Making Ignorance Great Again

By Diane Roberts

If you’re wondering what happens when history is bowdlerized or suppressed, lies are enshrined, free enquiry stifled, empathy ridiculed, education crippled, and hatred valorized, take a look at Preston Damsky, racist, antisemite, and top law student at the University of Florida.

Damsky’s now notorious for receiving a “book award” as the best student in his “Originalism” seminar. Seems the professors were dazzled by his capstone essay arguing the Constitution’s “We the People” means white people.

Only white people.

Non-whites should have their voting rights protections removed. What he calls “criminal infiltrators at the border” should be shot on sight.

Amendments 13, 14, and 15, the ones abolishing slavery and enshrining citizenship, equal treatment under the law, and the right to vote are illegitimate.

According to Damsky, “The United States was founded as a race-based nation-state for the preservation and betterment of White Americans (the People), as clearly laid out in the Preamble and revealed by our history, it is difficult to see how these amendments (or at least the way they have been interpreted in the post-World War II era) do not amount to unconstitutional, revolutionary usurpations by the constituted government power.”

There’s a touch of truth in this: The 18th Century iteration of our Constitution was indeed written by white men for white men.

But much as he’d love for American society to look like it did in 1788, when the Federalist Papers were published, times have changed. We fought a bitter war over slavery, marched against segregation, demanded rights for the disenfranchised, and eventually legislated our way — slowly and partially — to a more equitable nation.

The post-Civil War amendments are just as valid, just as much a part of the Constitution of the United States, as the earlier ones.

For now, at least: it’s unclear whether this will continue to be the case.

At home in Florida

Most Americans once celebrated our heterogeneity, our pluralism, and our tendency to expand freedoms. We valued knowledge and tried to foster understanding; we welcomed the new.

Not so much these days, not here in Florida. Trump and DeSantis have made ignorance great again.

This state now has statutes forbidding teaching the truth about slavery and Jim Crow, threatening educators who discuss gender, sexuality, systemic racism, and other disfavored topics.

Universities are scrubbing their websites of words that might upset the governor and his goons: “women,” “Black,” “colonialism,” and “diversity” — even if it’s “biodiversity” — anything seen as threatening to white, male Christian hegemony.

No wonder Preston Damsky, who was raised in the alarmingly multicultural world of Southern California, feels at home in here in Florida.

Florida is also alarmingly multicultural, of course, but our governor — while not an avowed white supremacist — is nonetheless an anti-immigrant, anti-civil rights, Viktor Orban-wannabe whose definition of “American” leaves out an awful lot of people.

DeSantis’ Florida is big on book bans, removing from schools books with LGBTQ characters, books about civil rights, books questioning American exceptionalism, books that tell painful truths about the world.

Toni Morrison’s “Bluest Eye,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice,” Khaled Hosseini’s “Kite Runner,” Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” Judy Blume’s “Forever,” and Anne Frank’s “Diary” have all been challenged or deep-sixed by parents and school boards who want to suppress stories that might deepen and complicate students’ knowledge of the country they live in or expand their understanding of ways to be human.

In Escambia County, they’ve yanked the dictionary off the shelf.

Seems Merriam-Webster might harbor smut and subversion.

‘Institutional neutrality’

But nobody’s censoring Preston Damsky’s weird, warped take on who counts as a real American, and nobody is punishing him for being a white supremacist.

When asked why Damsky’s paper was not only acceptable but worthy of an award, the interim dean of UF’s law school cited “institutional neutrality” and said professors must not practice “viewpoint discrimination.”

This is actually as it should be: Contrary to right-wing talking points accusing the academy of “canceling” the insufficiently “woke,” universities are places where you can express unpopular, even vile, racist, exceptionally stupid opinions.

But “institutional neutrality” doesn’t seem to apply to all exceptionally stupid opinions — as Preston Damsky has now discovered.

Virulent racism is OK: The Trump regime is not yanking funding from universities for anti-Black discrimination.

Antisemitism, however, unleashes a firestorm.

