Prior to his suspension, Preston Damsky won an award for his paper arguing against voting rights for nonwhites. The University of Florida has suspended one of its students over racist social media posts—but not before he won an award for a paper arguing the Constitution only protects non-whites. The college placed Preston Damsky, a 29-year-old law student, on leave earlier after he posted a series of racist messages to his X account that included suggesting Jewish people should be “abolished by any means necessary,” The New York Times reports. Before his suspension, Damsky had written a paper for one of his legal seminars in which he argued “We the People” in the Constitution should be understood as referring solely to white people, that voting rights ought to be revoked for non-whites, and that shoot-to-kill orders should be issued for “criminal infiltrators at the border.” John L. Badalamenti, a sitting federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump, taught the class for which Damsky wrote that report. Badalamenti granted Damsky a “book award,” reserved for the seminar’s top student. The Daily Beast has reached out to Badalamenti for comment. “[White people] cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty,” Damsky wrote in his paper, adding that allowing the U.S. to become “a nonwhite majority” country would amount to a “terrible crime.”
via daily beast: Trump Judge Gave Jew-Hating Neo-Nazi Coveted Academic Prize
siehe auch: A White Nationalist Wrote a Law School Paper Promoting Racist Views. It Won Him an Award. The University of Florida student won an academic honor after he argued in a paper that the Constitution applies only to white people. From there, the situation spiraled. Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. 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 Trump-nominated judge who taught the class, John L. Badalamenti, declined to comment for this article, and does not appear to have publicly discussed why he chose Mr. Damsky for the award. That left some students and faculty members at the law school, considered Florida’s most prestigious, to wonder, and to worry: What merit could the judge have seen in it? The granting of the award set off months of turmoil on the law school campus. Its interim dean, Merritt McAlister, defended the decision earlier this year, citing Mr. Damsky’s free speech rights and arguing that professors must not engage in “viewpoint discrimination.”
