Trump Judge Gives Nazi-Sympathizing Law Student High Marks For Rehashing Klan Legal Theory Calling For Minority Disenfranchisement And Murdering Immigrants

The core of modern conservative ideology isn’t that hard to understand. It has three axioms:

1) White is Right.
2) Violence toward members of outside groups is encouraged, actually — it reinforces social cohesion and feels good to boot!
3) The proper way to deal with the poor is to pass policies which hasten their deaths and blame the outcome on “the market deciding.”

This isn’t the definitive list — I personally believe that the second rule is just a corollary of rule one — but it will help you decode most Fox News segments, White House press releases, and a recent University of Florida Levin College of Law paper that scored top marks from Trump-nominated Judge John L. Badalamenti that is making headlines. From the New York Times:

In his capstone paper for the class, [Preston] 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.”
…
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.

Unflinching Originalism and high marks — could Mr. Damsky be the poster child for the “conservative ideals” Skadden pledged to incorporate in to its Fellows program? And before you hand wave associating his extremism with conservatism proper, gerrymandering to water down black votership and Texan immigrant murder buoys are squarely contemporary conservative policy; Damsky isn’t breaking much new ground here. In fact, the ground is so old that he appears to be plagiarizing Ku Klux Klan “scholarship” from the 1860s:

I think that the proper response to public affirmations of Nazi or Klan talking points is the one provided by the Man of Steel:

Alas, we’re far past the historical period of “Your politics put you on the same side of history as David Duke” having any real bite to it. Writing for the Volokh Conspiracy, Josh Blackman decided to skip past the paper’s White Genocide rhetoric (“’The People cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty,’ he wrote, adding that if the courts did not act to ensure a white country, the matter would be decided ‘not by the careful balance of Justitia’s scales, but by the gruesome slashing of her sword.'”) and instead spends the first paragraph of his piece praising how expertly the footnotes were Bluebooked. Why not mention how immaculately ironed the SS’s Hugo Boss suits were while we’re at it? Blackman’s ultimate criticism was that Damsky argued against the abolition of slavery and equal protection to vote in the wrong parts of his paper.

If you’re interested in an adult’s assessment of the paper, here’s Anthony Michael Kreis. His is the best we have to work with considering Judge Badalamenti failed to tell why he thought Dylan Roof’s manifesto in a law school sweater deserved an award:

Kreis’s move to focus on the actual players at hand and not the paper is the right one. The New York Times article mentions that Damsky wants to go on to be a prosecutor. He shouldn’t be trusted to prosecute traffic violations — they disproportionately target minorities enough as it is. He snagged an internship that was eventually rescinded by Brian Kramer, thank God. PrawfsBlawg floats the question of if Damsky should be able to pass character and fitness after submitting a manifesto like this: they point out that a neo-Nazi was denied admission to the Illinois bar in the 1990s.

Grading aside, let’s be thankful that this white supremacist was foolish enough to voice his thoughts out loud. So often people who think like this have enough tact to keep their racism under wraps until they join the force or get sat somewhere as a judge. Let’s hope more of them come forward to get rooted out quickly.

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

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s .  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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