Illegals are given “sanctuary” by liberals. Where is the sanctuary for American conservatives?

It seems there’s a war on for the soul of America. And America may be losing. The America we remember, anyway. An America that not only proclaimed to embrace free speech, but actually did it.

Berkeley — once ground zero in the battle for free speech — is now the heart of the battle against free speech. And, in a tragic irony, the self-proclaimed tolerant left that was so adamant in asserting the right to free speech in the 1960s is now the fascist force fighting against it.

After several violent protests and even riots aimed at preventing conservative luminaries from speaking their minds — at Berkeley, at Middlebury College in Vermont and elsewhere — an appearance at Berkeley by conservative commentator Ann Coulter was canceled this week due to fears of a repeat of left-wing violence.

Meanwhile, at Middlebury, a professor was put in a neck brace while trying to protect a conservative speaker from a violent, heedless mob.

It is a sad day for America, and a shameful, embarrassing day for American liberalism. It’s gone so far that liberals have now pushed the notoriously left-wing American Civil Liberties Union into the arms of Ann Coulter.

“The heckler’s veto of Coulter’s Berkeley speech is a loss for the 1st Amendment,” the organization said in a tweet.

Nice. But even in the tweet and in a longer written statement condemning the liberal violence, the ACLU continues to exacerbate the problem — blanketly characterizing conservative speech as “hateful” and “bigoted.” It’s just such self-righteous, subjective and inflammatory rhetoric from the left that has caused this problem, by convincing liberals they have the moral high ground from which to attack — literally.

As long as such blind, self-deluded smugness dominates liberal thought, America will be at war with itself.

Oddly, liberals have expressly become that which they claim to combat: hateful, oppressive self-anointed autocrats.

Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, whose University of California, Berkeley initially canceled Coulter’s appearance and ultimately caved to the violent left, said, “This is a university, not a battlefield.” It is both now — precisely because the university was unwilling to courageously combat its far-left goons from the get-go.

Conservatives will not be silenced. They will not be intimidated anymore. They will not sit for being treated as third-class citizens whose right to free speech is determined by their fascist liberal counterparts.

This battle is only beginning.

What next? Conservatives must redouble the exercise of their First Amendment rights. They should utterly overwhelm the opposition and inundate the public square, and in particular the college campus, with conservative thought and speech.

College leaders should draw an indelible red line past which liberal students cannot tread — and arrest and expel and otherwise crack down on those who would silence speech. Faculty and administration enablers who have taken the side of the censors should be summarily dismissed.

Law enforcement must arrest every amateur authoritarian attempting to silence others. New, draconian laws, and swift and sure punishments, will be required to sufficiently deter them.

Congress and state governments should look at punishing free-speech-violating campuses financially.

Above all, it’s time for fair-minded liberals to get off their high horse — because it’s a Shet­land pony about now — and join with their conservative friends in protecting free speech for all.

There’s a war on for freedom of speech. Which side are you on?

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(c)2017 The Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, Ga.)

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