Right-Wing Assault on Professor

I await Bari Weiss and Thomas Chatterton Williams and Pamela Paul expressing their outrage about this in approximately never.

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.

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.”

I most certainly expect more assaults on faculty by right wing extremists. It wouldn’t shock me if it happened to me someday, though the things I teach are less viscerally outrageous to fascists. But really, I’ve been attacked so many times by right wingers and had so many threats that I expect anything. I just keep my office phone permanently unhooked at this point.