‘Let’s Go Brandon’ sweatshirt ban won’t get Supreme Court airing

The Supreme Court declined Monday to review a Michigan middle school's ban on 'Let's Go Brandon' sweatshirts, leaving in place lower court rulings that the phrase counts as vulgar speech under the 1986 Fraser precedent, not protected political speech under Tinker. The phrase is a widely understood coded stand-in for an obscenity aimed at former President Biden.

The school's brief to the Court leaned hard into argument by vulgar euphemism, listing a long parade of 'sanitized' sexual slang to argue that letting coded profanity slide would turn, in its words, 'nurseries of democracy into nurseries of debauchery.' The students, identified only as D.A. and X.A., had argued the ban amounted to viewpoint discrimination dressed up as a decency rule.

With no noted dissents, the Court's silence lets two lower court rulings stand: the phrase was banned for what it means, not for which letters spell it.

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