Two Turning Point USA (TPUSA) journalists have been charged with harassment and assault in an altercation involving an Arizona State University (ASU) professor.
Last month, reporters Kalen D’Almeida and Braden Ellis attempted to ask questions of ASU professor and Drag Queen Story Hour co-founder David Boyles. In response to questioning from D’Almeida and filming from Ellis, surveillance footage shows Boyles lunge and grab at Ellis before D’Almeida pushes Boyles away. Boyles falls from the shove.
D’Almeida questioned Boyles about his involvement in sexual education and drag shows for minors, his writings, and whether he harbors attractions to minors. Boyles refused to answer D’Almeida’s questions.
D’Almeida and Ellis each face a charge of harassment, a class one misdemeanor carrying a prison sentence of up to six months and fines up to $2,500 (A.R.S. §§ 13-2921, 13-707, and 13-802). D’Almeida also faces additional charges of assault (A.R.S. § 13-1203 (A)(1) and (B)) and disorderly conduct (A.R.S. § 13-2904) both class two misdemeanors carrying a prison sentence of up to four months and fines up to $750.
Immediately after the incident last month, ASU President Michael Crow sided with Boyles in a public statement. Crow likened the TPUSA journalists to “bullies.” Crow also claimed that D’Almeida and Ellis “ran away” from the scene before police arrived, but surveillance footage shows the pair, along with Boyles, walk together in the same direction off camera after the altercation.
In a Facebook post, Boyles called D’Almeida and Ellis “right-wing fascists” and “terrorists,” echoing Crow’s claim that the pair “ran off” after the incident. Boyles said that he only moved to block the camera before D’Almeida pushed him.
“And the first thing we can do to stop it is to stop coddling these f*****g terrorists,” said Boyles. “These people should be shunned from society.”
ASU police confirmed they’re investigating D’Almeida and Ellis to determine whether the altercation was motivated by bias or prejudice.
In a statement responding to the charges against D’Almeida and Ellis, TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet declared that neither man committed any wrongdoing.
“Kalen and his cameraman did absolutely nothing wrong,” said Kolvet. “We will vigorously defend them and look forward to taking this matter into a courtroom where the very clear video evidence documenting what actually happened will quickly prevail over ASU’s gaslighting and the media’s propaganda. Our team members will be vindicated.”
OFFICIAL STATEMENT REGARDING CHARGES BROUGHT AGAINST TPUSA JOURNALISTS FOLLOWING OCTOBER INCIDENT WHERE ASU PROFESSOR ATTACKED A TPUSA CAMERAMAN:
Kalen and his cameraman did absolutely nothing wrong. We will vigorously defend them and look forward to taking this matter into a… https://t.co/eg4DEteRl4
TPUSA CEO Charlie Kirk issued a statement of his own, in which he accused ASU of retaliation over their organization’s campaign to pull taxpayer funding from ASU.
“Our two @TPUSA journalists are expected to be charged and arrested for defending themselves against an aggressive weirdo professor at ASU who physically attacked them,” said Kirk. “ASU is retaliating against TPUSA because we’re rallying support to pull taxpayer $ from their institution.”
Unbelieveable:
Our two @TPUSA journalists are expected to be charged and arrested for defending themselves against an aggressive weirdo professor at ASU who physically attacked them.
ASU is retaliating against TPUSA because we're rallying support to pull taxpayer $ from their… pic.twitter.com/QoWuPZs0B2
Two Arizona State University (ASU) professors are demanding an end to free speech rhetoric, as it tends to align with right-wing political agendas and undermine experts.
Just over a week ago, professors Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell wrote an opinion piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Dear Administrators, Enough With the Free Speech Rhetoric!: It concedes too much with right-wing agendas.” The pair argued that a greater focus on freedom of speech, or intellectual diversity, would ultimately undermine the true purpose of higher education, which they claimed was imparting the minds of experts, or “academic expertise.”
“Our contention is that calls for greater freedom of speech on campuses, however well-intentioned, risk undermining colleges’ central purpose, namely, the production of expert knowledge and understanding, in the sense of disciplinarily warranted opinion,” said Amesbury and O’Donnell. “A diversity of opinion — ‘intellectual diversity’ — isn’t itself the goal; rather, it is of value only insofar as it serves the goal of producing knowledge. On most unanswered questions, there is, at least initially, a range of plausible opinions, but answering questions requires the vetting of opinions.”
