ASU Funding Threatened After Harassment of Conservative Students Goes Viral

On Wednesday, Campus Reform reported that twenty Arizona lawmakers have issued a statement condemning the viral harassment of two conservative students in a supposed “multicultural space” on Arizona State University’s campus.

Now, Arizona State’s funding may be in jeopardy.

Jake Hoffman, a Republican state representative, questioned university leadership after seeing what appeared to be an exclusionary space on a taxpayer-funded campus, and condemned said funding as tantamount to state-sponsored segregation.

Remarks made by Hoffman included the following:

“The racially-charged removal of these students from the multicultural center begs the question of why Arizonans are being forced to spend tens, potentially hundreds, of millions of their hard-earned tax dollars on a building at a public university that some of our citizens are not allowed to use?

“Racism has no place in America. The institutionalization of racism and the exploitation of taxpayer dollars to implement it certainly has no place in Arizona, or any other state. Doing so is a disgusting abuse of the public trust and resources.

“As a member of Arizona’s House Committee on Appropriations, I will be fighting alongside the undersigned Legislators to get to the bottom of this and take the appropriate action in the upcoming budget. Not one penny of taxpayer money should be appropriated to a public institution that in any way enables racism or neo-segregation. Period.”

The video of the incident, originally posted to Reddit on September 23, shows two white male students, one with a “Police Lives Matter” laptop sticker and the other wearing a “Did Not Vote For Biden” t-shirt, being accosted by two nonwhite female students for studying in an alleged “multicultural space.” One of the female students states the men are making her uncomfortable for occupying the space as “white, cis males,” and accusing the university of “violence” and insinuating its predisposition for protecting a “white man who thinks he can take up our [multicultural] space.” The second woman instructs them to leave the space “if [they] have any consideration for people of color.”

The video has since received 5.6 million views on Twitter alone.