While I strongly disagree with Thomas's decision, I disagree on the basis of several of the issues that he himself points out as unaddressed by the majority. S

While I strongly disagree with Thomas's decision, I disagree on the basis of several of the issues that he himself points out as unaddressed by the majority. Specifically, the widespread compulsory nature of schooling today vs in the 19th century, which Alito's concurring opinion outlines, as well as the limited-scope of snapchat "stories"; it is not the student's fault that speech intended to be transitory and limited in distribution was screenshotted and amplified. This case was much more like speech at a casual in-person meet-up outside of school than Thomas wants to admit. Furthermore, the nature of public schools (and even most private schools) today is far less serious than schools of the 19th century or before. Even if it weren't for the issue of compulsory schooling, schools have abdicated most of their traditional responsibility for moral instruction of students, and the SCOTUS is an inappropriate authority to try to undo that. If you read the last paragraph of Thomas's dissent, it's clear he's more troubled with the laziness of the majority opinion than he is by the specific result. It reads like he wanted to really dig into the issues Alito raised in a concurring opinion, but didn't feel like he should because only Alito and Gorsuch concurred with that one, and debating those issues at length would be like bikeshedding. Maybe they were on the cusp of getting him to sign on, but they ran out of time and there were unresolved differences that led him to write the dissent. Thomas's dissent should get everyone to think carefully about the scope of rights to discipline children in loco parentis in various circumstances. If you send your children to a friend's house, or with their friends' parents on some trip or to some event, you're granting those parents virtually unlimited ordinary disciplinary authority (subject to criminal and family law limitations). Voluntarily sending your kids to school could be seen (and, as Thomas points out, was historically seen) to create much the same dynamic.