A black student says he was assaulted over the weekend at a vigil for the victims of the Charlottesville protests because of his conservative beliefs.
Caleb Slater, the president of the Ithaca College Republicans in New York, was wearing a Young America’s Foundation hat at a Sunday evening vigil for Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed when a suspected white nationalist drove his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville on Saturday.
The vigil was organized by the Syracuse, New York, chapter of Black Lives Matter.
When masked members of the militant-left group Antifa saw Mr. Slater, they approached him, asked him about his hat, told him to leave and attacked him.
He said his assailants grabbed him by his clothes, choked him with his camera strap and pushed him into the street.
“Fortunately, no cars were coming, but the light was green at the time,” Mr. Slater told The College Fix.
Mr. Slater caught a small portion of the attack on video. He said he turned on his camera “because I did not know what they planned on doing to me.”
No one from the rally tried to help, Mr. Slater said. Instead, they began chanting, “No Trump, No KKK, No Nazi USA, Go Away.”
Mr. Slater said he wore the YAF hat to the memorial “to show that conservatives and progressives can both agree that the alt-right pose a threat to the Western world.”
He said he knew he would “encounter many people that I did not agree with on most issues, but hoped that we could at least come together to combat and call out extremism in this country.”
• Bradford Richardson can be reached at brichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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