First Amendment

Jacob Sullum | 10.27.2025 4:10 PM

By contemporary political standards, the phrase "Let's Go Brandon," a mocking reference to former President Joe Biden, is pretty mild. But officials at Tri County Middle School in Howard City, Michigan, deemed it intolerable when it was displayed on sweatshirts that two students—a sixth-grader and his brother, an eighth-grader—had received as Christmas gifts from their mother. By requiring the boys to remove their sweatshirts, their mother argued in a 2023 lawsuit, the school violated their First Amendment rights.

Not so, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled this month in B.A. v. Tri County Schools, "because the school reasonably understood the slogan 'Let's Go Brandon' to be vulgar." Judge John K. Bush vigorously disagreed. "If we allow schools the power to censor political speech by recharacterizing it as vulgarity," he warns in his dissent, "we risk turning disagreement with political speech into justification for its censorship—something the First Amendment flatly forbids."

The argument between Bush and his colleagues hinges largely on the question of how much weight should be assigned to the origin of the message on the boys' sweatshirts. When NBC Sports reporter Kelli Stavast interviewed race car driver Brandon Brown after he won a NASCAR contest at Alabama's Talladega Superspeedway on October 2, 2021, the crowd could be heard chanting "Fuck Joe Biden." Stavast either misheard or misrepresented those words, saying, "You can hear the chants from the crowd, 'Let's Go Brandon.'"

That episode gave birth to the political meme that offended officials at Tri County Middle School. "From the beginning," Judge John Nalbandian notes in the 6th Circuit's majority opinion, "the expression had a wide range of meanings. Some saw it as merely a euphemism for what the crowd really said. Others used it as a shibboleth to express
antipathy towards the then-President and his policies. And still others used it to question what they perceived as liberal bias in the media—based on the theory that NBC had been trying to hide the anti-Biden sentiment on display at Talladega."

In defense of its sweatshirt censorship, the school district emphasized the first interpretation. Given its history, school officials said, "Let's Go........

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