News/Commentary

Court sides with school in ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ shirt case, says it’s vulgar

October 16, 2025 | | Print Article

A federal appeals court ruled in favor of a Michigan school that made two students wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” shirts remove them.

The students, two brothers, believed their First Amendment rights were violated in 2022 when the Tri County Middle School ordered them to remove the shirts that sported the phrase mocking former President Joe Biden. In the initial lawsuit, the school’s attorney had argued that the district “does not prohibit students from the right to express their political views or from wearing clothing with political slogans.”

However, at issue was the vulgar and offensive language allegedly inherent in the phrase, which essentially meant F*** Joe Biden.”

In a 2-1 decision on Tuesday, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the two students, agreeing with the school district that there was no First Amendment violation.

“In the schoolhouse, vulgarity trumps politics. 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,” wrote Judges John Nalbandian and Karen Nelson Moore in their decision.

“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,” wrote Nalbandian, a Trump appointee. “Requesting that students remove clothing with that slogan didn’t violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”

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In a dissenting opinion, Judge John Bush argued that there was special protection for the slogan, which was different from using outright profanity.

“By displaying the message on these shirts publicly, the students participated in broader civic discourse, a notion the Supreme Court has never rendered inappropriate for the school environment,” he wrote.

“The phrase at issue here is a euphemism for political criticism. It contains no sexual content, no graphic imagery, and no actual profanity,” he noted. “To the extent that it implies an offensive phrase, it does so obliquely — by design.”

Bush, also a Trump appointee, said the phrase has “evolved into a widely recognized political slogan used to express opposition to a now-former president.”

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“It is not vulgar on its face, nor so socially deviant that it must be sanitized from student expression,” he said. “It has become a political hallmark entitled to the First Amendment protection described in Tinker [v. Des Moines].”

“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,” 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 Washington Times reported that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression will be appealing the court’s decision, saying, “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,” FIRE lead attorney Conor Fitzpatrick said. “America’s students are not so fragile, and the First Amendment is not so brittle.”

Frieda Powers
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