Viking costume and holding a rubber chicken. The most vulgar meme appeared to capture the moment Kirk was shot, accompanied by the words, “Release the Epstein Files.”
But it was a more innocuous post that would soon send Bushart’s life spiraling out of control. It was an image he had previously posted to his own feed to little response: a photo of Trump alongside a quote, “We have to get over it.” The meme, which had been circulating for more than a year, drew from remarks Trump madeafter a January 2024 school shooting in Perry, Iowa. Beneath the quote was a line providing context: “Donald Trump, on the Perry High School mass shooting, one day after.” Above the image were the words “Seems relevant today.”
If Bushart shared the posts to taunt those mourning Kirk, the reactions on the forum remained relatively mild. “Jeez Larry, take a stress pill or something,” one man commented. “Mow the lawn, get off the computer. A simple, concise statement like ‘I HATE Charlie’ would be sufficient.” Some of Bushart’s posts were received more positively; a meme arguing that “Billionaires fund the class war. Charlie Kirk sold it as a race war” got several likes. The Trump meme, meanwhile, was ignored.
By Sunday evening, however, the posts had gotten the attention of Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems. An avid Facebook user himself, Weems had shared the information about the Kirk vigil on his own page a few days earlier. He had also posted his own emotional response to the news of Kirk’s murder in September, warning ominously about the “evil” in our midst. “Evil could be your neighbor,” he wrote. “Evil could be standing right beside you in the grocery store. It could be your own family member and you never even know it.”
Weems contacted his investigator. Just under an hour later, in Lexington, Bushart wrote a two-line post on Facebook at 7:53 p.m. “Received a visit from Lexington PD regarding my posted memes on ‘What’s Happening in Perry County,’” he wrote. The police had come at the behest of Perry County, he said, but did not elaborate.
If he was concerned, Bushart didn’t show it. He went back to posting. At 9:48 p.m., Bushart shared a meme from a page called Blue Wave 2026, featuring an unhinged-looking Roseanne Barr. “Many maga are claiming that Obama used the pressure of his office and the FCC to get Rosanne cancelled just like Trump did to Kimmel,” it read. “Except Obama wasn’t president in 2018. Care to guess who was?”
It would be his last post that night. At 11:15 p.m., police knocked on his door again. This time there were four officers, one of whom was holding a warrant for his arrest, which had been sent from Perry County. Body camera footage obtained by The Intercept shows police following Bushart inside his house and waiting while he slips on his shoes. Then they handcuff him on his front porch and lead him away.
Arriving at the local jail, the officer with the warrant unfolded the piece of paper. “Just to clarify, this is what they charged you with,” he told Bushart, pointing and reading aloud: “Threatening Mass Violence at a School.”
“At a school?” Bushart said, sounding confused.
But the officer had no further explanation. “I ain’t got a clue,” he said, chuckling. “I just gotta do what I have to do.”
Bushart laughed too. “I’ve been in Facebook jail but now I’m really in it,” he said. He hadn’t committed a crime, he said. “I may have been an asshole but…”
“That’s not illegal,” the officer said.
Bushart was booked at the Perry County Jail in Linden on September 22, just before 2 a.m. He has been there ever since. His bail was set at $2 million — a shocking amount, wildly beyond his financial capacity. Under Tennessee law, Bushart would have to pay at least $210,000 to get out of jail, under onerous conditions. Although his defense attorney has filed a motion asking General Sessions Judge Katerina Moore to reduce his bail on the grounds that he is not a flight risk and does not pose a threat to the community, a hearing on the motion was reset at prosecutors’ request. Bushart’s next court date is not scheduled to take place until December 4.
Bushart is one of countless people whose lives have been upended due to social media posts shared after Kirk’s death. The murder triggered an extraordinary crackdown on speech, wielded against Americans from every level of government, with the White House and its allies targeting those whose public reactions they considered offensive. Vice President J.D. Vance urged Americans to report people to their employers. At the Pentagon, nearly 300 employees were investigated. And more recently, the State Department revoked the visas of people who spoke ill of Kirk.
