Two Michigan middle-school boys wore sweatshirts bearing three words that contained no profanity: “Let’s Go Brandon.” School administrators made them take the shirts off anyway because everybody knew what the phrase meant.
Now the Supreme Court has decided not to get involved.
The justices declined Monday to hear the students' First Amendment appeal, leaving intact a divided Sixth Circuit ruling that allowed Tri County Area Schools to treat the slogan as vulgar speech. A denial of review doesn’t mean the Supreme Court endorsed that reasoning. It does mean the two students lost their last chance to overturn it in their case.
From the Associated Press:
The school told her sons to take off the sweatshirts she bought them for Christmas in 2022.
Lower courts upheld the ban, finding the veiled vulgarity of the phrase allows schools to ban it. It functions as a stand-in for “F-— Joe Biden.”
The woman’s attorneys argued that the decision wrongly gives school officials wide latitude to squelch political speech based on their personal ideas of what is vulgar. The phrase itself doesn’t contain any swear words or sexual implications, they said.
The school district urged the justices to reject the case, arguing that messages with lewd implications have no place in school, even if they touch on political topics. There has been evidence that some students wore clothing that read “Make America Great Again” or had messages supporting President Donald Trump, a Republican who lost the 2020 election to Biden, a Democrat.
The story began after the boys received “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts from their mother for Christmas. One wore his to Tri County Middle School in Howard City, Michigan, in February 2022. Assistant Principal Andrew Buikema stopped him in the hallway and told him to remove it because the phrase “means the F-word.” The boy also had a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt underneath, so he was told to remove that too and change into school clothing.
Nobody claimed the shirt started a fight; nobody claimed classes stopped; nobody claimed students couldn’t learn because three scandalous English words appeared on cotton fabric. The school district never argued that the sweatshirts caused a material disruption.
Instead, administrators decided they could mentally translate the euphemism back into the vulgar chant that inspired it and punish the cleaned-up version.
Judge John Bush wasn’t buying it. In dissent, he noted that the slogan contained no sexual material, graphic imagery, or actual profanity. He warned that allowing schools to reclassify political speech as vulgar gives administrators a remarkably convenient way to censor viewpoints they don’t want displayed.
Bush also pointed to the slogan’s obvious political character. “Let’s Go Brandon” became a nationally recognized criticism of Joe Biden after a 2021 NASCAR interview transformed a profane crowd chant into one of the strangest political catchphrases in recent memory. Members of Congress used it, protesters used it, and Americans put it on shirts, flags, bumper stickers, and signs.
The boys wanted to wear it because they opposed Biden and his policies. That’s political speech, whether school officials found the joke clever, childish, rude, or tiresome.
The majority took a different approach. Because administrators could reasonably understand the slogan as a substitute for profanity, the court concluded the school could restrict it as vulgar expression. Political meaning didn’t rescue it.
Think about where that leaves students: schools routinely tell kids to clean up their language, and these boys did. They used a euphemism with no forbidden word printed anywhere on their clothes, and administrators responded by supplying the forbidden word themselves.
Apparently, watching your language only works if school officials also approve of what you’re saying.
The Supreme Court had an opportunity to draw a clearer line between actual vulgarity and political speech that makes adults uncomfortable.
It passed.
For students in the Sixth Circuit, the result is a rule broad enough to let school administrators decide that polite words are profane if the political joke behind them is sufficiently obvious.
The First Amendment deserves better than a vocabulary test administered by the principal’s office. “Let’s Go Brandon” may be crude political humor, but Americans don’t need government officials translating their euphemisms for them, then punishing the translation.
The boys said exactly what their shirts said. The censors supplied the rest.
The school’s rainbow-shirt, alphabet mafia, pro-mutilation of children, and other lefty causes exemptions were apparently unavailable for “Let’s Go Brandon.”