The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a First Amendment challenge from two Michigan middle school students blocked from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts, leaving lower court rulings against them in place without comment and with no noted dissents.
Courthouse News reported that the dispute centers on Tri County Middle School’s decision to bar students identified in court papers as D.A. and X.A. from wearing the apparel. The school treated the slogan as a profane message. Two lower courts threw out the students’ claims.
The case sat at the intersection of student political speech and school authority over vulgar expression. The students cast the ban as viewpoint-driven censorship. The school cast the phrase as coded lewdness it could police under long-standing precedent.
The slogan took off in 2021 after a NASCAR race. Fans chanted “F*** Joe Biden.” A reporter described the noise as support for racecar driver Brandon Brown. “Let’s Go Brandon” then spread as a coded jab at the former president.
D.A. and X.A. wore sweatshirts with that phrase at Tri County Middle School in Michigan. Administrators stopped them. The school said the message was profane. The students said it was political speech protected by the First Amendment.
They asked the Supreme Court to step in after losing below. Their petition argued schools should not be free to rebrand disfavored politics as vulgarity and then ban it.
In their petition, the students framed the ban as a threat to evenhanded free-speech rules.
“The First Amendment is intended to shield Americans from inconsistent enforcement based on government officials’ whims and political leanings,”
They pressed the point further, warning that schools could launder viewpoint discrimination through morals language.
“But ‘[i]f 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.’”
That was the core of their Supreme Court ask: treat the sweatshirts as political expression, not as a free pass for officials to silence a slogan they dislike.
Two lower courts rejected the students’ claims under Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser, the 1986 decision holding that the First Amendment does not stop schools from banning vulgar or lewd speech. Those courts concluded “Let’s Go Brandon” counted as profanity because of the meaning it carried, not because of the particular letters on the shirts.
The students had leaned on the spirit of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. In that 1969 ruling, the Supreme Court held that public schools could not ban black armbands protesting the Vietnam War unless the conduct interfered with school operations. Fraser later drew a separate line for lewd and vulgar student speech.
By putting the Michigan dispute on the Fraser side of the line, the lower courts treated the slogan’s coded insult as unprotected vulgarity inside the schoolhouse. The Supreme Court’s refusal to review that result leaves that framing undisturbed for now.
Tri County Middle School urged the justices to deny the petition. Its brief argued that political packaging should not create a special shield for sanitized sexual slang or crude coded messages.
The school posed a string of hypotheticals about other “sanitized” sexual terms and what a win for the students might mean in classrooms and hallways.
“Can students use ‘sanitized’ terms for oral sex, like ‘blumpkin,’ ‘bush diving,’ or ‘carpet muncher?’”
It kept going with a longer list of sexual slang it said could follow under the students’ theory.
“What about yet other sexual terms, like ‘donkey punch,’ ‘cornhole,’ ‘reverse bazooka,’ ‘Netflix [a]nd [c]hill,’ ‘bumping uglies,’ ‘riding the pony,’ ‘queening,’ ‘eating the peach,’ and ‘rusty trombone?’”
The school also answered the students’ democracy rhetoric directly. It noted that the petitioners praised public schools as “nurseries of democracy,” then flipped the line.
“But petitioners’ approach would transform those nurseries of democracy into nurseries of debauchery.”
In the same vein, the school pointed to other shirt messages it cast as crude or sexualized, including examples such as “United States Space Force Protecting Uranus” and “Shoot Loads Not Guns.” The throughline was clear: officials wanted authority to police coded lewdness whether or not students called it politics.
The Supreme Court declined to review the appeal without comment. No dissents were noted in the report of the order. A denial of review is not a ruling on the merits. It leaves the lower court outcomes in force for these students and this school.
Absolute calendar dates for the school ban, the lower court decisions, and the petition filing were not detailed beyond the Monday denial at the high court. The full docket number and the names of the two lower courts also were not provided in the account of the order. The city location of Tri County Middle School beyond Michigan was not specified.
Still, the procedural posture is plain. School officials barred the shirts. Two courts applied Fraser and tossed the First Amendment claims. The Supreme Court would not take the case.
The fight exposes a recurring fault line. Tinker protects non-disruptive political expression in public schools. Fraser gives schools wider berth against vulgar and lewd speech. When a political slogan is also a stand-in for an explicit insult, lawyers fight over which rule controls.
D.A. and X.A. said the danger is elastic censorship. If officials may relabel political messages as vulgarity, enforcement can track “whims and political leanings,” in the petition’s words. The school said the danger runs the other way: a carve-out for politics could force educators to accept a parade of sexual coded terms so long as students claim a viewpoint.
Investigators of a different sort, meaning courts and counsel in the next case, will still need to determine how far Fraser stretches when the contested phrase is popular political code rather than classic sexual innuendo. This order does not draft that broader rule. It only leaves the Michigan students’ loss in place.
Tri County Middle School chose to treat “Let’s Go Brandon” as a profane message and to defend that choice all the way to a brief opposing Supreme Court review. The students chose to escalate a clothing dispute into a constitutional petition. Lower courts chose Fraser. The Supreme Court chose silence.
Each step carries governance weight. Public schools regulate speech under constitutional limits. Parents and students watch whether those limits flex with the politics of the moment. Conservatives who watched officials and cultural institutions police anti-Biden messaging with special energy will read a denial like this as more than a quiet orders list entry.
Courthouse News described the justices’ action as a decision not to give the sweatshirt ban a Supreme Court airing. That ends this path for D.A. and X.A. It does not erase the underlying clash over coded political speech in the hallways.
When schools may outlaw a popular political slogan by calling it lewd, and the high court declines to look, the message to families is simple: local administrators hold the first and last word unless a future panel says otherwise.
