Turning Point USA Brownshirts Shoved Gay College Instructor In Self Defense Of Their Knuckles From His Face
Turning Point USA Brownshirts Shoved Gay College Instructor In Self Defense Of Their Knuckles From His Face
On the other hand: a college admin standing up for his faculty!
Brownshirt goons from diaper enthusiast Charlie Kirk’s rightwing group “Turning Point USA” were trying to get a “gotcha” moment on camera when the ambush interview devolved into an assault on an Arizona State University writing instructor the alleged journalists had been harassing. The incident is being investigated as a hate crime.
ASU writing instructor David Boyles is on TPUSA’s Please Send Death Threats To This Academic Who Is Destroying America site for the crimes of co-founding Arizona’s branch of “Drag Queen Story Hour” and for writing that “Sex education is a topic I’ve been obsessed with for a while.” He has written about the need for more queer representation in sex ed, so obviously he needed to be harassed and accused of being a pedophile.
Boyles wrote on Facebook that he was leaving a university class he teaches on LGBTQ+ youth in pop culture and politics Wednesday when he was ambushed by a TPUSA guy recording him with a cell phone and a “reporter” doing what Boyles described as “‘citizen journalist’ cosplay,” a term we’ll have to remember to use ourselves.
We won’t embed the full video the TPUSA posted on Xitter; you can see it yourself if you want to. The “reporter” — identified by NBC News as a TPUSA “personality named Kalen D’Almeida” — asked if Boyles would answer some questions; Boyles replied “Nope” and tried repeatedly to walk away from the two, who bravely kept following him like jerks as D’Almeida peppered him with increasingly inflammatory, homophobic questions, asking when he “became obsessed with sex education,” which was at least something Boyles said, as though sex ed is dangerous and wrong, then, after Boyles refused a second time to engage, accelerating to gross hypotheticals like
“OK, so if I ask you how long you've been attracted to minors, or how long you've fantasized about minors having sex with adults and why you write about it in children's books, what are you going to tell me? Nothing? What’re you gonna do?”
Boyles probably also wouldn’t say when he’d stopped beating his wife. For the sake of accuracy, we also don’t think he has himself written any children’s books at all, although he has written about LGBTQ representation in books, so obviously that makes him a “groomer” just like me because I’ve written more than once about that gay penguin book.
The harassment continued; D’Almeida then told Boyles “you can’t run” and added, like a reasonable person, that he only seeks a dialogue: “It's best you just talk to me about why you want to push sodomy onto young people. That's the best thing to do is have a conversation.”
Yeah, why can’t people just calmly talk over simple accusations like that anymore? The asshole also wanted to know why Boyles thinks children should see drag performances “where they shake their genitals and their fake breasts.” He is only asking questions, you see.
The video then suddenly cuts to another scene where D’Almeida accuses Boyles: “You really, really hate Americans,” which we suppose is a reference to blog posts where Boyles calls far-right people who show up to harass Drag Queen Story Hour events “neo-Nazis” bent on violence, shame on him.
“You just are disgusted with Americans in this country. And it’s funny, because — you would like to see a different America exist where little boys are sodomized by people like you, right?”
At that point, Boyles reaches to put his hand in front of the cell phone camera and the video abruptly ends. Boyles wrote on Facebook,
“Knowing that they were filming in order to post this online and inspire even more harassment against me, I moved to block the camera. When I did so, the other one jumped me from behind, slamming me to the pavement and causing the injuries you see above. They then ran off like the cowardly pieces of shit that they are.”
And if you want some Rashomon on the Rio Salado, TPUSA claimed on Xitter that its “reporter” was merely asking Boyles “a few simple questions,” and that Boyles “assaulted, pushed, and clawed at our cameraman.”
In a description that sure sounds a lot like “he brazenly used his face to repeatedly bash into my knuckles,” the Xeet explains that its “reporter”
then attempted to remove Professor Boyles from our cameraman, which caused Mr. Boyles to fall and scrape his face on the ground.
Gosh how clumsy of him.
The Xeet also claims that the camera cut out because Boyles hit it so hard that it “resulted in a disconnected wire that caused the video to cut out,” so that’s convenient.
However, video from ASU security cameras shows D’Almeida shoving Boyles forcefully away from the camera dude, knocking him to the ground. He certainly didn’t simply lose his balance. Here’s a teevee news report showing parts of the interview as well as the long-distance security video; to make it safe for local news, it omits nearly all of the disgusting accusations in “question” form, including of course the one right before Boyles went for the camera.
ASU police spokesperson Adam Wolfe said the incident is being investigated as a “potential bias or prejudicially motivated incident.” A TPUSA flack says the camera person is planning to file a police report, because no one should take a swipe at a camera after being relentlessly goaded and accused of wanting to sodomize little boys, those were just simple questions I’m not touching you I’m not touching you, why are you getting upset pedo, are you too excited thinking about raping children huh?
In a letter posted to the university’s website Saturday, ASU President Michael Crow condemned the homophobic harassment and attack on of Boyles, writing,
“It is astounding to me that individuals from Turning Point USA would wait for an ASU instructor to come out of his class to follow him, harass him and ultimately shove him to the ground, bloodying his face. 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 said that he had asked TPUSA back in April to remove names of ASU faculty from its “Professor Watchlist,” noting that it has led to “antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ+ and misogynistic attacks,” but that the group had not responded. He also noted the irony of TPUSA trying to intimidate faculty members, even as TPUSA has itself held and been featured in campus events. But isn’t that what free speech is all about? Driving evil people out of their jobs?
And then all the assholes on Xitter complained that Boyles had swung first and should be fired for his disgusting advocacy of everything D’Almeida said Boyles is in favor of, and also did you see how fat he is and he was wearing a skirt, why is someone like that allowed to “teach,” and worse, why did the university back him up unless it too supports grooming children?
On Facebook, Boyles said that his injuries were minor, but that he was feeling “angry, violated, embarrassed, and despairing at the fact that we have come to normalize this kind of harassment and violence against anyone who tries to support LGBTQ+ youth,” reminding readers of previous terror campaigns against children's hospitals and libraries, and of the August murder of Lauri Carleton for having a Pride flag outside her business.
Boyles closes with a call to action:
“And the first thing we can do to stop it is to stop coddling these fucking terrorists. Call them what they are. If you have family members who support this shit and vote for politicians who use this rhetoric, cut them off. These people should be shunned from society. And if you don't understand that, I have nothing more to say to you.”
We can’t disagree with a word of that. And if Boyles is somehow prosecuted for lashing out at the camera after enduring all that abuse, we hope members of the jury are very aware of the principle of jury nullification, the end.
[NBC News / Arizona Republic / David Boyles on Facebook]
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Oh for fuckssake.
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Please review the rules, Item #2 We do not actually allow you to fantasize — as s user did just a half hour ago — about how great you would feel taking a "2x4 or a chunk of hardwood" to the "fucking melon" of a rightwing creep, because only by beating people's brains out with a "2x4 or a chunk of hardwood" can America become a decent place again.
Or fuck it, tell us all about your detailed fantasies about how satisfying it would be to feel the a "2x4 or a chunk of hardwood" connect, to feel their skull caving in, maybe how neat it would be if one eye went funny as they fell and the blood and bits of brain flowed from their skulls, because we are right, they are violent thugs, and that makes public calls for violence just fine.
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Dear TPUSA,
Stop being dicks.
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