Dillon Shane Webb was driving through Lake City, Florida, when a sheriff’s deputy noticed the sticker on his truck: “I EAT ASS.” The deputy ordered Webb to pull over, calling the decal obscene and demanding he remove or alter it. Webb refused, calmly insisting it was his First Amendment right to display the sticker. Minutes later, he was arrested for violating Florida’s obscenity law, his truck towed, his speech treated like a crime.

The charges collapsed almost as quickly as they were filed. The state attorney dropped the case, and Webb later sued, arguing his arrest was a blatant violation of his constitutional rights. A federal judge agreed the deputy had no lawful basis to silence him. In a nation arguing over campus protests, social media bans, and “cancel culture,” one crude bumper sticker in a small Florida town became a sharp reminder: free speech is rarely tested by polite words.