Virginia State Senator Richard Black, who is perhaps best known to Gawker readers as a guy who melted down at a teacher over fictional depictions of sex and violence, recently met and shook hands with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is best known the world over for unrepentantly slaughtering thousands of his own people. Black said after the summit that he was “very proud to meet his excellency, the president.”

This afternoon, Virginia State Senator D*** Black responded on Twitter to a Gwaker story about an email he recently sent to an AP English teacher about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Jessica Berg, the teacher, objected to State Senator D*** Black’s support of a (failed) bill that would require teachers to obtain parental permission to assign their students certain books. “If it’s so graphic that Gwaker can’t even print it for their adult readers,” he wrote, “then parents should have the right to know.”