A man who hung Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear in a Memorial Day Weekend protest at the state’s capitol has been fired from his job, The Louisville Courier-Journal reports.
As reported at the time in a companion Louisville Courier-Journal report, on Monday, Memorial Day, about 100 people gathered outside of the Bluegrass State’s Governor’s Mansion for the Take Back Kentucky Protest, which was officially supposed to be about Second Amendment rights. However, as the newspaper noted, the protest was simultaneously against the Beshear administration and, specifically, his coronavirus restrictions.
At one point during the protest, a man could be seen hanging the governor in effigy via a mannequin with a paper cutout of Beshear’s face. A sign affixed to the mannequin read “sic semper tyrannis,” or “thus always to tyrants,” the phrase John Wilkes Booth exclaimed after he shot Abraham Lincoln.
The display sparked outrage at the time, even from Republicans, the opposition party to Beshear’s Democratic administration.
“I condemn it wholeheartedly. The words of John Wilkes Booth have no place in the Party of Lincoln,” said Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican.
The man who hanged the effigy has been identified as Terry Bush, who is identified by the Louisville newspaper as president of the Kentucky 3 Percenters Club. That group is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-government group.
On Tuesday night, Bush’s former employer, The Neil Huffman Auto Group, said in a statement that one of its employees had been let go following an internal investigation into the hanging incident. The statement did not identify the employee by name.
“The Neil Huffman Auto Group does not condone threats of violence in any form, whether they be a call to action or an implied threat… There is no place for hate or intolerance at any of our dealerships,” said the group’s Human Resources Manager in a statement.
Though the dealership did not identify Bush by name, his wife, Patsy Bush, confirmed that he was fired.
“He was fired because this governor is more important than the regular joe out in this state trying to put food on their tables,” she said.
She also had some things to say about her husband’s former employer.
“They fired him for exercising his (First Amendment) right to free speech,” she said, noting that her husband had an exemplary work record, that he did not threaten anyone, and that his actions did not invoke his employer by name.
