A Trump-appointed federal judge awarded a Neo-Nazi white supremacist law student, who supported the Iranian nuclear program.
By Rachel Avraham
According to the Combat Antisemitism Movement, an antisemitic law student was honored by the university with a prestigious academic award — sparking outrage from students, faculty, and the broader Jewish community. Preston Damsky, 29, received the “book award” for a paper he wrote for a class last fall, the Jerusalem Post reported.
In the paper, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for non-white citizens and orders to kill “criminal infiltrators at the border,” according to the New York Times. The award for the paper was given to Damsky by Federal Judge John L. Badalamenti, a Trump administration appointee who taught Damsky’s class, the Jerusalem Post added.
According to the Jerusalem Post, there is a growing tension within American academia as the Trump administration escalates its campaign against diversity, equality and inclusion policies, which have seen Holocaust remembrance pages stripped from government websites but allowed far-right sentiments to go unchecked.
Shortly after receiving the award, Preston Damsky launched a public account on X (formerly Twitter), where he posted a barrage of antisemitic, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi content, the Combat Antisemitism Movement noted. According to the report, in one post, he attempted to justify antisemitism as a natural response to Jews’ alleged “hostile and damaging” behavior toward non-Jews, accusing Jews of “bad faith, nepotistic scheming” and seeking “social dominance over their Gentile hosts.”
In another post, he stated: “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.”
According to the Combat Antisemitism Movement, “Damsky also openly praised Iran for launching missiles at Israel and expressed support for the Tehran regime’s attempts to develop nuclear weapons, asserting: “Iran… absolutely [has] the right — and duty — to acquire nuclear weapons.””
In a particularly chilling post, Damsky shared an official Israel Defense Forces map showing the locations of incoming Iranian missiles — and used it to mock Israeli civilians taking shelter, writing: “Please, don’t run.” He further declared: “I support Iran in their just fight against the Jewish gangster entity. The Jews are the genocidal aggressors… Iran deserves our country’s diplomatic and material support.”
In dozens of other posts Damsky made from February to April, he described Jewish people as “parasitizing the West,” described immigrants as “invaders” and advocated for a white ethnostate, according to the University of Florida student paper The Independent Florida Alligator.
Following mounting pressure and growing media scrutiny, the university suspended Damsky and issued a three-year trespass order, barring him from campus, the Combat Antisemitism Movement noted. However, administrators have not explained why the award was granted in the first place — or why disciplinary action only came after online calls for genocide, the Combat Antisemitism Movement stressed.
According to the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the University of Florida hosts the largest Jewish undergraduate population of any public university in the United States, with more than 6,500 Jewish students. In a statement, University of Florida Hillel condemned the university’s handling of the case: “There is no place at UF for this type of hateful rhetoric. We are grateful that the university responded by suspending the student, barring him from campus, increasing police presence around the law school, and initiating disciplinary proceedings aimed at expulsion.”
Photo from User:DouglasGreen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Florida#/media/File:Dsg_UF_Albert_A_Murphree_Statue_20050507.jpg
