Today Greg Lukianoff, the president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has a guest column in the New York Times about the unethical persecution of Bushart, a 61-year-old retired police officer living in Lexington, Tennessee, who ended up in jail for 37 days for posting a meme on social media post that some hysteric took to be a threat to shoot up a school. His was a particularly head-scratching case of the wild over-reaction to stupid and vicious comments about Charlie Kirk after his assassination. Lukianoff uses his column to condemn all negative consequences of all of those comments, usually by the Trump Deranged and Axis media-indoctrinated.

From the column:

Mr. Bushart’s case would be alarming even if it were the sole instance of institutional overreaction to a response to Mr. Kirk’s killing. But it is not unique. A recent review by Reuters of court records, local media reports and public statements found that more than 600 Americans have been fired, suspended, investigated or disciplined by employers for comments about the Kirk assassination. Mr. Bushart, too, lost his job — because he was in jail.

At my organization, we have tallied 80 attempts to punish academics over their remarks about Mr. Kirk since his killing, resulting so far in about 40 investigations or disciplinary actions and 18 terminations.

The Bushart case is a poor one to send Lukianoff to his soapbox: he wasn’t arrested over what he said about Kirk. I don’t think he was fired, either, since the column begins by telling us he is retired. Moreover, FIRE’s absolutism is misplaced: there are very good reasons to fire teachers who celebrated a man’s death by violence for his political views. To begin with, they are terrible, hateful leftists who shouldn’t be corrupting young minds.

But the column did remind me that I had never learned (or written about…I’m sorry) the resolution of the far worse case of Justin Carter, a Texas teenager (above) who was arrested in 2013 for commenting on Facebook with a fellow gamer, “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts. lol. jk.” A Canadian jerk who read the exchange decided to report Justin to the Austin police, who then arrested him–he was 18 at the time—searched his family’s house, and charged him with making a “terroristic threat.”

I wrote a great deal about the case in 2013, beginning with this post, “The Persecution Of Justin Carter And The Consequences Of Fear-Mongering: If This Doesn’t Make You Angry, Something’s The Matter With You.” I just re-read it: I blamed the teen’s abuse on the Obama Administration’s exploitation of the Newtown school shooting to create sufficient anxiety among parents to move the metaphorical needle on gun control, and I was right. Where I was wrong was in not keeping Ethics Alarms readers updated on Carter’s fate, though I referred to his case as recently as 2018.

I had a surprisingly difficult time today finding out what happened to Justin. Almost no news sources reported on the resolution, and what I could find was often contradicted by other sources. After being kept in jail—where he was sexually assaulted—for five months Carter was finally allowed out on bail (payed by an anonymous donor) in 2014. In 2018 (I think) he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor that had nothing to do with his imaginary crime so he could get the terms of his bail lifted, because he had been prohibited from using the web and that made getting a decent job difficult.

I have a lot of questions about the episode. Why wasn’t Justin tried and exonerated? Why did the case take so long to resolve? Why weren’t there ethics sanctions against the prosecutors? Why did free speech activists and the news media largely ignore Justin after 2013? Why wasn’t there a TV movie about him? Why didn’t he write a book? What happened to the poor guy?

In that first post about Carter, two of 2025’s five regular EA commenters, James Flood and zoebrain, raised the similar case of Josh Pillault. He had been arrested as a 19-years-old video game player because he trash-talked while playing “Runescape,” the online multiplayer fantasy game. Another player had told him to kill himself, so Pillault ranted that would kill not just himself, but also shoot up the local high school. The other player reported this as a “true threat,” and Federal authorities raided the Pillault home a few days later, arresting Josh. Pillault ultimately spent 6 years in prison, finally being released in 2018.

I don’t understand why his case wasn’t followed more closely by the news media, or, for that matter, by me.