Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals lost its mind — as usual in the United States, in a tyranny-favoring direction

© 2025 Peter Free

 

17 October 2025

 

 

In the business of banning political speech now?

 

According to an abbreviated panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, "Let's go Brandon" is a vulgar expression. And wearing those words on a shirt can be banned in K-12 schools:

 

 

This case is about the vulgarity exception. And specifically, how a school may regulate political speech without vulgar words that the school nonetheless reasonably understands as having a vulgar message.

 

To answer that, we must resolve two preliminary questions. The first is linguistic, asking whether a phrase that lacks explicitly profane words might still have a vulgar meaning. The second is doctrinal, asking whether a school administrator may prohibit student political speech that has a vulgar message.

 

The district court answered yes to both and so held that the plaintiffs hadn’t suffered any constitutional deprivation because the school administrators’ actions comported with the First Amendment. For the reasons given below, we agree.

 

The Constitution doesn’t hamstring school administrators when they are trying to limit profanity and vulgarity in the classroom during school hours.

 

[E]uphemism is not the same as the explicitly vulgar or profane word it replaces. “Heck” is not literally the same word as “Hell.” But the word’s communicative content is the same even if the speaker takes some steps to obscure the offensive word.

 

[F]ederal courts should view a school administrator’s reasonable and good-faith determinations of what is vulgar with some deference.

 

How can a school create an environment conducive to learning if it is compelled to tolerate “lewd, indecent, or offensive speech and conduct” at the whim of its students? Fraser, 478 U.S. at 683.

 

And a key function of schools is teaching students values such as civility, which are “essential to a democratic society.” Id. at 681. The essence of this holding doesn’t change just because the vulgar speech also has a political message.

 

Fraser requires our conclusion that a school may prohibit students from wearing a slogan reasonably understood as profane or vulgar. In the schoolhouse, vulgarity trumps politics.

 

B.A. v. Tri County Area Schools, No. 24-1769, slip opinion (Sixth Cir. Oct 14, 2025) (at pages 7-18)

 

 

Given such a lunatically convoluted . . .

 

. . . anti-First Amendment decision, dissenting judge John K. Bush fired back.

 

His key argument being that the two majority judges had focused on the wrong precedential case and, thereby, missed the most essential First Amendment issue:

 

 

Under Tinker, student political speech may not be restricted in school unless the speech “materially and substantially interfere[s] with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school” or might “reasonably have led school authorities to forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities.”

 

The majority essentially gives school administrators boundless discretion—akin to “I know it when I see it,” Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 197 (1964) (Stewart, J., concurring)—to redefine facially non-vulgar speech as vulgarity in order to ban it.

 

If we allow schools the power to censor political speech by recharacterizing it as vulgarity, we risk turning disagreement with political speech into justification for its censorship—something the First Amendment flatly forbids.

 

“Let’s Go Brandon!” is quintessentially political. Whatever else it may be, it is not a slogan devoid of political meaning or rooted in values hostile to education. Unlike Boroff, the record here contains no evidence that the sweatshirt’s message promotes drug use, violence, or any other category of speech the Court has held to be categorically regulable in schools.

 

The absence of plainly lewd or vulgar language, plus the political valence, takes the case outside the scope of Fraser and thereby makes Tinker the proper analytical framework.

 

Even if the student’s speech in Fraser could be construed as political, we have never interpreted Fraser so broadly to encompass euphemistic speech that might offend.

 

[F]ederal judges still bear a responsibility—to ensure that those “state and local officials” do not trample the free speech rights of students while accomplishing their educational mission.

 

B.A. v. Tri County Area Schools, No. 24-1769, slip opinion (Sixth Cir. Oct 14, 2025) (at pages 20-40)

 

 

The moral? — Exhibiting foresight . . .

 

. . . as to appellate court decisions' downstream Constitution-enforcing (or not) effects, is a mark of judicial intelligence.

 

The two judge majority decision from this Sixth Circuit panel demonstrates none.

 

Evidently the two majority judges think that interpreting the First Amendment's protections can be left to the many tyranny-creating connivers, who are sprinkled throughout the United States' absurdly many accumulating layers of societal bureaucratic and corporatist control.

 

Recall, in this, that appellate precedents have the way of expanding themselves into new areas of dubious reasoning. Logic that is supposedly confined to K-12 schools can, foreseeably, eventually migrate itself into other — purportedly 'similar' — situations and constructs.

 

To my mind, this Sixth Circuit case exhibits premonitory hints of the same draconian flavor that the US Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) did.

 

That was the holding in which the Supreme Court's aggressively corporatist-favoring stupidity trashed the concept of We the People's primacy in Constitutional affairs.

 

Now, the Sixth Circuit is — via its two majority judges —  obtusely laying similarly impactful groundwork in yet another anti-Liberty direction.