After returning to Phoenix, he encountered the fledgling "New Times" weekly, first named the "Arizona Times". It had been founded in 1970 by recent Arizona State University (ASU) dropout Michael Lacey and various other ASU students in opposition to the U.S. conflict in Vietnam, specifically the Nixon administration's incursion into Cambodia and the massacre of four students at Kent State University in Ohio, shot down by National Guard troops as the students protested Nixon's illegal expansion of the war.