Amesbury teaches and serves as the director for the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (SHPRS). He joined ASU in 2019. Prior to ASU, Amesbury chaired Theological Ethics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and chaired the Philosophy and Religion Department at Clemson University.
O’Donnell also teaches for the SHPRS, as well as the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Lincoln Center Applied Ethics, Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, and SST American Studies.
In their article, the professors wrote that academia is restrained by “intellectual responsibilities,” and that the social costs of unfettered free speech were too great to merit entertainment. They argued that academia has a fiduciary responsibility to the public and therefore must vet speech, dismissing the notion that the marketplace of ideas converges on truth.
“[C]olleges are under no obligation to balance warranted, credible, true opinions with unwarranted, discredited, false ones,” stated the professor. “Only by disavowing pretensions to be the public sphere can colleges perform their critical role in relation to it.”
Amesbury and O’Donnell then argued that free speech deprived faculty of academic freedom and deprived the public of the faculty’s “regime of expertise.” They lamented that experts “enjoy no special public esteem,” and that the scholarly expertise has come to be viewed as further opinion equivalent to a “flattened-out theory of knowledge.”
“When free speech drowns out expert speech, we all suffer,” said the pair. “‘Free speech’ is what we are left with when we recognize no experts.”
Ultimately, the pair said that free speech arguments weren’t about truth-seeking but a guise for the lucrative fulfillment of particular, unscholarly, and inexpert interests. As examples, Amesbury and O’Donnell cited the University of Tennessee’s Institute of American Civics, the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center, and the University of Texas at Austin’s Civitas Institute.
“[T]he institutions themselves are peopled by faculty who serve on each other’s boards, invite and re-invite each other to give talks, appeal to the same funders, and even publish in each other’s journals and book series,” stated the professors. “[A]lthough such efforts are frequently portrayed as making colleges democratically accountable to the wishes of the public and their elected representatives, the logic of intellectual diversity arguments is toward ever greater mistrust between colleges and the public they serve.”
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Despite its name and alleged purpose, Arizona State University’s (ASU) The Integrity Project (TIP) appears to fall short on achieving honesty and transparency.
AZ Free News discovered that TIP was formerly a nonprofit established in the first year of former Donald Trump’s administration with the primary purpose of undermining the former president. Yet today, TIP describes itself as an “apolitical” nonprofit aimed at combating misinformation, with its core values rooted in transparency, impartiality, and honesty.
“Our mission and our work are intended to be transparent to the public,” states TIP. “Malicious actors are undermining the stability of democracies, communities, families, and even friendships. We will fight back with the truth.”
Yet, TIP’s hidden past raises questions of transparency and intent for the ASU partner.
“The Integrity Project was created due to a frustration with the politicization of the truth. What was once the foundation that unified our democracy, the facts themselves had become the very thing that could collapse our society,” reads the TIP members and partners page. “All of our founders and members set aside their personal beliefs in order to serve something bigger than themselves. Misinformation has eroded the foundation of our democracy, with manipulated facts becoming the catalyst for mistrust and division that has our society on the road to ruin. The purpose of The Integrity Project is to restore the legitimacy of information, and nothing more.”
Initially, the nonprofit branded itself online as “Lead Not Greed” after September 2017, when its X (formerly Twitter) page launched. In the following months, it rebranded as the “Campaign for Accountability and Transparency,” and then “Make Integrity Great Again” (MIGA). Several websites were presented on the X profile at some points: “holddjtaccountable.org,” and then “makeintegritygreatagain.org.”
As of this publication, the MIGA url still redirects to TIP’s website.
In June 2018, MIGA filed a widely-reported complaint attempting to revoke the liquor license for the Trump International Hotel on the basis that Trump allegedly lacked good character. The District of Columbia Alcoholic Beverage Control Board dismissed the request several months later.
“Donald Trump needs to choose: he can either be the president, or he can be a businessman, but he can’t be both. Lead Not Greed is fighting back by finally hitting Trump where it hurts — in the pocketbook,” stated the organization.
The lawyer that filed suit on behalf of MIGA was Joshua Levy: partner at Levy Firestone, former counsel for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs as well as Sen. Chuck Schumer.
Around the middle of 2022, the MIGA website transitioned to TIP and existing social media slates were wiped clean. None of these changes were disclosed on TIP’s website or social media pages as of press time. In fact, prior posts by its past versions were wiped entirely.
