A guy in Tennessee spent more than five weeks in jail because of an anodyne Facebook meme that did not even jokingly threaten violence:

The officers came to arrest Larry Bushart shortly before midnight on Sept. 21.

Mr. Bushart, a 61-year-old retired police officer living in Lexington, Tenn., had posted a meme on Facebook after the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10. It was a picture of Donald Trump along with Mr. Trump’s comment in response to a school shooting at Perry High School in Iowa in 2024: “We have to get over it.” The meme was headed by the caption, “This seems relevant today.”

Mr. Bushart shared that meme in a Facebook thread promoting a vigil for Mr. Kirk in nearby Perry County, Tenn. The Perry County Sheriff’s Office obtained a warrant for Mr. Bushart’s arrest, claiming that the post was a threat of “mass violence” at a school. The sheriff’s office did this even though the meme referred to a shooting that took place more than a year before at a school in Iowa. The only connection — if you can even call it a connection — was that the Iowa school also had “Perry” in its name.

Mr. Bushart’s bail was set at $2 million. Unable to pay, he spent 37 days in jail before prosecutors dropped the charge.

In my 25 years working as a lawyer on free-speech cases, I have seen a lot of overreach. I have never seen anything quite like this. With the help of a local attorney, my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, is preparing a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the Perry County sheriff and others, seeking damages and a ruling that what happened to Mr. Bushart violated the First Amendment.

This episode recalls the abuses that gave rise to modern First Amendment jurisprudence more than a century ago. The socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for giving an antiwar speech and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Though the Supreme Court unanimously upheld his conviction, it later changed course, holding that the government may punish political advocacy only when it is intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action or when it amounts to a genuine threat.

Most of the hundreds of others of people who lost their jobs for making non-reverent posts about Charlie Kirk are not First Amendment issues per se, but do lay bare the bad faith of the broader right’s CANCEL CULTURE industrial complex. It’s always meant that they should be able to say whatever you want and you should be able to shut up, and the rise in state censorship is even worse than this.

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John Ganz’s fascinating 2024 book When the Clock Broke is a cultural/political history of America focused primarily on the years 1989-1992. Reading it reminded me that a major issue during the 1992 presidential campaign was the question of whether the Vietnamese and/or Laotian governments were holding American prisoners of war as slave laborers, with the knowledge and complicity of the US government.

I was already aware, via Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, of how cynically the Nixon administration had ginned up and exploited the supposed POW/MIA issue, at the time when the actual American POWs were being released per the terms of the Paris peace accords. Even though in 1992 was 32 years old and paying some attention to politics, I had mostly forgotten that, nearly 20 years after the withdrawal of the US military from Southeast Asia, this paranoid and indeed frankly insane conspiracy theory about dozens or hundreds of American service members still being held captive was something that all three major presidential candidates had to treat respectfully. Indeed Ross Perot himself was obsessed with the issue, and had had extensive financial dealings with minor presidential candidate and former Green Beret Bo Gritz, who had made at least a couple of trips to Southeast Asia, to find and liberate these non-existent prisoners.

The hysteria around this was sufficiently intense that per a WSJ poll at the time, 70% of Americans professed to believe that POWs were still being held by the Vietnamese, and that the US government was covering this up. It seems likely that this belief was due in no small part to Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo films and their various knockoffs. Another manifestation of the hysteria was the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA affairs, which existed from August 1991 until January 1993, despite the fact that all of its members (it was chaired by John Kerry) were well aware that the whole thing was a cruel farce:

Running the committee was seen as politically risky for Kerry, and one that his advisors recommended he not do. Indeed, as Bob Kerrey later said, “Nobody wanted to be on that damn committee. It was an absolute loser. Everyone knew that the POW stories were fabrications, but no one wanted to offend the vet community.

I noticed a few days ago that a POW/MIA flag is still flying next to the Stars & Stripes at my local post office, no doubt because of some ongoing executive and/or congressional order, which can’t be rescinded because of a combination of Nixon-style cynicism, and the same political cowardice that will at all costs avoid “offending the vet community.”

I’ll have more to say about Ganz’s book, which is full of telling vignettes like this one.

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Last month we talked about “other duties as assigned” — things you’ve been asked to do at work that were wildly outside of your job description. Here are 15 of my favorite stories that you shared.

1. The handmade crafts

I had a manager whose in-laws held a handmade-only Christmas exchange every year. They were all crafty and she was decidedly not, and they made some intimidatingly great things — the one memorable example she cited was that someone hand-carved a chess set for the exchange.

