Grown adult Nancy Turbak Berry can continue to wear her Mayday Health sweatshirt for now, but kids can’t wear the smirkingly vulgar “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts to school if the principal says no. So said the United States Supreme Court yesterday in its refusal to take up an appeal from some Michigan MAGA brats:
In the “Let’s Go Brandon” case, D.A. ex rel. B.A. v. Tri County Area Schools, the court had been asked to address the constitutionality of a school’s ban on clothing bearing the phrase, which is used as a substitute for an expletive against former President Joe Biden.
The dispute began in 2022, when two brothers wore the “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts, which they had received from their mother for Christmas, to Tri County Middle School in Howard City, Michigan, where they were in sixth and eighth grade. After school administrators required the boys to remove the sweatshirts, they filed a lawsuit against the school district, arguing that it violated their First Amendment rights when it barred them from wearing the sweatshirts.
A federal district court threw out the brothers’ claims, and a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld that ruling. Writing for the majority, Judge John Nalbandian explained that, as a general rule, courts should give “some deference” to a school district’s decisions about what student speech is vulgar. “And here the uncontroverted origin of the slogan shows a plainly vulgar meaning,” Nalbandian stated. That vulgar meaning, Nalbandian continued, “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.”
The brothers came to the Supreme Court in March, asking the justices to take up their case. They argued that the lower court’s decision “poses a stark threat to the First Amendment rights of millions of public school students. It licenses individual teachers and administrators to banish nondisruptive political speech containing sanitized expressions if it clashes with their personal notion of ‘vulgarity.’”
…The school district countered that although the students characterize “public schools as ‘nurseries of democracy,’” their “approach would transform those nurseries of democracy into nurseries of debauchery.”
…By denying review, the Supreme Court left the 6th Circuit’s ruling in favor of the school district in place [Kelsey Dallas and Amy Howe, “Court Declines to Hear Cases on ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ Sweatshirts, Felons’ Second Amendment Rights, COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates, and Other Notable Issues,” SCOTUSblog, 2026.10.05].
Kids may still wear clothing and pins expressing their honest opinions about political matters. But teachers and administrators can still put the kibosh on turning political discourse into coded childish cursing.