chapotraphouse

Hmm... I wonder why.

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.

Gee, another tricky question.

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?

Normalization part #1. Emphasis mine.

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.” Ms. McAlister, in an email to the law school community, also invoked “institutional neutrality,” an increasingly popular policy among college administrators. It instructs schools not to take public positions on hot-button issues.

[...]

“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.”

Normalization part #2. Gee, why are such views getting normalized? It's not as if they appear in a matter-of-fact way in the NYT and they interviewed— Oh, wait.

Well beyond the classroom, bigoted and extremist views are on the rise and vying for mainstream acceptance, raising questions about whether principles of neutrality and free-speech rights are proper and adequate responses to the threats.

[...]

In an interview, Mr. Damsky said that he belonged to no organization or group, and that he did not pose a physical threat to anyone. He said he was being unfairly targeted for sharing his ideas, and blithely shrugged off the criticism. The disciplinary measures he faces could result in expulsion. He said he planned to fight them vigorously. “You know,” he said, “I’m not, like, a psychopathic ax murderer.”

Mr. Damsky said his ideas were well formed before he started law school, shaped by reading authors like Sam Francis, a white nationalist, and Richard Lynn, who argued for white racial superiority and eugenics. He grew up around Los Angeles and studied history at the University of California, Santa Barbara; he wanted to become a prosecutor, he said, after watching progressive-minded California prosecutors adopt policies that he believed were soft on crime.

Better late than never?

At the University of Florida, the story of the book award took a dramatic turn soon after Ms. McAlister defended the decision to honor Mr. Damsky with it. It was then, in February, that Mr. Damsky opened an account on X and began posting racist and antisemitic messages. After he wrote in late March that Jews must be “abolished by any means necessary,” the university suspended him, barred him from campus and stepped up police patrols around the law school.

He is now challenging the punishment, which could result in his expulsion.

It's nifty how the NYT put this stuff at the end of the article instead of at the beginning.

Mr. Damsky’s argument that at least some of the framers meant for the Constitution to apply only to white people is by no means a new one. Evan D. Bernick, an associate law professor at Northern Illinois University, notes that the argument can be found in the Ku Klux Klan’s founding organizational documents from the late 1860s.

[...]

While Mr. Damsky’s papers were written in a formal style consistent with legal scholarship, his social media posts have been blunt, crass and ugly. A critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, he argued in one post that President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were “controlled by Jews,” whom he called “the common enemy of humanity.” In posts about Guatemalan illegal immigrants, he said that “invaders” should be “done away with by any means necessary.”

He lamented the “self-flagellatory mind-set” of modern-day Germans, noting their failure to revere Hitler.

---

I feel sick for reading that. I knew it would be bad. But not that bad.