Florida Student Awarded For Racist Paper About Constitution

If someone were to say to you, “So, a judge nominated by President Donald Trump was once a law school professor in Florida, and while he was a professor, he granted an award to a white supremacist student in his class for writing a paper arguing in favor of white nationalism,” you would probably say there’s not a single word in that sentence that isn’t perfectly believable.

Well, you would be right, and no, this is not a hypothetical scenario. This exact thing happened last year.

Meet Preston Damsky, a law student at the University of Florida.

Recently, Damsky was suspended from the university after he wrote on social media that Jewish people must be “abolished by any means necessary.” But the suspension of the bigoted college student who, for some reason, thinks people can be “abolished” didn’t come until after that student had written a paper arguing that the U.S. Constitution should only be applied to white people and received the class’s highest award for it.

From the New York Times:

Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.

In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People” in the Constitution’s preamble to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.”

Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”

At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades.

The Times noted that the Trump-nominated judge, John L. Badalamenti, declined to comment on granting Damsky the award and doesn’t appear to have ever spoken about it publicly.

Who has addressed the issue (by not really addressing the issue) is Merritt McAlister, the University of Florida’s law school’s interim dean. Damsky receiving the “book award” resulted in months of controversy and turmoil on the law school’s campus as students and faculty members were horrified that a neo-Nazi had been deemed award-worthy for writing a paper that would have been well-received at a Ku Klux Klan rally rather than in a law school classroom. (And before anyone accuses me of casting aspersions on Damsky by calling him a neo-Nazi, according to the Times, he once said in an interview that referring to him as a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong.”) This compelled McAlister to speak on the matter at a town hall meeting with students and faculty in April, according to The Independent Florida Alligator.

“The college isn’t going to express a viewpoint on any particular student speech,” she said. “Our job as a community is to have dialogue and discussion and debate on these issues, and let the marketplace of ideas drown out a particularly odious idea.”

Except the college did express a viewpoint on Damsky’s speech. He was given a prestigious award for it. The same college, then, suspended him for posting hate speech about Jewish people, indicating that, once again, it expressed a viewpoint on it.

So, why the change of heart?

Here’s the thing: When it comes down to it, Damsky only wrote what much of MAGA America believes but (normally) won’t say explicitly. For example, there’s no denying that Trump’s agenda to deport Black and Latino migrants in massive numbers is shirking due process. So, since they can’t deny it, white conservatives in the media, across social media and in Congress are moving the goalpost to argue that Constitutional rights shouldn’t be applied to non-citizens. (I’ll believe they don’t just mean white people when white conservatives stop adhering to the Great Replacement Theory and start objecting to white Afrikaners being given a free pass to migrate to the U.S. under the guise of escaping a fictional “white genocide” in South Africa.)

On the other hand, Trump has been claiming, without evidence, that antisemitism is rampant on American college campuses, and he’s been using that factless narrative to justify denying federal funding to schools that engage in what he has called “illegal protests,” which doesn’t seem to meerly apply to protests where violence happened, but any protest promoting a message he and his ilk doen’t agree with.

It’s almost as if the University of Florida was fine as long as Damsky was only talking about denying rights to Black Americans, Native Americans, Black and brown migrants and all other people of color, but the second he went full Kanye on Jewish people, it had to draw the line before the MAGA-fied White House drew it for them.

So, are we great again yet?

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