Yet this sharp-tongued Never Trumper was also, according to the Anti-Defamation League, by far the most bullied Jewish journalist of 2016 — quite a distinction when you think about the kind of vitriol that gushed forth this past year on platforms like Twitter. Those attacks came from the alt-right, which called Mr. Shapiro a “Christ killer” and far worse. When his son was born, the trolls called the baby a “newborn cockroach” and suggested that the entire Shapiro family head to the gas chambers.

Let’s hope the protest against this “fascist” who has been the regular target of actual ones doesn’t result in any violence. But the brouhaha over Ben Shapiro is significant not because of what might go down Thursday at Berkeley, but because it is a perfect exhibition of a much broader phenomenon increasingly apparent in the wake of the Charlottesville, Va., demonstrations last month: the sloppy conflation between actual white supremacists and, well, run-of-the-mill conservatives, libertarians and classical liberals whose main beef is with some on the left who seem like they’d rather do without the First Amendment.