In Tennessee, a wave of firings and suspensions took place across the state, with numerous public employees and college and university staffers punished for their posts. A high school science teacher was suspended after being targeted by the right-wing website The Federalist for an Instagram story calling Kirk a “POS” and quoting his reaction to the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, which left seven dead, including three 9-year-old students. “It’s worth to have, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights,” Kirk had said. And, under pressure from Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who is running for Tennessee governor, a university fired a theater professor for posting an old article about Kirk’s comments, issuing a statement explaining that the professor had “reshared a post on social media that was insensitive, disrespectful and interpreted by many as propagating justification for unlawful death.”
But Bushart’s case is in a class of its own. He is almost certainly the only person who was arrested and held on a serious criminal charge for a Facebook post in the wake of Kirk’s death — a charge that seems clearly divorced from reality. Among those who have heard of it, the case has been met with shock, outrage, and considerable confusion. On TikTok, Reddit, and a “Justice for Larry Bushart” page on Facebook, many see the case as a form of government overreach that puts all Americans in danger. And though the case is undeniably part of the broader assault on free speech sparked by the Kirk assassination, it is also locally rooted: a perfect storm of bad law, overzealous policing, and a political climate that has emboldened law enforcement officials to punish perceived enemies.
At the heart of the controversy is elected Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems. In office since 2015, his previous claim to fame in Tennessee was his response to the 2018 shooting at Parkland High School in Florida, which killed 17 people. In an impassioned open letter, he criticized politicians who failed to protect students, pledging $500 of his own money to install barricade locks on school doors in Perry County. His rallying cry: “Not Our Children!”
More recently, Weems has availed himself of a Tennessee law passed after the Covenant School shooting, which sought harsh new punishments for “recklessly making a threat of mass violence.” The American Civil Liberties Union and other free speech experts cautioned at the time that the language was so broad, “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” — and this is precisely what has happened. The law has ensnared numerous students for social media activity that, by all rational interpretations, are not actually threatening actual violence. Earlier this year, ProPublica and WPLN/Nashville Public Radio reported on a group of middle school cheerleaders who were slapped with criminal charges by the local sheriff for filming a TikTok video in which one girl said, “Put your hands up,” while other girls dropped to the floor.
In Bushart’s case, the warrant affidavit contains a short narrative summarizing the ostensible evidence against him. “At approximately 1900 hours,” writes Perry County Sheriff’s Investigator Jason Morrow, “I … received a message from Sheriff Nick Weems regarding a Facebook post Larry Bushart made on the What’s Happening in Perry County, TN Facebook page stating ‘This seems relevant today…’ with an image of Donald Trump and the words ‘We have to get over it.’” Morrow quotes the rest of the meme and notes that it was posted “on a message thread regarding the Charlie Kirk vigil.” He then writes: “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.”
A screenshot of the meme Larry Bushart Jr. posted to Facebook.Source: Larry Bushart Jr.'s Facebook page
It’s possible, perhaps, to imagine how the Trump meme might have set some members of the Facebook group on edge — at least upon first glance. The post invoked a school shooting at a “Perry High School.” The local high school in Linden is called Perry County High School. Moreover, just one month earlier, Weems had reported an alleged threat against the school, prompting administrators to cancel all classes “for the safety of our students and staff.” Still, it was easy to discern that, apart from the name “Perry,” there was nothing connecting the meme to Linden.
Chris Eargle, who created the “Justice for Larry Bushart” Facebook page, first heard about the case from news reports posted on social media. Like many online commenters, he figured there had to be more to the story. “I was very skeptical when I first saw it,” he said. “He couldn’t have just been thrown in jail with a $2 million bond just for posting a Trump meme.” But the closer he looked at the case, the more it seemed clear that’s exactly what happened. “I was like, ‘Oh, wow, they actually did charge him for posting a meme.’”
Eargle requested to join the “What’s Happening In Perry County” group and was granted access. He also started commenting on different Facebook pages linked to the sheriff. “Unwise persecution of people for their political views will cost the taxpayers millions of dollars,” he wrote in a review on the “Re-Elect Weems for Sheriff” page. “He should never be allowed near public office again.” Before long, the page was taken down. So was the Perry County Sheriff’s Office page.
