In what has turned into something of a ritual on many campuses, the conservative California Patriot had an entire press run of its newspaper stolen from its Berkeley campus office, with editors received harassing phone calls and even death threats. The theft was carried out in response to the newspaper's investigation into the student-funded Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA), a radical Hispanic group that repeatedly refers to white people as gringos in its literature, calls for revolutionary liberation of the bronze continent by the bronze people, and maintains a website (aztlan.org) that features a great deal of anti-Semitic rhetoric. The Patriot has had its papers stolen twice in the past year and had many of its sponsored speakers shouted down, with little response from university officials.

[Ed.: This practice appears to be especially embedded in Berkeley's culture. In December, none other than the mayor, Tom Bates, admitted to stealing and trashing about 1,000 copies of the Daily Californian, which had endorsed his opponent.]

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