Over on FIRE’s blog today, there’s a post up about the theft of conservative newspapers at Johns Hopkins University:

In June, FIRE reported that Johns Hopkins University had ignored the theft of The Carrollton Record (TCR), banned the distribution of the conservative paper in campus dormitories, and entertained the possibility of investigating “harassment” complaints against the paper’s editors. All of this came after the paper ran a story about a campus visit by a pornographic film director, complete with a front page picture of the speaker with members of the sponsoring student group, the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance (DSAGA). JHU officials told TCR that the disappearance of their newspaper did not actually constitute theft, and then used a flyer-posting policy to ban TCR from dorms, even though other papers like the liberal Donkey retained full distribution rights in dorms. In addition, members of DSAGA filed harassment complaints against members of the TCR.

This is a nationwide trend: Driven by self-righteousness, many student radicals on the far Left are willing to try almost any tactic to prevent the dissemination of viewpoints that they deem unsavory. “Harassment” has become a favorite charge of these would-be censors. When they can’t get enough heavy-handed support from a university administration, they sometimes take it upon themselves to confiscate leaflets and newspapers. In an Orwellian twist, they often claim that stealing other people’s publications is actually an exercise of their own free-speech rights—a type of civil disobedience or some such—to disguise the illiberality of their actions.