President Joseph R. Biden may be out of office, but the free-speech battle over whether students may wear “Let’s Go Brandon” apparel to school isn’t over.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against two Michigan brothers who sued after being barred from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts to class, upholding a lower-court decision in favor of the school’s policy prohibiting clothing with slogans “reasonably understood as vulgar or profane.”
“In the schoolhouse, vulgarity trumps politics,” said Judge John Nalbandian in the Tuesday opinion. “And the protection for political speech doesn’t give a student carte blanche to use vulgarity at school — even when that vulgarity is cloaked in innuendo or euphemism.”
In 2022, an assistant principal and teacher at Tri County Middle School in Howard City, Michigan, told the brothers to remove the “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts they received for Christmas, citing the school’s ban on attire with “messages or illustrations that are lewd, indecent, vulgar or profane.”
The slogan became an anti-Biden euphemism in October 2021 after an NBC reporter said NASCAR fans were chanting “Let’s go, Brandon” following a race won by driver Brandon Brown, when they could clearly be heard saying, “F—- Joe Biden.”
“Here, the school administrators reasonably interpreted the ’Let’s Go Brandon’ slogan as being vulgar speech that ’a school may categorically prohibit’ despite its political message,” said Judge Nalbandian, a Trump appointee. “Requesting that students remove clothing with that slogan didn’t violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said it would appeal the ruling, insisting that “Supreme Court precedent makes clear that public school students have a right to wear nondisruptive political apparel to school.”
“The majority held that no matter how careful teenagers are to express their political opinions in a nonprofane, school-appropriate way, schools may censor them if their expression might cause someone to think about a swear word,” said FIRE lead attorney Conor Fitzpatrick. “America’s students are not so fragile, and the First Amendment is not so brittle.”
The foundation pointed to the dissent filed by Judge John K. Bush, who said the phrase has “evolved into a widely recognized political slogan used to express opposition to a now-former president.”
“It is not vulgar on its face, nor so socially deviant that it must be sanitized from student expression,” said Judge Bush, also a Trump appointee. “It has become a political hallmark entitled to the First Amendment protection described in Tinker [v. Des Moines].”
In its 1969 Tinker decision, the Supreme Court held in favor of students who wore black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War.
In Tuesday’s ruling, the majority opinion cited the high court’s 1983 decision in Bethel School District v. Fraser, which found that schools may prohibit lewd or indecent speech after a student was suspended for making sexually suggestive remarks at a school assembly.
“A student wearing a ’Let’s Go Brandon!’ sweatshirt is not engaging in the kind of ’offensively lewd’ or sexually explicit speech in the way Fraser contemplated,” Judge Bush wrote in his dissent. “Although the phrase may carry a controversial or provocative undertone, it is fundamentally political — not plainly lewd or vulgar.”
The foundation filed an appeal after District Court Judge Paul Maloney ruled in favor of the school district in August 2024, finding that in “school settings, profanity does not enjoy First Amendment protection.”
