Kent Messenger Maidstone

Suppress these voices and they just get louder

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The first time I heard the term ‘altright’ was two weeks ago when fresh from the shock of Donald Trump’s triumph I tried to make sense of it all by immersing myself in documentar­ies. In Trump’s Unlikely Superfans, BBC 3’s Angela Scanlon travelled across the pond to interview the irregulari­ties in an already irregular US election campaign.

She met a young black man, two attractive blonde twins and a very camp Brit named Milo Yiannopoul­os.

Yiannopoul­os was perhaps the most likely backer of the now president-elect. He is Cambridge educated and from a wealthy, predominan­tly white middle-class part of the world.

The 33-yearold is also the technology editor of the highly controvers­ial Breitbart News, a website which is described as a platform for the alt-right – a worrying movement rejecting mainstream conservati­sm and increasing­ly linked to white nationalis­m and worse – which has run stories including ‘The solution to online ‘harassment’ is simple: Women should log off’.

Yiannopoul­os himself penned ‘Gay rights have made us dumber, it’s time to get back in the closet’ and posed the question: “Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?” He is essentiall­y a US-based Katie Hopkins.

He’s described as a spokesman for the altright but prefers the term sympathise­r and told Scanlon he believes its success is down to society’s obsession with political correctnes­s.

People get fed up being told what they can and can’t say or do, he added, and he’s right, look at Brexit and Trump, two complete rejections of the establishm­ent.

So this week’s decision by the Department for Education to ban him from speaking at Simon Langton, his old school in Canterbury, simply fuels that fire.

When you suppress someone’s voice they simply get louder, more angry and it would seem more popular.

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