The Supreme Court left standing a ban on “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts at a Michigan middle school, a move free-speech advocates say lets schools muzzle political criticism.
The high court declined Monday to take up an appeal from two middle school brothers barred from wearing the anti-Joe Biden slogan, leaving in place a divided Sixth Circuit ruling that treated the phrase as vulgar speech schools may prohibit.
The New York Post reported that the justices gave no reason for turning away the case, which grew out of a dress-code fight at Tri County Middle School in Howard City, about 35 miles north of Grand Rapids.
For parents who watched schools police student messages during the Biden years, the result is plain: a coded jab at a sitting president was treated like dirty language, and the nation’s highest court let that framing stand.
School administrators and a teacher told the brothers to remove the “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts after deciding the message violated the district dress code. The lawsuit said officials treated the slogan as “equivalent to the f-word.”
An attorney for Tri County Middle School said the ban rested on that dress-code judgment, not on the political target. The mother of the boys sued the district in 2023, arguing the order violated her sons’ First Amendment rights. The free-speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, brought the case on her behalf.
FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick framed the dispute as core political expression, not dirty talk.
“Criticism of the president is core political speech protected by the First Amendment.”
He added that schools cannot pick favorites among student messages.
“Whether it’s a Biden sticker, ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ sweatshirt or gay pride T-shirt, schools can’t pick and choose which political beliefs students can express.”
In October 2025, a Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit panel ruled 2-1 that the school could reasonably ban the sweatshirts as vulgar speech. The majority held that administrators acted within their authority and that ordering the clothing removed did not violate the First or Fourteenth Amendments.
Judge John Nalbandian, a Trump appointee who wrote for the majority, put the point bluntly.
“In the schoolhouse, vulgarity trumps politics.”
The panel also stated that school officials “reasonably interpreted the ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ slogan as being vulgar speech that ‘a school may categorically prohibit’ despite its political message,” and that “Requesting that students remove clothing with that slogan didn’t violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”
Judge John Bush, another Trump appointee, dissented. He warned that re-labeling political speech as vulgarity opens a path to viewpoint control.
“If we allow schools the power to censor political speech by recharacterizing it as vulgarity, we risk turning disagreement with political speech into justification for its censorship, something the First Amendment flatly forbids.”
“Let’s Go Brandon” spread widely in the fall of 2021 as a stand-in for “F, Joe Biden.” The phrase took off after NBC reporter Kelli Stavast, interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown after the Xfinity Series’ Sparks 300 that October, described a crowd chant in sanitized terms. Everyone following politics knew what the substitute meant.
That public meaning is exactly why free-speech lawyers saw a First Amendment fight, not a simple swearing case. The school called it vulgar. The family called it politics. The appellate majority sided with the school’s reading.
Just the News reported that the Sixth Circuit majority, applying the Supreme Court’s Fraser standard on lewd student speech, treated administrators’ view of the slogan as code for “F, Joe Biden” as enough to strip the apparel of ordinary First Amendment protection in school, even without a finding that the shirts caused disruption.
The same account noted the majority conceded the phrase can carry a range of meanings, including a swipe at media bias, yet still allowed the ban. Judge Bush’s dissent argued the court expanded Fraser to cover speech that is only ambiguously lewd, pushed past the Tinker rule that usually protects non-disruptive student political expression, and created tension with other circuits on non-obscene political clothing. He compared facially clean political apparel to the antiwar armbands of earlier student-speech cases, not to sexually explicit material.
Just the News also tied the posture to the Supreme Court’s earlier decision not to take up a separate student-shirt fight over an “Only Two Genders” message, another instance in which the justices left lower-court speech limits undisturbed.
By declining review, the Supreme Court left the Sixth Circuit’s 2-1 framework in force for that circuit: school officials may treat a widely understood anti-president slogan as categorically ban-able vulgarity, even when the words on the fabric are not themselves obscenity and even when the message is aimed at the nation’s chief executive.
No injuries, arrests, or campus shutdowns were described in the dispute. The cost is legal and cultural. A mother who sued to defend her sons’ right to wear a political slogan lost at the appellate level, and the justices declined to reopen the question. FIRE’s warning, that schools will sort student politics under the cover of “vulgarity”, now sits against a final refusal to hear the appeal.
Howard City is a small Michigan community. The rule the Sixth Circuit blessed is not small. It tells administrators that if they hear a dirty phrase underneath a political chant, they may order the shirt off and call it discipline rather than viewpoint control.
When schools can rebrand a jab at the president as the f-word and the Supreme Court will not even take the case, student political speech loses ground one dress-code order at a time.
