The New York Times reports:

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.”

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.

But the question of how officials should respond to Mr. Damsky — who, in an interview, said that referring to him as a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong” — is not merely academic.

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.

X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, recently allowed millions of people to view Kanye West’s new song saluting Hitler when other platforms removed it. Vice President JD Vance criticized European governments’ efforts to ostracize far-right political parties, on the grounds that doing so violates principles of free speech.

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. [Continue reading…]