<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

So, this fellow, Bryton Mellott<\/a>, thought it would be cool to post a picture of himself while he was burning the flag on Independence Day. So, yeah, he had a right to do that, but then folks who criticized him have their rights, too, and they expressed those opinions according to the Champaign, Illinois News-Gazette<\/a>;<\/p>\n

After looking at the posts, Charles said, police saw a rapidly growing number of threats toward the young man and decided to look into it more closely. Many of the posts threatened violence against Mellott and his place of employment, Wal-Mart, which fielded a large volume of calls regarding the post, according to Urbana police.<\/p>\n

Urbana police explained their involvement in a news release Monday, stating that \u201cthe volume of responses and specificity of threat against his place of employment (a location where an act of violence would likely cause harm to others), prompted police involvement in this case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charles said police spoke with Mellott and with his employer. He said they told Mellott that they \u201cunderstood his freedom of speech\u201d but explained they were concerned for his safety and believed his posts were putting others at risk.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

Funny how that freedom of expression can go both ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, this fellow, Bryton Mellott, thought it would be cool to post a picture of himself … Bryton Mellott’s free speech<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":66669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dumbass-bullshit"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Bryton-Mellott.jpg?fit=960%2C960&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/66669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}