In February 2022, two middle school students at Tri County Middle School in Sand Lake, Michigan walked into school wearing sweatshirts that read "Let's Go, Brandon." Assistant Principal Andrew Buikema and teacher Wendy Bradford ordered the boys to remove them. The school's dress code prohibits clothing with messages that are "lewd, indecent, vulgar, or profane."
The sweatshirts contained none of those things. The phrase exists precisely because it doesn't.
The boys' mother had bought the sweatshirts as Christmas gifts in 2021 — the same year an NBC Sports reporter, interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown after a race, told viewers the crowd was chanting "Let's go, Brandon" when they were very clearly chanting "Fuck Joe Biden." The reporter's creative interpretation became the joke. The joke became a rallying cry. The rallying cry became a sweatshirt. And the sweatshirt became a federal case.
D.A. v. Tri-County Area Schools has now reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — FIRE — filed a petition for certiorari on behalf of the students after both a district court in Western Michigan and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against them.
The Sixth Circuit's 2-1 decision is where this gets remarkable. Judges John Nalbandian and Karen Nelson Moore held that "Let's Go, Brandon" was close enough to a swear word to justify the ban under the Fraser exception — the legal standard that allows schools to restrict "vulgar" speech. The phrase contains no profanity. It references no profanity. It became famous specifically as an alternative to profanity. The court banned it anyway because, in the majority's reading, everyone knows what it really means.
Judge John Bush, dissenting, pointed out what should have been obvious. The phrase constitutes "purely political speech" criticizing a political official. It represents "core" First Amendment protection. As Bush noted, "not one of the 'seven words you can never say on television' appears in it."
Conor Fitzpatrick, FIRE's supervising senior attorney, framed the constitutional problem directly: "The First Amendment permits schools to censor nondisruptive political speech for 'lewdness' or 'vulgarity' only if it is 'plainly' so, not if any teacher could 'reasonably' view it that way." The distinction matters. Under the Sixth Circuit's standard, any political expression that a school administrator subjectively associates with something crude can be banned — not because of what it says, but because of what someone decides it implies.
The Patriot Post's Emmy Griffin flagged the deeper absurdity. The phrase was born because a reporter tried to gaslight the entire nation on live TV. The government is, in effect, arguing that a G-rated joke about media dishonesty is legally equivalent to the profanity it replaced.
First Amendment scholars from the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic filed an amicus brief on April 30, 2026, supporting the petition. The precedent they're worried about isn't hypothetical. If "close enough" becomes the legal standard for school speech restrictions, any political slogan a principal finds distasteful is one subjective interpretation away from a dress code violation.
Tinker v. Des Moines established in 1969 that students don't shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. Black armbands protesting Vietnam were protected speech. The question before the Supreme Court now is whether a phrase that contains zero profanity loses that protection because an administrator can guess what the speaker might have been thinking.
