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.

link: https://newrepublic.com/post/176271/queer-arizona-state-university-professor-injured-right-wing-activists

archive: https://archive.ph/5fE5N

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah. It’s infuriating how mainstream media insists on using the same terms for right wing domestic terrorists and left wing people who care about social and political issues!

      “Stop union busting” and “stop forcing sodomy on children” are NOT equivalent statements and the fact that it even needs to be said is fucking dystopian!

      • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Both of those statements come from the left though. A statement from the right would be something like “just move the priest/cop to another town to avoid hurting their reputation”

        • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s best if you just talk to me on why you want to push sodomy to young people

          That’s iterally a quote from one of the right wing troglodytes who assaulted the professor, so I don’t know what you mean by “coming from the left”.

          Unless you’re pretending to be on the left in spite of believing the anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech of the fascists…

          • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I think we’re talking cross purposes. Only the left is against kiddy diddling. The right either accepts it (shell game with priests) or normalizes it (no age requirements for marriage)

            • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              My point was that only the far to extreme right consider it acceptable to lob that accusation at innocent people solely because they’re LGBTQ+…

              That being said… While it’s true that most child abusers are right wing, saying that most right wing people are fine with child abuse is going way too far.