Conservative Youth Group v. ASU: Competing Videos Escalate a Feud

An altercation between Charlie Kirk's conservative youth group Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and an English writing professor at Arizona State University (ASU) is just the latest in an ongoing feud that could culminate in charges of a hate crime and civil litigation.

While ASU declined to provide Newsweek with details about an ongoing investigation, it has made public a security video, which contains no audio, showing its professor David Boyles walking with a TPUSA reporter and cameraman.

At the 20-second mark, it appears that Boyles lunges toward the camera and the reporter, Kalen D'Almeida, reacts by shoving the professor, which results in Boyles falling to the ground.

While a spokesman for ASU told Newsweek that the video makes it "clear" who the aggressors were, Kirk used the same word when he released the audio and video from the reporter and cameraman.

Newsweek has embedded both videos in this story.

Turning Point's ASU Video

In TPUSA's video, the reporter asks Boyles: "How long have you fantasized about minors having sex with adults?"

"You can't run. It's best if you just talk to me about why you want to push sodomy onto young people."

"You would like to see a different America where little boys are sodomized by people like you, right?"

At the conclusion of that final question, the professor is seen presumably grabbing the camera, which quickly stops recording because, D'Almeida told Newsweek, the scuffle resulted in the power source being cut off.

The reporter's questions emanated from TPUSA's opinion that Boyles, who reportedly founded the Arizona chapter of "Drag Queen Story Hour," teaches inappropriate sexual content to children.

In fact, after the incident, Kirk posted on social media the allegation that Boyles publishes books about minors having sex with adults, and markets them on Amazon in the "coming of age" section.

Boyles is the author of Life is a Banquet, described by Amazon as a "coming-of-age" novel about a 17-year-old boy "suffocated by his conservative Arizona suburb and his parents' megachurch" who is tutored by an "unapologetically queer college student."

In an interview with Newsweek, D'Almeida said some of his questions were based on the explicit content of the novel, and he said that he and his cameraman left the scene because what happened was unprecedented and they needed to alert their superiors.

"I've interviewed rioters at protest scenes, and never has anyone become violent before," he said.

D'Almeida said he covers stories nationwide but lives in Arizona and for a few years has noticed that Drag Queen Story Hour was controversial, so he figured he'd research its local sponsor and attempt an interview.

"With digging, I discovered professor Boyles has spent much of his adult life advocating for the exposure of queer sex to young people," D'Almeida said. "When he didn't answer my first two questions, I asked more pointed ones, trying to elicit a response."

ASU's Response

In an October 14 letter to staff that ASU President Michael Crow wrote, he says the TPUSA reporter and cameraman "followed, harassed, pushed and injured" Boyles, and he calls the perpetrators "cowards" and "bullies in a high school" who fled the scene before police arrived.

"Let me assure all of you that ASU will do all that we can to end the bullying and intimidation of our faculty members by Turning Point USA and to reduce threats against the members of the ASU community which arise from such actions," Crow said in his letter.

Newsweek reached out to Boyles, but he did not respond. A TPUSA spokesman said his group is aware that ASU law enforcement, which did not respond to Newsweek, are exploring whether a hate crime has occurred, or, as one media outlet put it, "a prejudiced incident."

"That's framing we entirely deny. If anything, it's our cameraman who was assaulted, not the other way around," said TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet.

Kolvet said TPUSA is exploring civil litigation against the school, the professor and Crow, not only due to the physical altercation but also due to Crow's use of "defamatory language, calling us 'bullies' and 'cowards.' That's language unbecoming of a university president. He engaged in a drive-by shooting of the truth, and we're certainly exploring our legal standing."

An ASU spokesperson said Crow was unavailable for comment. Below is the security video that ASU has released.

Turning Point and ASU's Past Issues

But the bad blood between ASU and TPUSA predates the latest tussle. In April, Crow fired off a letter to the group asking that it remove ASU professors from its "Professor Watchlist," which purports to unmask "radical professors" who "discriminate against conservative students," and TPUSA ignored his request.

According to Crow, the Watchlist amounts to "dangerous practices that result in both physical and mental harm to ASU faculty members, which they then apparently exploit for fundraising, social media clicks and financial gain."

A spokesman for TPUSA says the group will soon be adding Crow to its Watchlist.

Crow said that the Watchlist has already caused antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ+ and misogynistic attacks on faculty, and in his April letter he included the opinion of Stand Together, formerly the Charles Koch Institute, where one of its experts said the Watchlist is "truly McCarthyism 2.0. It's a platform that exists to put the names and profiles of self-identified progressive professors out there and encourages conservative students to intimidate them."

Both TPUSA and ASU have been claiming that their right of free speech is under attack by the other side.

"Our reporter used his constitutionally-protected speech to ask a taxpayer-funded employee some simple questions," Kirk wrote on social media about D'Almeida's controversial interview of Boyles.

But in his October 14 letter, Crow writes that TPUSA's tactics are "anti-democratic" and "anti-free speech," and he notes that TPUSA has been allowed to host events at ASU.

"The same organization is ironically using intimidation, embarrassment and bullying to prevent others from speaking in ways with which it disagrees," Crow wrote.

But Kirk has sought to widen the scope of the discrepancy by publicly noting that ASU allegedly has a problem with conservatives beyond TPUSA. In his social media post addressing the altercation, he wrote of an investigation into ASU's "violations of free speech."

A TPUSA spokesman told Newsweek that the reference was to an event early this year that featured Kirk, radio host Dennis Prager and Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki.

The engagement was hosted by the T.W. Lewis Center at ASU's Barrett Honors College, and was objected to by dozens of faculty members who signed a letter calling Prager and Kirk "purveyors of hate."

Tom Lewis, the namesake donor of the center, objected to faculty members who sought unsuccessfully to quash the event, thus he pulled his funding and wrote that if he were a parent of a student at Barrett, he "would find a different college or university that cared more about education than left wing activism."

Ann Atkinson, who ran the center, claimed ASU was engaging in censorship and the incident led to her dismissal and the closing of the center.

All of this led to a Joint Legislative Ad Hoc Committee on Freedom of Expression at Arizona's Public Universities that was co-chaired by two Republican lawmakers, state Senator Anthony Kern and state Representative Quang Nguyen, who demanded an investigation.

An internal investigation conducted by ASU with the help of outside counsel led to a 75-page report that found accusations of censorship surrounding the event were "not supported by the facts."

Nevertheless, Prager has used the incident involving him, Kirk and ASU as fodder for his radio show and his column at Townhall.com, writing that it's understandable that professors and deans object to him and Kirk because "if students are exposed to one of us for just 90 minutes, we can undo four years of leftist indoctrination."

In September, Kirk and Prager returned to ASU in a presentation that filled a 350-seat hall, an event that Crow has used as proof that ASU does not engage in viewpoint discrimination.