Weems had been happy to publicize Bushart’s arrest at first. In the earliest news story on September 22, local radio station WOPC published Bushart’s mugshot along with a statement from the sheriff, who said that Bushart’s meme had alluded to “a hypothetical shooting at a place called Perry High School.” According to Weems, “That message caused considerable concern within the community and we were asked to investigate.”
Readers found this perplexing. “I’m confused,” one woman wrote on Facebook after the story was posted on the station page. “He was talking about shooting up the school or shooting up a vigil. How are the two things connected?” Another reader speculated that Weems hadn’t heard of the Iowa shooting and misinterpreted the post as a threat. “A man is in jail because the sheriff didn’t use google.”
In a comment that has since been deleted, Weems personally replied to correct the record. “We were very much aware of the meme being from an Iowa shooting,” he wrote later that afternoon. The meme “created mass hysteria to parents and teachers … that led the normal person to conclude that he was talking about our Perry County High School.”
This did not go over well. Most people would not read the meme as a threat, several commenters pointed out. But even if the meme had caused some people to panic, one man wrote, “your department arrested a man for expressing free speech because you listened to public hysteria rather than doing an investigation?”
Others didn’t buy the notion that there had been panic at all. “Mass hysteria is a lie,” another man wrote. “I hope he sues you.”
As the story spread, confusion persisted over the basic facts. Because the Facebook thread was only visible to members of the Perry County group, it was unclear to most people when, exactly, Bushart posted the memes or how people reacted — let alone whether the response could be described as “mass hysteria.” But Weems insisted that Bushart wanted to sow panic, telling The Tennessean that “investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community.”
Yet there were no public signs of this hysteria. Nor was there much evidence of an investigation — or any efforts to warn county schools. Although the Perry County Schools District did not respond to messages from The Intercept, attorneys with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a series of open records requests with the school district asking for any communications to or from staff pertaining to the case — including terms like “shooting,” “threat,” and “meme.” In response, the director of schools wrote that there were no records related to Bushart’s case. “The Perry County Sheriff’s Department handled this situation,” he wrote.
“You would think that if a school district or a school was the target of a serious threat, they would have an email or a text message or something to students, to parents, to the safety officer, to the community, saying, ‘Here’s what has happened. Don’t worry. Everything is all right,’” said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with FIRE who has been monitoring the case. “They have nothing.”
Meanwhile, the Perry County Sheriff’s Office has not responded to records requests by FIRE. In a phone call with The Intercept, a sheriff’s deputy told The Intercept that any records related to the case would have to be subpoenaed. “I’m not releasing anything due to the scrutiny and the harassing phone calls we’ve had,” he said, then hung up. But Weems himself responded to an email earlier this week. He said that the Perry County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page “has been in the process” of being deleted since July but declined to comment further. “There is a lot of false quotes being made in regard to this case,” he wrote. “Therefore, I’m not gonna continue to discuss the case until it’s settled in court.”
Bushart’s lawyer has not responded to messages about the case. Bushart’s wife declined to speak on the record on the advice of the attorney. But Bushart’s son defended his dad on social media, calling the prosecution “an egregious violation of his 1st Amendment rights” and spelling out what has been clear from the start: The meme he shared was meant to show “the hypocrisy in honoring Charlie Kirk while ignoring other tragic incidents of mass violence.”
For now, Bushart faces the prospect of spending Thanksgiving in jail. On Tuesday, a member of the Justice for Larry Bushart page created a GiveSendGo account to raise money for his legal defense. “This isn’t just for Larry; this is a stand against overzealous law enforcement acting on skewed interpretations of free speech,” it reads. “Remember: today it’s someone else; tomorrow it could be you or me.”
To Steinbaugh, who has litigated First Amendment violations all over the country, Bushart’s case stands out. “One thing that’s unique about it is that nobody has done a course correction here,” he said. “It would be one thing to have law enforcement overreacting and detaining someone … and then the next day, saying, ‘OK, message received, we’ve done our due diligence. That’s all we need to do here.’ This guy’s been incarcerated since this happened over quoting the president. Cooler heads should have prevailed by now.”
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