Over Thanksgiving weekend, Yale University newspaper thieves made off with the entire press run of the Yale Free Press. The school's dean of student affairs responded to the theft by telling the conservative student editors of the Free Press to individually contact the directors of the school's eleven residential colleges with their complaints. In other words, get lost.

At Rutgers (where I speak a week from today), anti-free speech activists made off with 5,000 of the 6,000 copies of the Medium, a weekly campus newspaper that offended feminists by printing some risque pictures of women and offering readers politically incorrect humor. In response, a women's studies professor teaching a course called "Woman, Culture and Society" required her students to collect signatures demanding the school ban the Medium. Shortly thereafter, the thefts occurred. A group calling itself the Progressive Activists anonymously took responsibility (if that's possible), but left it unclear what they were progressing toward in absconding with thousands of newspapers.

All of this seems not to bother campus feminists in the least. "I don't even know that they're stolen," the head of the Rutgers women's studies department told columnist Paul Mulshine. "Do you have evidence that they're stolen?"

Dan, you're slipping here. Chastising someone for requesting proof of alleged wrong-doing is like scolding someone for behaving sensibly.

Or at least that's what you said to me when I caught you stealing those copies of Sports Illustrated from the news stand.

This is what pisses me off about liberals. Someone actually COMMITS A CRIME by STEALING newspapers, and the CRIME is ignored because the newspaper had a conservative slant. However, when a store like Wal-Mart LEGALLY CHOOSES not to sell CD's with "explicit lyrics" stickers, liberals cry foul and wrongfully say it's "censorship." While I admit that stealing newspapers is not censorship, it is actually something to "cry foul" about!

First of all, it is hard to allege that a 'crime' was committed, as most campus newspapers are free. This is like 'stealing' a copy of the Village Voice (or whatever the free daily alternative in your city is). In order to steal something and claim that theft is a crime, the thing stolen needs to have some monetary value; i.e., a financial loss must be incurred.

That said, Flynn is right to cry foul here. Campus activists and their professorial apologists for years have tried to stifle inquiry and debate that does not hew to the politically correct multiculturalism.

The irony of all of this, of course, is that campus newspapers are themselves a bit of an anachronism because all campus newspapers have web sites, and students interested in reading newspapers have a greater propensity to read online than to read a physical paper. And no one is claiming that the university is blocking access to conservative papers' web sites.

But Flynn's overall point remains: campus liberals wantonly steal papers which espouse views with which they disagree.

As to the complaint about Wal-Mart: Wal-Mart is in its right to sell products it wants to sell. No less and no more, because it is a private institution. People who claim that Wal-Mart 'censors' materials that it deems objectionable miss the point that the material is easily available elsewhere. I may not like it that, if I go to Wal-Mart for groceries I can't also buy Playboy, but my life is hardly ruined if I have to go to another store or the internet to get my porn fix.

Ok, Dave. Glad to see you agree with me.

Can't steal a "free paper"? It still belongs to the owners and the owners don't want one person or a group to take all the copies with the intent to stiffle free speech.

Fascism has a key element in all dictionary entries for that word. It's that "fascism" is allows only it's own view and ruthlessly suppresses all other views, frequently by force.