A White Nationalist Wrote a Law School Paper Promoting Racist Views. It Won Him an Award.

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.”

You’ve always been a little weird, but WTF are you talking about? If you’re trying to make a point, then try to make one. Cut the nonsense with the dumb questions.

Nwrep gets what I am getting at, and I'm surprised you don't.

I'm responding to your message # 8.

"The Constitution includes a mechanism to amend it, and that process was used correctly to make amendments and now the document includes more than just whites."

Which amendments were the ones that made the document include more than just whites?

Well it was the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. How did we get those amendments?

We parked armies in the Southern states, kicked out their existing legislatures, denied all their citizens the right to vote, only allowed the army and carpetbaggers to vote, elected a new fake legislature, which was just a puppet of the Washington DC government, and then this fake legislature "ratified", the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, completely against the will of the actual citizens of those states.

We broke constitutional law to create these amendments.

Now these amendments may very well have been well intentioned, but the method to "ratify" these amendments was completely against the constitutional amendment process.

These amendments were passed *AGAINST* the consent of the governed. That's not how the amendment process is supposed to work. That is how a dictator process works.

Now doubtlessly had the government followed constitutional law, none of those amendments would have passed.

I'm not speaking to the worthiness of the amendments, but any honest person who has studied this period of history would be aware that there is no way in hell the Southern states would have ratified these amendments without puppet governments speaking for them.

Without the Southern state ratifications, none of those amendments could have passed.

So you consider the question "dumb"? I wanted to get you committed to an honest amendment process before I pointed out to you that the process I outlined above is *HOW* we got those three amendments.

Now Nwrep has already indicated he knew where I was going with this, and he said it was just fine using the army to force states to "ratify" amendments under certain circumstances.

Well this is such an outrageous statement I knew he had to have figured out what I meant, and he just ignores how great of a constitutional violation it is to use the army to "ratify" an amendment.

So there it is. You are free to agree with him, or you are free to agree with me. I suspect you will go the "special case" route and agree with him, but I put it out there so that you and others can understand how I view a system that uses the army to suppress the will of the people in their own states.

They lost the war.

Does that change the constitutional process? The whole war was contingent on *THE SOUTH* not adhering to Constitutional law, (A claim which I reject, by the way) So the people forcing constitutional law down their throats don't have to obey it themselves?

How does that work?

Slavery was being abolished.

Not legally it wasn't. Lincoln spent the first year and a half of the war telling everyone he had no authority or power to abolish slavery. Well he was right about that.

To be admitted into the Union, they needed to adopt the law of the land.

I'm going to point out a dichotomy here that apparently some people can't see or comprehend.

Lincoln's authority to raise armies to subdue the South were contingent on the theory that they could not leave the Union. Lincoln's position was that they were states in "rebellion" and therefore subject to the "Insurrection" clause of the constitution.

This legal authority evaporates if they are regarded as an actual separate nation. Constitutional law doesn't apply to other nations, it only applies to states that are still part of the United States.

The Dichotomy here is that in order to beat them, Lincoln had to maintain they never left the Union, nor were they ever able to leave the Union.

Well if his claim is true, you have no basis whereby you can legally deny them their constitutional rights. They would still be subject to "due process" (fifth amendment) and the prohibition against excessive fines. (eight amendment.)

Determining that everyone in a state was "guilty" without proving it, is a violation of constitutional law. You can't just declare everyone "guilty." You have to have trials. There were many people in the South who were against secession, and who refused to support the secessionist government, yet they were treated just the same as those who fought against the Union.

To be admitted into the Union, they needed to adopt the law of the land.

Abolishing slavery was *NOT* the law of the land. It was a proposed law that never would have passed in a fair and uncontrolled referendum of the states.

It could not have passed with a normal process. There were 16 slave states in the Union that would not have voted for it, and it would have taken an additional 48 "free" states to pass it against the will of those 16.

In other words, it was legally impossible to abolish slavery through constitutional amendment.

If you do things legally. If you just pretend a state has passed an amendment, it isn't really legal, is it? It's despotism masquerading as "Democracy."

I would comment on your previous hypothetical if you just told me the war Massachusetts lost which required the victorious side's Generals to administer the State transitioning peacefully into the federal government and their laws.

Where does it say in the law that losing a war abolishes all your rights under the constitution?

And for what it's worth, Massachusetts asserted a right to secede long before the South started talking about it.

During the Hartford convention of 1814, both Massachusetts and Connecticut threatened to secede from the Union, and rejoin England. They didn't do it, but they certainly threatened to do it.

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