MIGA was established by Jerome “Jerry” Hirsch, a self-identified Republican, founder and longtime chairman of the Lodestar Foundation in Phoenix. Hirsch’s foundation has projects including ASU’s Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation, a partnership between ASU and the Kellogg Foundation, as well as an active partner in TIP; the Collaboration Prize, a contest recognizing the best nonprofit collaborations in the nation; and the Nonprofit Collaboration Database, an online database of more than 1,000 nonprofit collaborations, maintained in partnership with The Foundation Center.
Hirsch was also one of the 2022 participants of the globalist Sedona Forum hosted by the McCain Institute.
Ten years ago, Hirsch was credited by the ASU Foundation as one of the principal “university founders” of the modern ASU, dubbed the “New American University.” Last December, Hirsch and ASU President Michael Crow were among those who signed onto the letter to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) petitioning for citizenship rights for illegal immigrants remaining in the U.S. under the protection of the DACA program.
Unlike his MIGA endeavor, it doesn’t appear that Hirsch has spawned a similar effort to counter President Joe Biden’s foreign business dealings.
The ability to use #misinformation and #disinformation without any scrutiny – even if the public may be harmed – appears to be an area Congressional leaders wish to defend as free speech with arguments centered in governmental overreach or weaponization.https://t.co/PhzxgBMbL1
— The Integrity Project (@MakeIntegrity) July 11, 2023
TIP’s current board of directors doesn’t include Hirsch. Current board members are:
Mi-Ai Parrish, overseer of Arizona PBS and Media Enterprise; former president and publisher of The Arizona Republic; a friend of Biden-appointed Ninth Circuit Court Judge Roopali Desai; former market president at USA Today;
Wellington “Duke” Reiter, special advisor to Crow with responsibilities in higher education, sustainable urbanism, and advancement of the New American University
Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, director of the Elections Research Center, and Lyons Family Chair in Electoral Politics;
Byron Sarhangian, attorney for Snell & Wilmer;
Craig Krumwiede, president and CEO of Harvard Investments, founding member of Social Venture Partners Arizona (tied to Hirsch’s Lodestar Foundation);
Joe Blackbourn, founder of Everest Holdings
Blackbourn recently took credit for founding TIP, but made no mention of its past as MIGA.
Despite MIGA’s newer presence online in 2018, with few followers and only two posts — as other users at the time pointed out — MIGA and its attempt to revoke Trump’s hotel liquor license gained the attention of other major leftist personalities such as Mindy Schwartz, Bill Prady, Jordan Uhl, Leah Greenburg, and Need to Impeach.
Although the website for MIGA said that their nonprofit was also named “Make Integrity Great Again,” the group used its former name, “Campaign for Accountability and Transparency,” as the primary identifier for all of its tax filings, dating back to the 2017 fiscal year.
MIGA’s first tax filing showed that it was created on Sept. 14, 2017. That was the day that Trump signed a resolution condemning white supremacy and hate groups following his controversial remarks on the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“You know, you have some pretty bad dudes on the other side also,” said Trump.
That first year, MIGA spent over $184,600 to create a website “to educate the public concerning the importance of addressing the character of public officials and candidates, and promote integrity as the basic tenet of American democracy.” It gave over $121,500 to a New York-based nonprofit, Purpose Campaigns (now Purpose Foundation), to undertake full operations and management of their campaign.
In 2018, MIGA spent over $153,200 on its website and over $358,000 on research for undisclosed “potential future programs” and challenges of qualifying as a nonprofit, among which it noted was the creation of the MIGA name. MIGA also spent a combined $309,000 on legal services from two Washington, D.C. law firms: Zuckerman Spader and Cunningham Levy Muse.
MIGA listed its two other officers as Lois Savage, secretary, and Sandra Horn-Goul, treasurer.
Savage and Hirsch have run the Lodestar Foundation since 1999; she was also the first executive director of a Lodestar spinoff, Social Venture Partners Arizona (of which TIP board member Krumwiede is a founder), and the initiator of the Arizona Grantmakers Forum. Savage served on former Gov. Janet Napolitano’s Interagency and Community Council on Homelessness.
Both Savage and Crow served on the 2009 Center for the Future of Arizona project “The Arizona We Want”: Crow on the steering committee, Savage as a critical reader.
