If you have been curious about what the “viewpoint neutrality” celebrated by conservatives looks like in practice, look no further than the University of Florida Law School. That’s where one of Donald Trump’s first-term judicial appointees, U.S. District Judge John Badalamenti, rewarded an openly white nationalist and antisemitic student for writing an openly white nationalist paper arguing that the Constitution only applies to white people.
This all went down last fall when Badalamenti taught a course on originalism, or the belief that the Constitution should be interpreted based on the Founding Fathers’ “original”meaning. For his capstone paper, Preston Damsky wrote a racist screed, which you can read here if you feel up to it. This thing is not subtle, but Badalamenti still gave Damsky the “book award” when the semester ended, effectively naming him the best student in the class.
Damsky says that the Founding Fathers “unambiguously conceived of the United States as a white country.” He calls for banning all nonwhite people from immigrating to the United States, but shows what he thinks is great magnanimity by assuring us that “non-whites would still be able to visit the U.S., without becoming residents, because tourism is not immigration.” He thinks birthright citizenship should not apply to the children of noncitizens, and he believes there is an invasion at the border—and the military should be able to kill border crossers. Oh, and also, we should get rid of the 14th and 15th Amendments, just for good measure.
Here’s a taste of Damsky’s scintillating argument:
However, given that the United States was founded as a race-based nation state for the preservation and betterment of White Americans (the People), as clearly laid out in the Preamble and revealed by our history, it is difficult to see how these amendments (or at least the way they have been interpreted in the post-World War II era) do not amount to unconstitutional, revolutionary usurpations by the constituted government power.
Now, high-profile originalists know better than to be this openly racist. But if you review Damsky’s policy positions, they aren’t really all that far afield from the rhetoric being spewed by conservative judges and Trump minions.
As Madiba Dennie noted at Balls and Strikes, Trump appointee Judge James Ho thinks immigrants are an invasion and that we should rethink birthright citizenship. Not long before ascending to the bench, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the 14th Amendment was “possibly illegitimate.” And of course, Damsky’s rhetoric about immigrants and invasions and militarizing the border matches the hateful screeds coming out of the Trump administration right now.
Perhaps that’s why Badalamenti wasn’t troubled by the paper. If you’re already fully immersed in the ongoing conservative project to roll back rights for everyone but white people, maybe this doesn’t even register. Multiple first-term Trump appointees, for example, refused to say that Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case, was rightly decided.
After The New York Times broke the story about Damsky, the interim dean of the law school issued a statement that trotted out the standard conservative tropes about how upholding academic freedom and the First Amendment means protecting every student’s right to spew white nationalist drivel. Sure, maybe—but that doesn’t mean a sitting federal judge should reward it as the best paper ever. The statement also takes pains to explain that Badalamenti didn’t know Damsky was an open white nationalist and just graded the paper on its merits, and also, of course, these are not Badalamenti’s views.
It’s inconceivable that the very best paper in the class was one that literally calls for the Supreme Court to just dispose of the Reconstruction Amendments. That’s not astute reasoning or a complex legal concept; it’s just a racist popping off about how he wishes Black people never attained rights.
But the kudos Damsky received along with a “neutral” defense from the law school’s interim dean apparently emboldened him enough to open an account on the social media platform X and start posting overtly racist and antisemitic statements, alarming the students around him.
Tucked in at the end of the dean’s latest statement is also this little tidbit:
We have protected academic freedom and the student’s First Amendment rights while also prioritizing the safety and security of our community. As soon as the student’s conduct became threatening and substantially disruptive, in collaboration with UFPD and UF administration, the student was barred from campus. We heightened security across the college. It is important to note that the escalation in the student’s conduct that led to his trespass happened three months after the book award had been announced in January.
So a white nationalist and open antisemite was allowed to be so aggressive that he was eventually barred from campus, but not before he made plenty of antisemitic posts on social media, including saying that Jewish people were the “common enemy of humanity.”
Surely the Trump administration will be all over this, threatening to pull funding from Florida as it has tried with Ivy League universities Harvard and Columbia, right?
Related | Harvard pushed back—now Trump’s ramping up his war on higher education
In case you’re wondering what type of speech the University of Florida law school does find problematic and worthy of censorship, look no further than Carliss Chatman, a visiting professor. Chatman proposed a class called “Race, Entrepreneurship, and Inequality,” which the school arbitrarily renamed as just “Entrepreneurship.”
Damsky and the law school want this to be a debate about free speech and the First Amendment, but no one is saying Damsky should be punished for the paper itself. Rather, people are pointing out that it is disturbing that a federal judge found this warping of originalism, one that demands allegiance to white supremacy and contends the courts should ignore the Constitution, to be the best paper in the class.
Conservatives can tell themselves that Badalamenti was simply rewarding Damsky for the rigor of his analysis, but we all know better.