The federal appeals court in Cincinnati ruled on October 14 that schools can ban clothing bearing the popular political slogan “Let’s Go Brandon.”
As The College Fix notes,
The phrase originated in 2021 from an NBC reporter interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown after his first victory. The crowd was chanting “F*** Joe Biden,” but the reporter told Brown “You can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go, Brandon!’”
The phrase has since become synonymous with “F*** Joe Biden.”
In the first few months of 2022, a pair of Michigan middle school siblings wore hoodies with “Let’s Go Brandon” on them. Assistant Principal Andrew Buikema and teacher Wendy Bradford both warned the pair to remove the hoodies as they violated the school dress code.
The code states school personnel can “determine [if] a student’s dress is in conflict with state policy, is a danger to the students’ health and safety, is obscene, [or] is disruptive to the teaching and/or learning environment by calling undue attention to oneself.”
Of note, however, Principal Joseph Williams had said “he was not aware that the school had experienced any disruption from students wearing ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ apparel.”
The siblings then challenged the ban on “Let’s Go Brandon” apparel in federal court. In 2024, federal district judge Paul Maloney ruled in favor of the school district, writing that “If schools can prohibit students from wearing apparel that contains profanity, schools can also prohibit students from wearing apparel that can reasonably be interpreted as profane.”
Maloney added that school officials could also ban clothes with messages like “F#%* Joe Biden” or apparel emblazoned with “homophones for profane words … [such as] ‘Somebody Went to HOOVER DAM And All I Got Was This DAM Shirt.’”
Last Tuesday, the federal appeals court in Cincinnati affirmed Judge Maloney’s ruling in a 2-1 decision. The majority opinion, joined in by Trump appointee John Nalbandian and Clinton appointee Karen Nelson Moore, said the hoodies saying “Let’s Go Brandon” could be baned based on “the vulgarity exception.”
“The Constitution doesn’t hamstring school administrators when they are trying to limit profanity and vulgarity in the classroom during school hours,” the majority said. “Again, students do not ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate’ [quoting the Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker decision]. But neither are school administrators powerless to prevent student speech that the administrators reasonably understand to be profane or vulgar.”
In his dissent, Judge Bush argued that the majority opinion erroneously applied the Fraser standard allowing schools to ban vulgar speech (the Fraser case is one where the Supreme Court upheld discipline of a student for giving a sexual innuendo-laced speech) instead of applying the more speech-protective standard for political protest set forth in the Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker decision.
“[T]he speech here — ‘Let’s Go Brandon!’ — is neither vulgar nor profane on its face,” Bush argued. “To the contrary, the phrase is purely political speech. It criticizes a political official — the type of expression that sits ‘at the core of what the First Amendment is designed to protect.’”
The students’ attorneys, Conor Fitzpatrick, criticized the court’s ruling, saying that “The majority held that no matter how careful teenagers are to express their political opinions in a non-profane, school-appropriate way, schools may censor them if their expression might cause someone to think about a swear word. America’s students are not so fragile, and the First Amendment is not so brittle.”
A spokesman for the plaintiffs said they are “considering their options.” “The next (possible) appeal would be to the Sixth Circuit en banc or the U.S. Supreme Court,” The College Fix says.