She made us figure out her craft and do her craft for her a team event every year. The one year I participated, we made a decent felt-flower wreath for her mother in law. It was fun, but in hindsight, wildly inappropriate.

2. The wake-up service

When our organization hosted a fancy pants conference, my psychotic ex-boss, Robin*, announced that she needed an intern to wake her up every day. I’m not kidding. She wanted to give one of us an extra key to her suite to wake her up in the morning at whatever time she stated the night before. An alarm clock wasn’t good enough. Robin wanted a human being to wake her with her fresh coffee order. (She was also obsessed with the British royal family so I wonder if that’s where she got the idea.) And, yes, she put it under “other duties as assigned.” I have no idea if anyone ever fulfilled her stupid request; all I know is it wasn’t me!

*Name not changed out of complete, sheer disrespect.

3. The weed

I was a day shift bartender, and my boss had a side business as a drug dealer. One morning I showed up to start my opening duties and there were massive amounts of weed hung up to dry all throughout the bar, clipped to strings like laundry drying in the sun. My boss hadn’t even left a note or anything asking me to take it down, and he wasn’t responding to my carefully worded texts asking that he help me or at least come pick it up.

This bar only had dim lighting, there were no bright overhead lights that I could turn on, so I had to run around in the dark looking for all the strings and collecting the weed in empty liquor bottle boxes while I was also stressing about getting more and more behind on all the usual things I needed to do before opening the bar. Even after I opened, I found some more that I had missed, and all day I was panicked that maybe this would be one of those days that the bar got chosen for a random inspection.

4. The missing knife

I had a summer job creating a database for the local university’s research farm. One morning my supervisor asked me if I had ever used a metal detector before. He’d dropped a 12-inch knife somewhere in a corn field, and it was cheaper to have me find it than puncture a tractor tire! I was given a metal detector and walked around for about 20 minutes before I found it.

5. The underwear order

First job out of college, I worked for a 90-year-old man in his third career. He was not at all senile, very fit, had all his faculties. Honestly, a very impressive human. He did, however, often call me his secretary and sometimes made comments that were a bit outdated. I brushed them off, it was annoying but didn’t offend me. What I could not brush off is when he walked into the office one morning with a clothing catalogue, dropped it in front of me with a page open to men’s underwear, and told me to order him three value-packs.

I was an office manager in a graduate program and he was the program chair.

6. The returned belt

This didn’t happen to me, but to my coworker and close friend.

Our boss went on a date and had the guy back to her house for the evening. She discovered the next morning that he’d left his belt behind. She told my coworker to take the belt and return it to him at his office at the state capitol, where he worked as a state representative.

That workplace was wild.

7. The artwork

I worked in fundraising for a nonprofit that cared for youth who were removed from their homes, as well as families in foster care or in need of parenting support, etc. Our donors loved receiving “gifts from the kids” but (1) the kids are in school all day and they’re not a craft factory and (2) most of our kids were tweens or teens and were uninterested in creating dorky “art” for rich people.

So my boss’s solution was for ME to make the kid art, including writing messages like “thank you for caring for us” written with my non-dominant hand to look like they were done by kids. I’m still embarrassed that I went along with it, but I was very young and nervous about losing my job.

8. The lost ear

I was a young woman – early 20s – and lived in a small country town that had an old pub with an attached store and petrol pump. On Sundays, all the city folk would come out for a drive and the owner did an outdoor BBQ lunch. I worked as a waitress and drinks server.

A group of bikies asked, quite politely, if they could use the BBQ after lunch was over, but the boss said no. Well, this did not go down well. Drinks were drunk, tempers flared, and it ended in a big fight during which one of the bikies literally bit off the owner’s ear. They retreated inside and I was sent out to look for the missing ear. Which I did, crawling on my hands and knees with beer cans flying over me. I found the ear, it was successfully reattached, and that was the end of it. I wasn’t particularly scared at the time, but when I look back!

9. The dandelion weeding

Back when I worked in fund raising for a Catholic girls high school, the very expansive front lawn of the school had a LOT of dandelions in it. The president of the school felt that it was my job, as the school’s chief fund raiser, to weed the lawn on a regular basis because the presence of weeds instead of perfectly manicured grass could affect the school’s fund raising goals.

I refused.

10. The ticket chase

I had to log onto a ticket purchase portal to wait in a virtual line to get BTS tickets on behalf of my manager. She had the whole team of us doing this and was running back and forth with her credit card in hand in hopes of getting the tickets.

