A film crew affiliated with Turning Point USA allegedly pushed an ASU English professor to the ground while trying to confront him about a drag story hour group he co-founded.
The right-wing group Turning Point USA has found itself at the center of a hate crime investigation after two local members of the group allegedly assaulted a queer professor at Arizona State University on Wednesday.
Two members identified of the conservative group waited outside the classroom of David Boyles, an English professor at the college and co-founder of Drag Story Hour Arizona, according to a statement by ASU President Michael Crow. The pair then harassed and shoved him to the ground, “bloodying his face,” Crow wrote in a letter to faculty and staff.
“This is the kind of outrageous conduct that you would expect to see from bullies in a high school cafeteria,” wrote Crow. In security camera footage captured by the ASU Police Department, two men clad in all black clothing can be seen surrounding Boyles as he passes through a courtyard. As Boyles reaches his arm out toward their camera, one of the men, identified as Kalen D’Almeida, runs up behind Boyles and forcefully knocks him to the ground.
“You can’t run,” D’Almeida told Boyles in a clip of the altercation posted the following day, according to NBC. “It’s best if you just talk to me on why you want to push sodomy to young people.” In a Facebook post sharing his condition, Boyles said his injuries were “relatively minor” but that the incident left him feeling “angry, violated, embarrassed, and despairing” that society has come to “normalize this kind of harassment and violence against anyone who tries to support LGBTQ+ youth.”
Police are investigating the altercation as a “potential bias or prejudicially motivated incident,” reported KPNX-TV. “Cowards that they are and so confident in the legality and appropriateness of their actions, the Turning Point USA ‘reporter’ and ‘cameraman’ then ran away from the scene before police arrived,” Crow noted.
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The turn to violence is happening sooner than I expected.
This is your friendly reminder to everyone to go get armed and get training on how to use your weapon of choice properly. Situations like this are going to start to become commonplace. Don’t let yourself become a hate crime statistic.
Instead become a gun crime statistic.
So long as it’s one of the 2 million estimated self-defense uses per year, we’re golden
In my country, I’m not allowed to carry anything that could be used as an offensive weapon. That includes pepper spray, tasers, brass knuckles, sticks, knives, literally anything that cna be used as a weapon.
I’m about to move to a new city and one of the first things I’m going to do is sign up to an MMA gym. Fists aren’t much use against a weapon but at least I’ll have some means to defend myself against violence if it becomes unavoidable.
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This is a friendly reminder that this is an incident. The “turn to violence” is the entire human history, pretty much, and you today are safer than you’ve ever been before
Yes, this is godawful, and yes, it’s happening too much but it’s also not as bad as it was 20 years ago when this guy likely wouldn’t have been able to speak.
You start arming yourself and you (or someone like you) will use that weapon on an unarmed asshole that thinks it’s cool to insult you and then the next attack on a queer person will not be shoving but bullets.
Sowing fear and panic is NOT helping anyone
And here come the bootlickers 🤦🤦🤦
I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort to the millions of innocent LGBTQ+ people you’re throwing into a meat grinder because you care more about going to 7-11 and McDonald’s than you do about their lives.
And here come the “I don’t know how to read but I do know how to RHHEEEEE folk”
If it falls within your comprehension; I’m trying to say that arming yourself isn’t going to protect you and it will make everything much worse for everyone .
I’m also trying to say that, while this is a bad event, it’s important to remember that life is safer for all LGBT folk than it has ever been before. Had you loved 20 years back we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. Sowing fear and panic will get you just that; fear and panic, and then the bodies start piling up.
There is a lot to be done still to make things better. RHHEEEEE is not one of these things. Grow up.
In some ways, but not in others. The hard right around the world is ramping up attacks (both in the courts and the streets) on us. I don’t mean this as some sort of gotcha, but are you LGBT yourself? As it’s hard to understand the fear, pressure and threats we experience day to day if you’re not.
I am, and yes, it IS. Have you read any history yourself? As it’s hard to understand the reason and tranquillity if you haven’t.
Being anything LGBT was a surefire way to get beaten up, killed, raped or whatnot for most of the entirety of human history until really the past two decades and even then it’s only acceptable in a few countries.
Since I think it’s safe to assume you live in one of those countries, yes, being LGBT is safer than ever before, even with attacks and what not. Did you really believe that in the past we were all Kumbaya together?
And here comes the blatant and obnoxious projection, patronizing talk to disguise the fact that you have nothing substantive to say, and troll baiting.
You’re not gonna convince us of obvious lies. We are capable of defending ourselves especially when armed.
You’re not going to convince us to support the system right or wrong when we are literally going to die at the hands of right wingers, the cops and the rich.
You’re not going to break our consensus that this is bad and demonstrates the very real need for every LGBTQ+ person in the United States to arm themselves.
Lick that boot elsewhere. Forum slide elsewhere.
Dear god…
What part was blatant obnoxious projection? The party where I said that you’re safer now than 30 years ago? I’m sorry if facts are obnoxious to you, I can’t help it that reality is what it is.
Yeeaaahhh, no you’re not. I’ve see your types working on “self defense” and face palming aside, it’s a joke. Weapons would serve you only to harm yourself, don’t do it.
I’m not, and they are not. You are yelling bloody murder over what clearly is an isolated incident, something that would have been much, MUCH worse and more regular 39 years ago. I’m trying to explain to you that you’re not helping anyone and that your behavior is actually actively harming people, including yourself, but you’re the “I know better than facts” type, which not so coincidentally, is the same type of person that keeps yelling about the dangers of LGBT… Trying to convince either of you about how the real world works is just impossible.
Obviously I’m the enemy to you because I disagree with you and you’re not the type to listen (let alone respond) to reason but since you don’t have anything constructive to say, you’ll just girl insults and slogans at me.
Do whatever you gotta do man. Live in fear. Arm yourself. Kill some of your enemies and see how you make everything worse for everybody. Go be a dick.