Supreme Court Declines to Hear Case Over Students’ “Let’s Go Brandon” T-Shirts

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal brought by two Michigan middle school students who were barred from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts because of the slogan’s vulgar reference to President Joe Biden.

The justices left intact an October 2025 decision by the Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling concluded the school could reasonably ban the sweatshirts because the phrase constituted vulgar speech.

The Supreme Court did not explain its decision not to take up the case.

The phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” became widely popular in the fall of 2021 as a substitute for the chant “F— Joe Biden.” The slogan emerged after NBC reporter Kelli Stavast mistakenly interpreted the profane chant during an interview with NASCAR driver Brandon Brown following that October’s Xfinity Series Sparks 300.

“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,” the Sixth Circuit said in a 2-1 ruling. “Requesting that students remove clothing with that slogan didn’t violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”

“In the schoolhouse, vulgarity trumps politics,” Judge John Nalbandian, an appointee of President Trump, wrote for the majority.

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Judge John Bush, another Trump appointee, dissented. “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,” he wrote.

The mother of the two middle school students sued the school district in 2023, arguing that the sweatshirt ban violated her sons’ First Amendment rights.

According to an attorney for Tri County Middle School in Howard City, located about 35 miles north of Grand Rapids, administrators prohibited the sweatshirts because their message violated the school’s dress code—not because of its political content.

An assistant principal and a teacher told the brothers to remove the sweatshirts after determining that the slogan was “equivalent to the f-word,” according to the lawsuit.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, filed the lawsuit on the mother’s behalf. The organization advocates for free speech and provides legal representation in such cases.

“Criticism of the president is core political speech protected by the First Amendment,” FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick said in a statement at the time. “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.”