Prints Donald the First

The thumbprint of Donald Trump is everywhere, even in places he does not directly influence. His vicious ethos smears everything.

Here are the top four paragraphs in a recent New York Times article:

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.

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This is, essentially, the way authoritarianism spreads to overtake a country. The evil guy at the top (it is always a guy, for reasons related to testicular poisoning) indirectly gives people the permission to be openly and unapologetically horrible.

Free speech is good. I believe in it. I think this asshole, the damn Damsky, had every right to write this crap, but I also think that no institution should get away with awarding it a prize, however well written it was.

For example, Hamlet’s great soliloquy contains this line, a syntactic mess: “To sleep, perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.”

It’s godawful, but it would be worse if it were made more interesting but become truly awful:

“… to have have shuffled off this mortal coil after killing a swarthy-skinned person, must give us pause.”

Anyway, that is my point for today.

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Questions and observations:

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