Hot Take: Your Sweatshirt Can Be Banned for a Swear Not on It

On October 5, 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from two Michigan middle school students who were ordered to remove a sweatshirt bearing the slogan "Let's Go Brandon." The court's silence leaves in place a divided appeals court ruling that the school could ban the sweatshirt because administrators reasonably read it as vulgar. The twist: the sweatshirt has no profanity on it. Nothing printed on that sweatshirt would get flagged by a content filter. The ban targets what adults think the slogan means, not the words themselves. And that is exactly the problem.

Here are the facts, as reported by Network Today and by CNN. The two students are brothers — one a sixth grader, the other an eighth grader — at Tri County Middle School in Howard City, Michigan. Their mother bought them matching sweatshirts as Christmas gifts in December 2021. When one of the boys wore his to school in February 2022, an assistant principal stopped him in the hallway and asked him to remove it, saying the phrase "means the F-word," according to the family's lawsuit. The family sued the district in 2023, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group, took up their case. "Criticism of the president is core political speech protected by the First Amendment," said FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick in a statement quoted in the Network Today report, arguing that schools cannot pick and choose which political beliefs students may express.

The slogan's origin is not in dispute. In the fall of 2021, a crowd at a NASCAR race chanted a profane insult at then-President Joe Biden while an NBC reporter interviewed driver Brandon Brown. The reporter misheard the chant and told viewers the crowd was cheering "Let's go, Brandon." The phrase became a political meme overnight. In October 2025, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled the school could reasonably treat the slogan as vulgar speech despite its political message. "In the schoolhouse, vulgarity trumps politics," wrote Judge John Nalbandian in the majority opinion, according to Network Today. The Supreme Court's decision not to take the case lets that ruling stand.

The slogan is only vulgar once politics gets attached

This is the heart of the dissent, and it is devastating. Judge John Bush, writing for the minority, argued that the phrase is innocuous when divorced from the political message. Imagine a football player named Brandon making a big play — "Let's Go Brandon" would read as encouragement. It becomes vulgar only after an adult assigns it the political meaning. As Bush put it, the supposed vulgarity comes from the phrase's euphemistic association with criticism of a political official. Without that viewpoint attached, no administrator could possibly view the words as vulgar.

Linguistic scholars made the same point in a brief filed with the appeals court, as reported by Reason: "This case is not about swearing; it is about not swearing." The entire point of a euphemism is to avoid vulgarity, they argued — so treating the avoidance as equivalent to the vulgarity collapses the distinction the law is supposed to protect. FIRE pressed a related argument: if schools can ban a euphemism by decoding its meaning, then any political message with an edge can be recharacterized as vulgar the moment an administrator dislikes it. "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," Bush warned in his dissent.

And there is a practical detail that strengthens the students' side: the school never claimed the sweatshirt disrupted anything. The boys' principal said he was not aware the school had experienced any disruption from students wearing the slogan, according to a report on the case's record. That matters because the Supreme Court's 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines decision held that students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate, and that schools may restrict expression only when necessary to avoid substantial interference with schoolwork. No disruption was ever claimed here. So consider what the rule now is in four states: a student can be ordered to strip off a sweatshirt, not for what is printed on it, not for any disruption it caused, but for the sentence an adult produced inside his own head.

The other side is not wrong either

The 1986 case Bethel School District v. Fraser helps the school's side. There, the Supreme Court upheld the suspension of a student who gave a lewd speech at a school assembly — even though the speech used sexual metaphor rather than explicit obscenity. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote for the majority that "surely it is a highly appropriate function of public school education to prohibit the use of vulgar and offensive terms in public discourse." The majority in this case saw the sweatshirt's slogan as the same kind of thing: a message that conveys vulgarity even when the words themselves are clean. Nobody involved — not the boys, not the school, not the courts — disputes what the slogan refers to. The origin is a profane chant, uncontroverted. On this view, calling the sweatshirt clean because the profanity is implied is a technicality that asks the school to pretend not to know what everyone knows.

There is also the viewpoint-neutrality question. The district's attorney said the shirts were barred for violating the dress code, not because of the political element — and the school bans lewd or vulgar attire regardless of viewpoint. If a student wore a shirt with the actual profanity spelled out, no one would argue the school had to allow it. The majority's logic is that a euphemism everyone understands still delivers the message, and letting students smuggle profanity past the dress code by winking at it would make the rule unenforceable. It is also worth noting that the Supreme Court has been reluctant to referee school dress-code disputes generally: the justices recently declined a separate case about a student barred from wearing a "There are only two genders" shirt. The court's message is that it does not want to be the nation's dress-code administrator.

What this means for students now

One clarification matters more than any other: the Supreme Court did not rule that the slogan can be banned. It declined to hear the appeal, gave no reason, and the refusal to take a case is not an endorsement of the lower court's reasoning. But it does leave the Sixth Circuit's decision as binding precedent in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. In those states, the rule is now the majority's rule: a school official who can plausibly decode a vulgar origin in a slogan may order a student to remove the clothing.

FIRE's warning about where that leads is worth hearing. If individual teachers and administrators can create their own test for vulgarity, a political shirt could have First Amendment protection in second-period algebra and not in third-period biology — protection would depend on which adult reads the slogan and what they hear in it. That is a strange place for a constitutional right to live. The boys have now lost their last appeal in this case, and the ban on their sweatshirt stands as precedent. Another student, another shirt, and another school district could eventually produce a case in a different circuit, and conflicting rulings could force the Supreme Court to settle the question nationally. But until then, the takeaway is plain and a little unnerving: your sweatshirt can be banned for a swear word that is nowhere on it — only in the meaning the adults assigned to it. Find the debate at Hot Takes on GenZ NewZ, and read a related piece on school rules and student expression at Unpopular Opinion: The NYC AI School Ban Is a Good Idea.