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, ābloodying his face,ā Crow wrote in a letter to faculty and staff.
āThis is the kind of outrageous conduct that you would expect to see from bullies in a high school cafeteria,ā 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 DāAlmeida, runs up behind Boyles and forcefully knocks him to the ground.
āYou canāt run,ā DāAlmeida told Boyles in a clip of the altercation posted the following day, according to NBC. āItās best if you just talk to me on why you want to push sodomy to young people.ā In a Facebook post sharing his condition, Boyles said his injuries were ārelatively minorā but that the incident left him feeling āangry, violated, embarrassed, and despairingā that society has come to ānormalize this kind of harassment and violence against anyone who tries to support LGBTQ+ youth.ā
Police are investigating the altercation as a āpotential bias or prejudicially motivated incident,ā reported KPNX-TV. āCowards that they are and so confident in the legality and appropriateness of their actions, the Turning Point USA āreporterā and ācameramanā then ran away from the scene before police arrived,ā Crow noted.
archive: https://archive.ph/5fE5N
Of course they ran away. They were all big and brave until they realized they might be held accountable
Itās just like the Bigly Manly Men who threw an insurrection were mostly in hiding until getting outed, sometimes YEARS later. When they show up in court, instead of being The Vanguard For Patriotic Freedom and other horseshit narratives, they were just ātouristsā there to āpeacefully protestā.