Horn-Goul is the wife of the late Michael Goul, formerly ASU’s Department of Information Systems chairman and senior associate dean for faculty and research and professor of information systems.
TIP featured speakers this year have centered discussions on disinformation, misinformation about the 2022 election, media literacy and information quality, the spread of false beliefs through misinformation, and the anti-science nature of vaccine skepticism.
In addition to events, TIP has a three-year plan: a two-year research project to monitor misinformation in Arizona, publication of a media literacy curriculum through ASU’s journalism school, and increasing dissemination of their research online.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
An Arizona State University (ASU) law school professor deleted a viral tweet detailing a racially-motivated verbal attack against Muslims after it was publicly exposed as a fake.
ASU professor Khaled Beydoun shared a picture in which an individual allegedly called another a “dirty Arab” and told them to go back to the Middle East. Beydoun alleged that an Instagram follower sent him the picture of the exchange (archived here). Khaled’s alleged follower purportedly responded that he was unable to return to the Middle East because the U.S. “gave Israel $14 billion last week to destroy it (Gaza).”
However, users on X (formerly known as Twitter) added a Community Note pointing out that the alleged racial attack message was in blue; on Instagram, that means the complainant sent the racial attack message to himself or herself.
“Blue on Instagram means that the message was sent from his own phone,” said the fact-check note. “Khaled presumably sent the racist message to himself.”
Jen Wright, Arizona’s former assistant attorney general, also debunked Beydoun’s post, and criticized ASU for hiring a supporter of a designated foreign terrorist organization, Hamas, to teach courses advocating for Islam.
“Manufacturing bigotry for clicks is not a very inspiring image for @ASUCollegeofLaw,” said Wright. “Why does @ASUCollegeofLaw have a Hamas propagandist who fakes victimhood and lies about the war in the Middle East teaching Islamaphobia [sic] & about Race & the Law?”
Why does @ASUCollegeOfLaw have a Hamas propagandist who fakes victimhood and lies about the war in the Middle East teaching Islamaphobia & about Race & the Law?@asu has a wannabe Jessie Smollet on staff ginning up racial tensions. 🤦🏻♀️
Beydoun teaches two courses at ASU, both with an apparent progressive social justice slant: “Race and the Law,” and “Islamophobia and the Law.” ASU hired Beydoun in June.
Beydoun responded to the debunking of his post by emphasizing that he received the image from another individual, and claimed that those who fact-checked him were “bigots.” Beydoun didn’t apologize for the false claim.
“But people don’t read sadly,” said Beydoun. “If was [sic] flagged by bigots who didn’t read the caption then removed. Done deal, bigger fish to fry.”
Wright pointed out that Beydoun, with his massive platform (nearly 295,000 followers on Twitter and over 1.4 million followers on Instagram), was undertaking actions to exacerbate divisions.
“@ASU prof deletes post after using his platform to spread fabricated hate to gin up hysteria,” said Wright. “As someone teaching Islamaphobia [sic] @ASUCollegeofLaw, he must know that manufactured hate begets more hate, increasing tensions. Why add fuel to a powder keg on the verge of explosion?”
.@ASU prof deletes post after using his platform to spread fabricated hate to gin up hysteria.
As someone teaching Islamaphobia @ @ASUCollegeOfLaw, he must know that manufactured hate begets more hate, increasing tensions.
Wright pointed out that Beydoun also deleted another false post which used pictures from the war in Syria to accuse the Israel government of war crimes. Wright questioned Beydoun’s academic worth based on his consistent issuance of false information.
“[Beydoun] should know to fact check so he doesn’t make false & defamatory claims,” said Wright. “If he doesn’t fact check his posts, does he fact check his curriculum?”
Looks like he deleted the other post that used pictures from Syria in 2017 to lodge false accusations against @IsraeliPM alleging @IDF WAR CRIMES.
Beydoun’s latest book, “The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims,” included a foreword written by Kimberlé Crenshaw; she is credited for popularizing Critical Race Theory (CRT). In her foreword, Crenshaw noted that Beydoun was one of her Critical Race Studies students in 2001.
Last week, Beydoun also claimed that another one of his followers had ordered his book but had received a book on Israel instead.
Beydoun announced that all sale royalties would go to Gaza, governed by Hamas.
Following Hamas’ initial terrorist attack on Israel, Beydoun posted a quote from Malcolm X alluding that Hamas was the true victim and Israel was the true oppressor.
