A group of Michigan middle school students banned from wearing "Let's Go Brandon" sweatshirts has asked the Supreme Court to step in, arguing that a federal appeals court handed teachers and administrators a blank check to silence political speech they personally find offensive. The petition, filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, lands at a moment when public schools across the country are drawing sharper, and more inconsistent, lines around what students may say, wear, and post on campus.
The case targets a split decision by a panel of the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling allowed Michigan's Tri County Area Schools to bar the sweatshirts under Bethel School District v. Fraser, the 1986 Supreme Court case that let schools restrict "lewd, vulgar, or profane" student speech. The problem, as the petition frames it, is that "Let's Go Brandon" contains none of those words. It is a euphemism, and treating euphemisms as profanity, the students' lawyers argue, opens a door that no school administrator should be trusted to walk through alone.
Just the News reported that the petition arrived the same week a separate student-speech fight ended in California, where the San Dieguito Union High School District quietly expunged its suspension of a student at Torrey Pines High School who had posted flyers reading "We ❤️ I.C.E., Real Americans." The two episodes, separated by two thousand miles, share a common thread: school officials punishing conservative expression while tolerating, or ignoring, progressive speech that is at least as provocative.
The petition lays out a straightforward argument. "Let's Go Brandon" originated as a sanitized stand-in for a profane chant directed at President Biden. The students' lawyers say that using a clean substitute for a vulgar phrase is as old as the English language itself. FIRE's Supervising Senior Attorney Conor Fitzpatrick put it bluntly:
"The school district's censorship assumes that students cannot handle seeing even sanitized expressions."
The petition goes further, arguing the phrase "fits squarely within our nation's deeply rooted tradition of peaceful dissent under the First Amendment." It draws a historical parallel to the 1884 presidential campaign, when opponents of Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland chanted "Ma. Ma. Where's My Pa?", a taunt referencing an illegitimate child. That slogan, the petition notes, was no less crude in implication than "Let's Go Brandon," yet no one would call it profanity.
The core legal complaint is that the 6th Circuit's reading of Fraser lets individual teachers decide what counts as coded profanity. That standard, the petition warns, authorizes contradictory decisions not just among schools in the same district but "between classes" in the same building. One teacher might shrug at a sweatshirt; the next might send a student to the office.
Judge John Bush, who dissented from the 6th Circuit panel, saw a "political slogan critical of a president but containing no words that are vulgar or profane", more like the antiwar armbands protected in Tinker v. Des Moines than the crude assembly speech punished in Fraser. The petition quotes his warning that "subjective standards are a petri dish for viewpoint discrimination and thus anathema to the First Amendment."
The Supreme Court itself has acknowledged the confusion. Twenty-one years after Fraser, the justices admitted uncertainty about how to apply the decision when they decided Morse v. Frederick, the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case, in which the Court narrowly upheld a school's punishment of a student who displayed a banner across the street from campus during a school-supervised event. FIRE argues that the 6th Circuit has been stretching Fraser beyond its original sex-themed subject matter "since the turn of the century," and that the result is a patchwork no student, parent, or principal can navigate with confidence.
The petition highlights a genuine divide among federal appeals courts. The 3rd Circuit found that a middle school could not ban "I ♥ boobies!" breast-cancer-awareness bracelets absent evidence of disruption, granting the broadest student protection under Fraser. The 9th Circuit requires speech to be "plainly" lewd or profane before schools may act. The 2nd Circuit has complained that Fraser and related precedents are "difficult and confusing, even for lawyers, law professors, and judges," and limited the decision to similarly vulgar speech.
Meanwhile, district courts in Indiana and Wisconsin reached the opposite conclusion from the 3rd Circuit on the very same "I ♥ boobies!" bracelets, authorizing bans in high school and middle school settings. When the same phrase produces opposite outcomes depending on the courthouse, something has gone wrong.
The Supreme Court has already sidestepped one chance to clean up this area. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas objected when the Court refused to review a 1st Circuit decision approving a Massachusetts middle school's ban on shirts reading "Only Two Genders" and "Only Censored Genders." That refusal left the circuit split intact and the rules for student political speech as murky as ever. With the Court's composition and future already drawing intense attention, the question is whether the justices will continue to look the other way.
FIRE's petition recommends a bright-line rule: schools may restrict actual "swearwords" or lewd actions on campus, but not sanitized political commentary that some adults happen to find distasteful. The petition describes this as a "commonsense, workable approach", a phrase that reads like a direct appeal to a Court weary of subjective balancing tests.
