Designated safe spaces are now popular on college campuses across the nation, at universities including DePaul, Rutgers and UCLA. A safe space, as defined by the Oxford English Living Dictionary, is a “place or environment in which a person…can feel confident they will not be exposed to…emotional harm.”

Although there are not official statistics on the amount of colleges with safe spaces, they are so popular that former President Barack Obama’s secretary of education endorsed them last November in a “Dear Colleagues” letter, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

At their conception, safe spaces were a good idea. They were designed to promote free speech and protest the recruitment of students by the military in 1970s as reported by the Guardian.

But as the old saying goes, the hunted became the hunter. Today in safe spaces, students of liberal stripe are free from having their ideas criticized. They dispatch “bias response teams,” according to the New Republic. These teams hand out punishments for things such as wearing the wrong Halloween costume as Breitbart, an online news network, details.

The Washington Post reports that safe spaces have had chalk saying “Vote Trump” removed under the assertion that supporting President Trump and his policies is “an implicit attack on the Muslim, Latinx, Black and other communities.”

Now whether you agree with banning costumes and sidewalk chalk or not, this should not happen at publicly funded colleges. When the silencing of dissenting opinions is allowed, the government is preventing individuals from engaging the freedoms they pay to have protected.

Safe Spaces have created a generation of citizens who are blissfully ignorant to the real world. Outside of the college that their parents pay for, the world is a dark and dangerous place. People will say things you do not want to hear.

Safe Space fascism died in 2016. This should be the year college liberals grow up and have their ideas challenged. There can be no true progression in society if ideas are not free to be discussed, debated and improved.

2017 should be the year American campuses return to their roots, standing for liberty instead of the totalitarian Marxist system they hold so dear.