The way Glenn Reynolds explains it, the law professor and USA Today conservative columnist was following the news out of Charlotte last week - watching as demonstrators protested the nation's most recent viral police shooting, marched through downtown and, in some places, resorted to vandalism and violence - when he saw a warning tweet from WBTV News.
"LIVE NOW: Protesters on I-277 stopping traffic and surrounding vehicles," it said. "AVOID."
He clicked to retweet the station's alert, then added some commentary of his own.
"Run them down," he typed.
Then Reynolds, who goes by @instapundit, sent out the tweet to his 70.6K followers.
Some quickly took offense, calling on his employers - the University of Tennessee and USA Today - to discipline him. Some even demanded he be fired.
On Tuesday, after a week-long investigation that included an examination of the facts, policies stated in the university's faculty handbook and the law, College of Law Dean Melanie Wilson announced she will do no such thing.
His tweet, she wrote, "was an exercise of his First Amendment rights." He will not be disciplined.
"Nevertheless, the tweet offended many members of our community and beyond, and I understand the hurt and frustration they feel," Wilson said, noting that Reynolds had apologized to the law school community. ". . .We will now move forward to rebuild our law school community and refocus on our primary purpose: educating future lawyers and leaders."
USA Today, for which Reynolds writes a twice-weekly column, took a more prompt and severe action, suspending his column for one month the day after his tweet was published.
Bill Sternberg, editorial page editor for USA Today, said in a statement that the publication "expects its columnists to provide thoughtful, reasoned contributions to the national conversation, on all platforms" and that Reynolds's "Run them down" tweet was a "violation of that standard and can be interpreted as an incitement to violence."
Initially, Reynolds defended his tweet, both in an email interview with The Washington Post and on his Instapundit website, where he wrote: "Sorry, blocking the interstate is dangerous, and trapping people in their cars and surrounding them is a threat. Driving on is self-preservation, especially when we've had mobs destroying property and injuring and killing people."
He continued: ". . . riots aren't peaceful protest. And blocking interstates and trapping people in their cars is not peaceful protest - it's threatening and dangerous, especially against the background of people rioting, cops being injured, civilian-on-civilian shootings, and so on. I wouldn't actually aim for people blocking the road, but I wouldn't stop because I'd fear for my safety, as I think any reasonable person would."
Later, though, Reynolds issued apologies. The first ran last week in USA Today, addressing his readers, and another, similar statement was sent to the College of Law community this week.
"Thursday one of my 580,000 tweets blew up," he wrote to his law colleagues. "I try to be careful and precise in my language. I didn't do that this time, and I unfortunately made a lot of people in the law school community sad or angry, something I certainly didn't mean to do, and feel bad about."
Reynolds explained that his words, "run them down," could be taken as "encouragement of drivers going out of their way to run down protesters," but that he "meant no such thing."
"What I meant was that drivers who feel their lives are in danger from a violent mob should not stop their vehicles," Reynolds wrote. "I remember Reginald Denny, a truck driver who was beaten nearly to death by a mob during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. My tweet should have said, 'Keep driving,' or 'Don't stop.' I was upset, and it was a bad tweet. I do not support violence except in cases of clear self-defense."
Reynolds cited his regular writing on the militarization of police and law enforcement accountability as evidence that his tweet, however ill-conceived, did not mean he was anti-demonstrators or pro-violence.
Reynolds's Twitter account was suspended by the social media platform, then later re-activated when he agreed to delete the tweet. He complied, but noted a screenshot of it preserved online.
He wrote on his website and previously told The Post that he would remain on the social media site so he could "tweet my response to this affair. But once that's over, I intend to shut it down. I don't see why I should provide content to a platform that will shut me down without notice."
Thus far, Reynolds has not left Twitter, continuing to tweet furiously about the first 2016 presidential debate, a Harambe political joke and whether or not Hillary Clinton does, indeed, blink like a Furby.
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