I reported this to our confidential ombudsperson line.

11. The shake monitor

I once had an office-assistant-type job at a wedding and event venue. Turns out, my MOST ESSENTIAL duty, which was not listed in the job description and did not come up in the interviews, was to make the GM’s meal-replacement shake at lunch and then check on him every half hour to see if he finished it, remind him to finish it if he hadn’t yet, then wash the shake container and return it exactly to the correct spot in the cabinet. Other work needed doing? If it was in the afternoon, it wasn’t getting done.

His office was at the other end of the building, so I’d have to walk there (leaving early enough to arrive precisely at the 30-minute mark), then wait for him to be free, remind him to drink his shake, then walk back to my desk. And repeat, and repeat, and repeat…

12. The wet shoes

In my first job out of college, my boss asked me to dry his shoes, which got wet in the rain. He plunked them down on my desk and said he needed them dry for a meeting in 15 minutes. I’m still not sure what he expected me to do because at a certain point, only time can dry things. The hard -unabsorbent paper towels from the bathroom weren’t going to cut it.
I was a receptionist but in no way a personal assistant.

13. The bartender

I had to bartend. This was at a makeshift bar set up in a machine shop, at age 14. My actual job was working for my uncle during the summer helping with paperwork/filing. He decided to host an open house celebration to recognize the business receiving a prestigious quality certification so I was pressed into service. I did not know how to bartend. I assumed until corrected (after a few hours) that all mixed drinks were poured half and half. His customers had a fantastic time!

14. The trick-or-treating

Not sure if this counts because I created the duty myself. I work in a hospital with a small rehab wing, and it always saddens me when patients are stuck in the hospital during holidays. Especially my favorite one, Halloween. So, with the approval of the unit manager, I made signs and plastered them around the hospital for employees to bring their costumed kids trick or treating on the rehab unit on Halloween. I provide the candy myself and give it to the patients to give out to the trick or treaters. The patients adore this and take lots of photos to share with their friends and families. This is the third year now that I’ve done this.

15. The cat attentions

We had an office cat named Baconfingers. She belonged to an employee who passed away, so folks had a lot of affection for this her. When I was hired, I was told that if she wanted attention, I was allowed to stop working and give her scritches for up to 15 minutes, and to code that time under office management.

Most of the time, Baconfingers roosted on top of a filing cabinet, but occasionally she would just make her rounds around the office, going from desk to desk getting scritches from different people in 15 minute increments.

The post the shoe dryer, the wake-up service, and more ridiculous “other duties as assigned” appeared first on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

This month, I started a new job that offers excellent benefits, including a policy stating that employees who “self-identify” on an addiction issue can take time off to get help without penalty. As a high-functioning untreated alcoholic, I’m very grateful for this, but unsure how to navigate it. (Kudos to all the authors of personnel policies out there who wrote language like this. Sincerely, those folks need to know how grateful some employees are for those clauses! Thank you! You are helping people!)

Here’s the situation: I’ve had a long-term drinking problem and know in-patient treatment would finally help me address it. Out-patient didn’t stick, and in-patient programs have told me I’m “not bad enough” to deserve a bed, but that’s subjective, and I really want the help. I’m going to go eventually. I’m going to get well and turn my life around, and I have a good job and mortgage to go back to. I’m worthy of real treatment, I say partially to convince myself this is okay!

My dilemma is about timing. I’m fresh on the job, and I’ve been working hard to establish myself. My new boss even described me as “indispensable,” and that is the reputation I want to keep. I’d love to be transparent, but I also don’t want to jeopardize the trust I’m building or seem unreliable so soon after starting.

When is it appropriate for a new employee to “self-identify” and use medical leave benefits for something like addiction treatment? Should I wait six months? A year? Or is it better to be up-front as soon as I’m ready to seek help? I would go tomorrow if I could. This job is so important to me, but I’ll keep sweeping my problem under the rug as long as no one hints it’s observable.

(And I literally have to have a half a beer before work and another on lunch to keep the shakes at bay, it’s that bad. I drink 7% ABV beer.)

P.S. I have found AA unhelpful, please don’t try to coerce me into it like everyone else. If AA was going to help me, it already would have.

The only responsible answer is to go now. If your health depends on it, you have to go now. If you’re drinking and driving or doing anything else that puts you or others in danger, you have to go now.

And addicts are notorious for misjudging how much danger they’re really putting themselves and others in — especially when they’ve been high-functioning for a long time — so I don’t see how there’s any answer here other than to go now.

