Let us start with a big lie, as stated by a fascist. You can tell them by the embrace of violence. The left owns the antifa, and MacLennan is a barrister. With this attitude, she would have to recuse herself from every case involving a white male.

There is no such thing as identity politics. The term is used by white men seeking to hold on to their power and deny the human rights of Maori, Pasifika, women and LGBTQ people.

Eight men own as much wealth as half the world’s population, or 3.6 billion people. Those men are overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon.

At the same time, globally, four children die every minute due to lack of access to medicine and food. The world has the resources to save those children, but we don’t choose to do so because we refuse to share resources, writes Catriona MacLennan.

Human history is the history of male domination and, primarily, of white male domination. Black and brown people, women and LGBTQ people have been prevented by law, custom and outright physical force from accessing political power, jobs, votes and resources.

I love the lies, the lack of data, and the appeal to rhetoric. Trouble is that unregulated speech has gone elsewhere. Saying there is not any politics of identity then using an intersectional analysis is sophism: full marks for that, but as an advocate, Catriona, you are failing.

And calling for the Anglo Saxon to be subservient is akin to telling niggers to know their place. You call one evil: call the other evil as well.

This is tired. Chris Trotter, who is quite left wing, notes that the big lie has failed.

The relaxation of state censorship is the first and most important gift to any revolutionary cause. Historically, the sudden appearance of posters, pamphlets, newspapers and books authored by those whose voices had hitherto been suppressed is always the surest sign that the old order is crumbling. In today’s repressive regimes it is the unfettered use of social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and blogs; which signals the arrival of the revolutionary moment. Think of the Arab Spring.

In its youth the Revolution hails freedom of expression as sacrosanct. The revolutionaries know that without it the power of the elites cannot be challenged. As the Revolution matures, however, and new power structures begin to replace the old, the criticism and analysis which freedom of expression makes possible seems less and less like an unqualified good. To the new occupants of these new structures, it is the protection and consolidation of the Revolution’s gains that should take priority. There is no surer sign that the Revolution is over than when the new power elite begins to punish people for exercising their right to free speech.

By this analysis it is clear that the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 70s have well-and-truly passed their expiry date. The great provocations of the Hippy era: think of the Broadway musical “Hair”; the proliferation of revolutionary underground comics; the human “Be-Ins” and “Love-Ins”; Ken Kesey’s “Acid tests”; would today be dismissed as “inappropriate”.

Only last week, in Berkeley, the birthplace of the “free speech movement” which touched off the student revolt of the 1960s, the world was treated to the spectacle of furious students doing everything in their power to prevent the Alt-Right provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, from exercising his right to (yep, you guessed it) free speech.

In discussing these sorts of incidents with contemporary leftists, I have been staggered by the consistency of their responses. “What you’ve got to understand, Chris,” they reply, “is that while people have the right to express themselves, they have no right to expect that the things they say will not have consequences.”

Just what those consequences look like can be seen every hour of every day on social media. Relentless incivility; extraordinary personal abuse; the issuing of threats to attack (and even kill) those whose expression is deemed offensive to, or transgressive of, the great revolutionary “truths” of the once “new” social movements; this, sadly, has become the norm on what passes for the “Left” in 2017.

The liberal tradition of responding to the expression of ideas with which you disagree with a reasoned, evidence-based argument in rebuttal no longer seems to fall within either the ideological of intellectual repertoire of today’s left-wingers. The only form of argument they seem capable of deploying is the abusive and circumstantial “Argumentum ad Hominem” – attacking the person rather than his or her ideas.

What would Trotter want? Ironically, what I want. Healthy families. Support for those who are in poverty: a hand up, a just work place. He and I recall the time before the neoliberals, when the Labour Party was run by Catholics and Methodists who heard the gospel every week, and socialism was called applied Christianity.

This has been rejected.

Those who call for it are now told to be silent. That they are to step back, because they are not vibrant. The lie is that the vibrant are the future, missing but one thing: the vibrant do not make the next generation.

The religious do, for they have a vision, and they value their children.

And history is written by those who show up.