Remember the good old days of the Latin American "death squads"?  Every liberal chanted with one voice to end these extrajudicial paramilitaries used by right-wing Latin American dictators to do the dirty work that they didn't want the regular armed forces, police, and justice system to do.

Liberals invented the term to differentiate between noble lefty revolutionary guerrillas who were good and evil right-wing regime thugs who were bad.  As any child could tell.

I strongly feel that our liberal friends' devotion to activism, the notion of the marginalized and the oppressed rising up in righteous rage against the ruling class, has gone sadly awry.  That is because the whole point of riots and rebellions and protests is that people outside the system are demanding to be included in the political division of spoils.  Our modern culture of voting and elected governments and universal franchise was created precisely to provide that every adult (except illegal aliens) was inside the system and represented by someone in the councils of power and therefore did not need to riot, rebel, or protest to get his cut.

On this notion, the idea of blacks and women and gays and transgenders needing to do activism and peaceful protest in the year 2018 is baloney.  As signed and sealed liberal "little darlings," these formerly marginalized groups are now fully represented in the system.  Therefore, there is no warrant for them to flood into the streets.  That's what the history of 19th-century Britain teaches us, too.  By the 1890s in England, the violence of the early to mid-19th century – the rick-burnings, the riots, the Chartism – had all died down.  The workers now had the vote, and their grievances were being addressed in the councils of power, and so they stopped rioting.

But liberals are attached to "activism" as to a religion.  Activism is what gives their lives meaning, so each graduate of a selective college must find a marginalized group, somewhere, somehow, and organize them and lead their "mostly peaceful protests" along the arc of history toward justice.  That is why liberal activism now features illegal aliens and Muslims.  They are outside the system and can be represented only by Soros money and well born activists from selective colleges.

An example of this craving for the crunch of beef and the bray of the bullhorn is Vanity Fair's excited piece on the 17-minute silence on Wednesday, March 14 at Parkland, Florida.  It was so wonderful that the kids wanted something more than the official 17-minute silence approved by the ruling class, so they transformed themselves into a mob and had a bit of a rumble.  Mostly peaceful, of course, but almost orgasmic for the Vanity Fair writer.

But this is only half of the story.  Our liberal friends, following the advice of Herbert Marcuse, have determined that only they are allowed to organize and protest, and anyone organizing against the ruling class is a hate group and not to be allowed to protest, and anyone speaking against the beliefs of the ruling class is guilty of hate speech and not to be endured.

Suppose you are a student preparing your application to a selective college like Yale, and you know that the key to acceptance is activism in ruling class-approved protest.  How do you know what kind of protest is approved by the ruling class and what is utterly beyond the pale as fascistic hate speech?  For instance, is it okay to protest against the Parkland massacre?  Don't worry, kids: as Walter Olsen explains in the Wall Street Journal, you eager progressive beavers have your young Millennial senior assistant director of admissions, Hannah Mendlowitz, who has kindly written a blog post to assure all applicants that protesting gun violence is A-OK.

"For those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice," Ms. Mendlowitz writes.  "I have the pleasure of reading applications from San Francisco, where activism is very much a part of the culture.  Essays ring of social justice issues."

The message couldn't be clearer.  Social justice activism is a Good Thing, as long as it aligns with the trendy progressivism of your average San Francisco resident.  But hey, don't get caught doing peaceful protest in the waiting room of an abortion facility.  Different strokes for different folks.

This liberal activism stuff stinks.  Activism approved by the ruling class is not real activism, which would be representing the folks outside the system, beyond the pale of ruling class approval.  In fact, today's activists are nothing but ruling class toadies, as the nice young lady at Yale admissions makes clear.  So it is time to name and shame all lefty think-tanks, protest groups, activist organizations, and ambitious young activists-in-training as "regime hate squads."

Because that is what they are.

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) runs the go-to site on U.S. government finances, usgovernmentspending.com.  Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.