The editors of the Wellesley News last week managed to quite nicely sum up the idiocy sweeping America’s campuses, writing, “Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech.”

Actually, that’s exactly what it is.

Wait, the editorial says: “The founding fathers put free speech into the Constitution as a way to protect the disenfranchised and to protect individual citizens from the power of government.

The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging.”

Yes, the Constitution limits what the government can do. But free speech is precisely about protecting a “free-for-all” — where those you deem hateful get their say, and you have the chance to debunk and expose them.

In any case, the ones who are “suppressed” on most US campuses today are the voices that the Wellesley women want to silence: anyone who presents facts and ideas that challenge progressive dogma.

Sadly, the students are learning from their professors. The six faculty on the school’s Presidential Commission on Race, Ethnicity, and Equity recently wrote that controversial speakers are exhausting the poor kids: “The speakers in question impose on the liberty of students, staff, and faculty at Wellesley.”

Specifically, students must “invest time and energy in rebutting the speakers’ arguments . . . This work is not optional; students feel they would be unable to carry out their responsibilities as students without standing up for themselves.”

That’s right: Having to work to rebut someone else’s argument is an injury. (It only used to be what college was all about.)

Mind you, the Wellesley News editors grant that some kids come to college ignorant of the truth, and shouldn’t be shouted down immediately. “If people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted,” the editorial reads.

In other words, education is now all about indoctrination — with stubborn holdouts subject to denunciation and, implicitly, violence.

After all this, the righteous editorialists express a bit of self-pity: “The emotional labor required to educate people is immense and is additional weight that is put on those who are already forced to defend their human rights.”

Whoever said the thought police had it easy?