The Trump-DeSantis axis has ginned up such hysteria over perceived antisemitism (which the rational among us can see is often principled support for the Palestinian people and horror at the murderous Netanyahu government), that anyone who criticizes Israel is treated like Heinrich Himmler, architect of the “Final Solution.”

Mohsen Madawi, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil and other student protesters detained for exercising their First Amendment rights are not Nazis. Preston Damsky, on the other hand … well, he has said calling him a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong.”

His social media posts call Jews “parasites” and declare they must be “abolished by any means necessary.”

In a neat triangulation of white nationalism, antisemitic paranoia, and (somewhat understandable) disdain for the whole U.S. government, one of Damsky’s X posts castigates Donald Trump for inviting rapper (and Florida native) Kodak Black to the White House.

This, Damsky said, serves to “normalize and glorify the mongrelized stupidity that is modern Jewish-produced ‘popular’ ‘culture.’”

 

‘Warrior culture’

You’d think the guy would notice Trump is not exactly devoid of his own antisemitism, accusing Jews of being money-grubbing and “disloyal” to America. In Iowa the other day, he invoked one of the oldest and nastiest Jewish stereotypes, calling bankers “shylocks.”

And surely Damsky would give the Trumpists credit for their own racist projects, restoring Confederate names to military facilities and starting the process to take Harriet Tubman’s name off a Navy ship.

Defense Secretary “Good Hair” Hegseth bleats about restoring a “warrior culture” to the military, obviously unaware that Harriet Tubman spied for the Union Army and led the 1863 Combahee Ferry Raid into Confederate territory.

Look it up, Pete. She was a warrior.

UF hasn’t expelled Damsky, but the university has made clear he’s not welcome on campus. If he trespasses, he could be charged with a second-degree misdemeanor.

It’s not the racism, it’s the antisemitism.

While Damsky shares many of the sentiments of Trump’s team of white nationalists, especially Stephen Miller, who wants to deport anybody with brown skin, Damsky despises Trump for being a tool of our old friend, the International Jewish Conspiracy.

Damsky’s X account is a crazy salad of the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend pro-Iranian screeds, demands for a Palestinian state (has he noticed that Persians and Arabs are not, according to his definition, white?), attacks on conservatives deemed insufficiently pro-Caucasian, and ranting about “Black criminality.”

He’s a Florida man, all right — an antebellum Florida man.

 

‘Illegitimate revolution’

His law school papers echo Confederate Ordinances of Secession: “The negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

At times he sounds like South Carolina’s Jim Crow Sen. Ben Tillman, who thundered in 1900 that Black people had no rights: “We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will.”

Census projections show the U.S. will be a majority minority nation in about 2045. Appalled at the thought, Damsky calls this “an illegitimate revolution” and says white folks “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”

The 14th and 15th Amendments must be repealed; non-whites, who cannot be citizens, should be given 10 years to leave the country; political violence on behalf of white hegemony is not only acceptable, it’s desirable.

Preston Damsky is not a cause, he’s a symptom, yet another white man terrified of losing the power he assumes is his God-given right.

He and the white nationalist Trump regime are unable to accept that the indigenous peoples our European ancestors displaced, killed, or locked up on reservations; the Africans kidnapped and forced into slavery to enrich the likes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision (and apparently one of Damsky’s heroes); and the immigrants from all over the world who risked everything to get here, are what make America great.

These scared people should get out more — and read more, say, W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Black Reconstruction” or Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” or Percival Everett’s “James” or Marie Arana’s “Latinoland.”

Education is the enemy of hatred.

Most of the time.

Nevertheless, those of us who teach must keep trying to blast the Preston Damskys out of their sad, cramped little worlds by showing them the many and wonderful ways to be an American.

Damsky’s probably enjoying all this attention. That’s fine. He will no doubt go on to become an intellectual star in the white supremacist world.

He may even get an invitation to dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

But he won’t get what he wants. America never was, and never will be, a “white man’s country.”

And thank God for that.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.