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.”
In an interview with the Times, he said it would “not be manifestly wrong” to describe himself as a Nazi. The Daily Beast has requested comment from the University of Florida, home to the largest number of Jewish undergraduate students of any college in the country.
Following his suspension, Damsky has apparently had a summer internship offer rescinded by local prosecutor Brian Kramer, who told the newspaper that “you could imagine, having someone in your office who espouses those kinds of beliefs would cause significant mistrust in the fairness of prosecutions.”
Damsky’s views had reportedly been a source of concern among fellow students and some faculty members before his suspension, prompting internal discussions about the limits of free speech on campus amid the rise in hate speech and political violence that has accompanied the second Trump administration.
Interim Dean Meritt McAlister responded to students concerns in an email, writing that as a public institution, the law school was bound by the First and Fourteenth amendments, and therefore the faculty could not “grade down a paper that is otherwise successful simply because [they] disagree with the ideas the paper advances.”
“The government—in this case, our public university—stays out of picking sides, so that, through the marketplace of ideas, you can debate and arrive at truth for yourself and for the community,” she added.
Meanwhile, one of Damsky’s former fellow students, who graduated in May, has apparently also had a job offer rescinded by a well-known law firm after telling them he’d criticized both Damsky and Judge Badalamenti in an interview with the Times.
The post Trump Judge Gave Jew-Hating Neo-Nazi Coveted Academic Prize appeared first on The Daily Beast.
