How Dare You Wear Such an Offensive Shirt to School — Cartoon teacher scolds student in MAGA shirt while praising student in Che Guevara shirt

How Dare You Wear Such an Offensive Shirt to School

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Published October 26, 2026

How Dare You Wear Such an Offensive Shirt to School started as a September 2017 political cartoon by Tom Stiglich sympathetic to a Georgia student scolded for wearing a MAGA shirt, but internet users flipped the sincere framing by editing Billy's Che Guevara shirt into increasingly absurd slogans. By July 2019, an Instagram edit swapping in "Two trucks having sex" drew more than 28,000 likes in a day6.

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Overview

The source panel shows a teacher yelling at a boy in a "Make America Great Again" shirt, "How dare you wear such an offensive shirt to school, why can't you be more like Billy?" while gesturing at a second kid whose shirt bears the face of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara3. Stiglich drew it as a straight-faced jab at liberal teachers, and conservative readers on r/The_Donald received it that way2.

The edits almost always leave the artwork and dialogue alone and only rewrite Billy's shirt. Swapping the Che portrait for "I'm gay," a stack of other memes, or a crude non sequitur turns the teacher's praise into the punchline, since the cartoon's logic falls apart the moment Billy's shirt is anything but a tidy left-wing icon34. The joke lives in that gap between the panel's earnest outrage and whatever absurd thing Billy is now endorsing.

Origin & Background

Platform
Editorial cartoon / Reddit / Tumblr (viral spread)
Creator
Tom Stiglich
Date
2017

On September 5, 2017, cartoonist Tom Stiglich published "Teacher Kicks Out Students for MAGA Shirt" in response to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution report that a River Ridge High School math teacher in Cherokee County, Georgia had told two students their MAGA shirts were not allowed in class1. Cherokee County Schools later said the teacher was wrong, that the shirts did not violate the dress code, and that she had inappropriately shared her personal opinion about the slogan during class1.

Stiglich's panel built on that story by imagining the same teacher praising a classmate in a Che Guevara shirt3. The sincere framing is what made the cartoon easy to flip: readers who found the setup overheated started treating Billy's shirt as a blank slot.

How It Spread

The cartoon spread as a sincere post before anyone edited it. On September 5, 2017, Redditor TheAmishTrump posted the Stiglich panel to r/The_Donald under the title "Liberal Logic: offensive shirt," where it drew more than 8,800 points at 93% upvoted and over 150 comments2.

Mockery arrived within weeks. Later that month, Tumblr user imgayjokes replaced Billy's Che portrait with the words "I'm gay," and the edit picked up more than 1,400 notes4. On November 17, 2017, Redditor elnachato posted a version to r/2juicy4bones in which both kids' shirts were covered in unrelated memes, drawing 250+ points at 98% upvoted5.

The format kept getting pulled out well after the news story faded. On July 10, 2019, Instagram account @salad.snake posted an edit in which Billy's shirt reads "Two trucks having sex," and the post drew more than 28,000 likes inside 24 hours6. Know Your Meme later catalogued the comic and its edits as a running template3.

Timeline

2017-09-03

Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a River Ridge High School teacher in Cherokee County, Georgia told students they could not wear MAGA shirts; the district later said she was wrong[1].

2017-09-05

Tom Stiglich publishes the cartoon "Teacher Kicks Out Students for MAGA Shirt" with the "How dare you wear such an offensive shirt to school" line[3].

2017-09-05

Redditor TheAmishTrump posts the cartoon to r/The_Donald, where it draws 8,800+ points[2].

2017-09

Tumblr user imgayjokes edits Billy's Che shirt to read "I'm gay," drawing 1,400+ notes[4].

2017-11-17

Redditor elnachato posts a version with both shirts covered in unrelated memes to r/2juicy4bones[5].

2019-07-10

Instagram account @salad.snake posts an edit reading "Two trucks having sex" that draws 28,000+ likes in 24 hours[6].

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