NY Times Targets College Student for Views

The NY Times spent years promoting The 1619 Project, where a Black woman argued that America was founded as a White supremacist nation.

Now the paper has a big story complaining that a White college student expressed similar ideas in a class paper:

Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. ...

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.

It says he also posted some online offensive comments, but did not link to any.

I searched, and here is his paper on the Constitution Article V and 14A. A law professor evaluates the latter paper, and says that it is pretty good.

Here is his most offensive tweet:

My position on Jews is simple: whatever Harvard professor Noel Ignatiev meant by his call to “abolish the White race by any means necessary” is what I think must be done with Jews. Jews must be abolished by any means necessary.

Now that the NY Times has targeted him, he has been suspended from the university.

It is absurd that the NY Times targets this student in this way. He is entitled to his opinions. We do not know if there are really his opinions, as class papers and tweets are often deliberately provocative to try to defend a peculiar view.

There are indeed two views about American founding. One says that it was a grand egalitarian experiment, open to all. The other says that it was only for White Christians. If we are going to let people express one view, we should also allow the other.

The paper does not rebut either side, but apparently the topic is so toxic that people get fired for any views on it.

One former student, who graduated in May, had his post-graduation job offer rescinded by a large law firm when he told them he had spoken to The New York Times for this article, criticizing Mr. Damsky’s paper and Judge Badalamenti for granting him the award. The student asked not to be identified for fear of jeopardizing other job offers.

Before his suspension, Mr. Damsky had been offered a summer internship in the local prosecutor’s office. But in early April, the prosecutor, Brian Kramer, the state attorney for the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida, rescinded the offer.

This is pretty crazy. Lawyers are trained to argue views that are not necessarily their own, in order to defend a client. We are not supposed to care about the personal views of a lawyer. Only that he advocates in behalf of the client.