But I understand what you’re asking, so in the most practical terms: does the policy indicate that you need to have worked there for a certain amount to time before you’re eligible for this leave and the associated job protection? FMLA protects your job for up to three months per year when you need time off for medical reasons, but it doesn’t kick in until you’ve worked there a year. Even if this job doesn’t explicitly lay out a similar waiting period, is it worded as “the company may give time off for treatment without penalty” or “the company will give time off for treatment without penalty”? Legally there’s a difference in how binding those each are. I’d like to think that a company that recognizes the importance of making it possible for people to seek treatment isn’t putting caveats on it like that, but you’re essentially asking how protected you’ll be, and that’s a relevant part of the answer.

In addition, if your employer has 15 or more employees, you may also be protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act because you’re seeking treatment, and there’s no waiting period for that to kick in.

You could also talk to HR about exactly what would be shared with your manager. Ideally they’d only be told that you’re out for emergency medical leave, without details beyond that.

But I’ll tell you this: if I had a new employee who had been doing well (well enough for me to have already called them “indispensable” a month into the job!) and they needed leave for in-patient treatment, I’d be glad they were taking it and I’d be glad my company offered it. It might be aggravating to try to get their work covered for that period and I might feel blindsided by it (they just started so we thought the work was covered now), but I’d no more hold it against them than if they suddenly needed to be hospitalized for any non-addiction medical issue. Frankly, that would be true even if they weren’t kicking ass at the job — but the fact that they were would make me extra glad that they were getting treatment so they could come back and continue the work. It would be a complication but not a disaster.

Go get treatment.

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Louisiana profiting on its gleeful imprisonment of immigrants in Trump’s concentration camps is part of a long, long history of that state and the rest of the South seeing prisoners as a site of profit.

Louisiana’s commander-in-chief could hardly contain his glee on Fox News this week as he announced that Donald Trump’s Gestapo force would soon be entering New Orleans: “I will tell you that when ICE is ready, we certainly welcome them to come into the city and be able to start taking some of these dangerous criminal illegal aliens off of our streets,” said Gov. Jeff Landry, explaining that local police have already been working with the agency. 

But it was this next part that really made him smile: “And we’ve got a place to put them—at Angola.” 

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, nicknamed “Angola” after the slave plantation that once stood in its place, is the largest maximum-security prison in the country. It has also been called “the bloodiest.” Angola gained national attention this September as the site of Louisiana Lockup, a new partnership between the state and DHS to “expand detention space by 416 beds” and “house some of the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens arrested by ICE.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said the prison was specifically chosen for its notoriety—a place where inmates still toil in the fields, surrounded by armed guards on horseback and alligator swamps—in hopes that it might scare immigrants into self-deporting. The facility is also known for its racism; in an ongoing class-action lawsuit, one inmate reported a white officer telling him, “We need a good hanging because these boys are out of line.”

It is no surprise that Gov. Landry seems thrilled by the prospect of rounding up “criminals” in New Orleans and sending them there. The former cop’s tough-on-crime rhetoric has always been a thin veil for his sadism; in Landry’s first year in office, he passed a law allowing for the perpetrators of certain sex crimes to be surgically castrated, and added two new methods of execution: the electric chair and suffocation by nitrogen gas. (If you’re someone who believes the punishment fits the crime, remember that Louisiana has the second-highest rate of known wrongful convictions in the country and New Orleans, as a city, has the first.)

But the reason Louisiana has become the center of mass deportation goes further than our governor’s personal cruelty and racism. A significant factor is profit. 

When you take a look at demographics, ICE’s upcoming Operation Swamp Sweep doesn’t make much sense. Only about 6.5 percent of New Orleans’ residents are foreign-born, a paltry number compared to much larger cities like San Francisco (34 percent) or Dallas (23 percent), neither of which have been the focus of large-scale, publicly-branded operations. Yet according to documents obtained by AP News, DHS has plans to arrest 5,000 migrants in this next sweep—significantly more than the number arrested in Chicago, a city whose metropolitan area has nine times more people than New Orleans.

But like everything in this administration, Operation Swamp Sweep has nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with pocket-padding: In Louisiana, migrant detainees are literally worth more money than ordinary inmates because their housing is federally funded. We also have a higher incarceration rate than anywhere in the world—besides, notably, El Salvador—and a track record for treating those inmates like filth. That means we have plenty of prisons to house people and we’ll do it at a fraction of the cost of other states. 

Fun times for America!

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