“Be careful. Ethnic cleaning [sic] becomes possible and permissible when you paint an entire people as terrorists,” said Beydoun. “‘If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people being oppressed, and loving those doing the oppressing.’ – Malcolm X.”
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Center for American Institutions (CAI), an interdisciplinary research project through Arizona State University (ASU), declared in a new report that higher education’s American history classes focus mostly on social justice revisionism that conclude with a depiction of America as a nation in decline.
In their research, published recently as the first “State of Health” commission report, CAI reviewed 75 introductory history syllabi from dozens of the top 150 national universities ranked by U.S. News and World Report last year. The project members included Scott Walker, former governor of Wisconsin; Mary Fallin, former governor of Oklahoma; and Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker.
The CAI commission discovered that progressive angles to identity-related terms and topics dominated American history introductory courses: white supremacy, racism, inclusion, exclusion, equity, diversity, masculinity, gender, LGBT, and oppression. Comparatively, the commission claimed that essential founding and other key historical topics were mostly overlooked or heavily criticized, like liberty, federalism, the Constitution, rule of law, Western tradition, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism.
The commission explained that its first report was focused on civic education because a proper education of the Constitution, federalism, economic expansion, and democratization produce informed voters. They posited that unity in imparting American history leads to a healthier nation, evident through limited polarization and dysfunctionality in politics. They also posited that an improper understanding of the nation’s history results in radicalization, divisiveness, mass disrespect, and antisocial behaviors; the commission cited an overemphasis on identity-related themes as a specific cause of an improper historical education.
On classes that taught American history from the settlement to 1877, the CAI commission found that all syllabi included at least one mention of an identity-related term; 56 percent of classes focused on institutions topics; one-third of courses focused on institutions for less than half of class meetings; 80 percent of courses spent only two class periods or less on the writing, ratification, and contents of the Constitution; 11 percent of classes didn’t cover the drafting of the Constitution in Philadelphia; and 63 percent of syllabi included institutional phrases such as “liberty” and “freedom,” but no syllabi mentioned “the rule of law” or “Western tradition.”
The commission also found that those syllabi that tended to mention institutions more also mentioned identities more, regardless of syllabus length.
On classes that taught history from 1877 to the present, the commission found that over 60 percent of syllabi included one “divisive” identity-focused term; over 40 percent didn’t mention the terms like “freedom,” “prosperity,” or “religion”; over 10 percent of class meetings focused exclusively on the Civil Rights Movement or feminism; and only 10 percent discussed Phyllis Schlafly, a major critic of second wave feminism.
The commission further found that instructors angled their teaching on this period of history with a fixation on the exclusion of minorities, oppression and expression of gender identity and sexual orientation, and voicing anti-market bias. The CAI commission added that coverages of political, legal, military, progressive, and religious histories lacked context and depth.
The research team found that most of the classes conclude with a characterization of America as a nation in decline and an ignorance of positive points in recent American history, such as women gaining voting rights.
“Through lectures, discussions, and required readings, students are directed to see a nation in decline. [The] United States is portrayed as a nation that never fulfilled its ideals of equality, defined as social equality,” stated the report.
The study was preempted by the discovery that 40 percent of students were below proficient in American history and civics, according to last year’s report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. CAI Director Donald Critchlow stated in the report introduction that higher education offered the poorest quality of education on American history and civics: social justice ideology over truth.
“American colleges and universities are being forced to become centers of remedial learning, but they are failing to provide basic facts of American history and civics to their students,” said Critchlow. “[M]any teachers of introductory American history courses simply are not conveying foundational knowledge to their students. Instead, a heavy emphasis rests on racial, ethnic, and gender identity, usually to the detriment of a comprehensive and necessary knowledge of our nation’s past.”
In order to counter these alleged issues with higher education American history and civics courses, the CAI commission recommended the establishment of new interdisciplinary degree programs with more expansive civic education opportunities.
Additionally, the commission recommended greater educational transparency: public postings of syllabi, approximate student enrollments and majors, student enrollments per faculty or affiliated faculty, publication of faculty meeting minutes, faculty and upper administration announcements, and a two-year report of occupational outcomes for majors.
The commission also recommended teachers to be evaluated based on teaching and research outcomes, and for higher education institutions to cease requiring diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements from faculty hires.
CAI will issue a second State of the Health commission report on Civic Education in the Military next spring.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
