Last week a liberal writer from Newsweek criticized me on Twitter over something I said on "The Five," writing: "Your premise is factually incorrect. But keep cashing those checks."

To which I responded: "I direct deposit."

Yeah, I won that round. I left the poor guy on the ground in silence, dazed by my pithy genius.

But later, I found his tweet actually generating a revelation in my slightly buzzed brain. While the guy might consider his insult ("keep cashing those checks") a real bruiser, it was old. Tired. Not relevant in this day and age.

"Keep cashing those checks" is something you might have heard someone say in the era before direct deposit — so it's exactly what you'd hear from a liberal who's fallen behind, who's been passed by, who's been trampled by the boots of progress.

He might as well have made a withering comment about my CD collection. Or scolded me for not owning an encyclopedia. Or suggested I get a second landline for my computer. I wonder if he still calls the movie theater for correct show times. It would be cute if he did.

His tweet, in short, was a neat little reminder of where liberals are today: in the past.

They're operating in a bygone era, so when confronted by the present, all they do is fret about the things they don't understand. And so they are stuck, repeating the same grade (likely sophomore year) over and over again.

They don't like a president who tweets, or right-wing radicals who get book deals, or lesbians who voted for Trump. They don't understand why identity politics isn't resonating anymore after demanding we all bow before the altar of political correctness for decades. They don't get it: No one cares who you're sleeping with anymore, or what percentage of you is Cameroonian. No one cares if you require one of 50 different pronouns, or that you get easily triggered by words and images from action films. That's the past.

No one cares about who you are anymore. We only care about what you do.

(A piece of advice to the young social justice warrior: You may think people care about who you are. They don't. If you're trafficking in identity politics, then you're likely surrounded by people just like you. Which means everyone is in it for the same reason: not to listen, but to be heard. So they aren't listening to you either. Get a life outside your grievances.)

Liberals are still clinging to the old ways of the easy, protestable past. For so long, they were embraced by the media for their emotional candor that they mistakenly think the public finds their outdated outbursts romantic or daring.

But the public doesn't. To them, the whiny public service announcement videos, the Funny or Die detritus and long-winded emotional speeches at awards shows are as old and musty as your grandma’s rotary phone. Their threats of boycotts come off as edgy as a Harvey Wallbanger or a warm bottle of Zima.

It's why Meryl Streep impressed so few people outside the Golden Globes auditorium. We all saw it coming, because we'd seen it before. You wanna shock us, Ms. Streep? Have lunch at Applebee’s.

Meanwhile, have you seen the response to the protesters during the Cabinet hearings?

No, because there hasn't been any. No one cares about those protests — except for their moments of comic relief. As I said on The Five, such protesters are now the rodeo clowns of politics. They are there to break up the monotony of long hearings and boring speeches. All that's missing is the barrel they can climb into after their performances.

These pathetic tantrums might have worked in the 1990s, but now they come off as the opposite of persuasion. The world has seen this all before, and after eight years of fomented fury, we know it's all orchestrated baloney with no substance behind it.

And so as we approach the inauguration, such tantrums will grow more intense, but less and less interesting. They will feel as old and clunky as a disposable camera, or that stack of VHS tapes you once used to record your favorite episodes of "Get A Life."

And yeah — you can take that to the bank. Or direct deposit it.