Ben Shapiro is a 33-year-old who supports small government, religious liberty and free-market economics and opposes identity politics, abortion and Donald Trump. He is, in other words, that wildly exotic creature: a political conservative.

You’d think that the cosmopolitan denizens of the San Francisco Bay Area would have encountered a few, if not in the form of an uncle at Thanksgiving, then perhaps in, I don’t know, a field trip down to Orange County. But to judge from the pre-emptive reaction to Mr. Shapiro’s speech scheduled for this Thursday at the University of California, Berkeley, you’d be mistaken.

Last week Paul Alivisatos, the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost, sent out a grave letter to students and faculty members. “We are deeply concerned about the impact some speakers may have on individuals’ sense of safety and belonging,” he wrote, encouraging his readers to avail themselves of campus counseling services. “No one should be made to feel threatened or harassed simply because of who they are or for what they believe.”

Mr. Alivisatos wasn’t referring to the various threats against Mr. Shapiro that you might imagine would be his chief concern: When the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos visited campus in February, the resulting protests caused $100,000 in damage. This time around, the activist group Refuse Fascism, which has hailed the left-wing extremist antifa movement as “courageous,” has taken the lead in condemning Mr. Shapiro’s speech, calling him a “fascist” on campus fliers and declaring in a Facebook post that his goal was to “spread ugly fascist views dressed up in slick-talking ‘intellectual’ garb.”