The California case is smaller in legal scope but sharper in its illustration of the double standard. A student at Torrey Pines High School posted flyers reading "We ❤️ I.C.E., Real Americans" in a common area where other students had posted political material. The school suspended him, telling his guardians he was "directing harassment, threats or intimidation toward district staff or other students," The Times of San Diego reported.
Torrey Pines cited a state law prohibiting speech that "incites pupils so as to create a clear and present danger," a district policy against "conduct that creates a hostile or intimidating environment," and the Supreme Court's 1942 "fighting words" doctrine from Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. That is a heavy legal arsenal to deploy against a student who taped up a flyer expressing support for a federal law enforcement agency.
The contrast with the school's treatment of opposing viewpoints is difficult to miss. Hundreds of students at the same campus carried anti-ICE posters during a school walkout. None was punished. FIRE noted that some of those posters included lewd slogans, yet the school reserved its discipline for the lone student who expressed the opposite opinion in the same common area.
FIRE told school administrators they "can't pick and choose which opinions students are allowed to express." After FIRE's litigation attorneys made "prompt and immediate document requests" and the family retained FIRE as counsel, the San Dieguito Union High School District backed down and expunged the suspension from the student's record. The speed of the reversal suggests the district knew its position would not survive scrutiny.
The episode is a textbook case of viewpoint discrimination, the kind of selective enforcement that corrodes trust in public institutions. When a school punishes a pro-ICE flyer but waves through an anti-ICE walkout complete with crude signage, the message to students is unmistakable: your rights depend on whether the administration agrees with you. That is not education. It is indoctrination by omission.
These are not isolated incidents. Across the country, school administrators have increasingly treated conservative student expression as a disciplinary matter while extending wide latitude to progressive speech. The Massachusetts shirt-ban case, the Michigan sweatshirt case, and the California flyer case all share a structural feature: officials invoking broad, subjective standards, "hostile environment," "coded profanity," "fighting words", to suppress viewpoints they find politically uncomfortable.
The petition in the "Let's Go Brandon" case makes a historical point worth lingering on. It argues that the modern public school system "implicates direct, coercive interactions between the State and its young residents", a principle the Supreme Court itself recognized when it rejected a Maryland school district's secret LGBTQ lessons. The petition says the 6th Circuit's approach "attempts to resuscitate the ironfisted authority over student speech that private school headmasters enjoyed in the 19th century. That era is over."
Five months before the 6th Circuit's split decision, the nation's largest federal appeals court affirmed that elementary school students possess the same First Amendment rights as older students. The trajectory of the law, in other words, has been toward more protection, not less. The 6th Circuit's ruling cuts against that grain, and the petition notes the court is, by one estimate, the "second-most overturned federal appeals court" in the country.
The "Let's Go Brandon" slogan may have originated in a moment of partisan frustration, but the legal question it raises is not partisan at all. If a school can ban a euphemism because a teacher believes it refers to something vulgar, then any expression with a subtext is fair game. A peace sign could be banned if an administrator decided it was coded mockery of military service. A rainbow pin could be banned if a teacher found it implicitly sexual. The rule has no limiting principle, which is precisely the point FIRE is pressing.
The broader free-speech environment makes the stakes plain. Institutions of every kind have shown a growing comfort with suppressing disfavored viewpoints, whether the setting is a social media platform, a newsroom, or a middle school hallway. When public schools join that pattern, they teach the next generation that the First Amendment is a privilege dispensed at the discretion of whoever holds authority, not a right.
The Supreme Court has not yet indicated whether it will take up the "Let's Go Brandon" petition. The circuit split is real, the confusion among lower courts is documented, and two sitting justices have already signaled frustration with the Court's reluctance to act. Whether the remaining justices share that frustration will determine whether students in Michigan, and across the country, get a clear answer about where their rights begin and school administrators' preferences end.
In California, the immediate fight is over. The suspension is gone. But the willingness of officials to wield disciplinary power selectively, and to fold the moment a competent legal team showed up, tells its own story about how these decisions get made when no one is watching.
Public schools exist to prepare young Americans for citizenship, not to sort their opinions into approved and unapproved categories. When administrators can silence a euphemism but tolerate a walkout, the lesson students learn has nothing to do with civics, and everything to do with power.
