Speech ban just fuels fire

The first time I heard the term ‘alt-right’ 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 Three’s Angela Scanlon travelled across the pond to interview people including 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-year-old is also the technology editor of the highly controversial Breitbart News, a website 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 penned a story with the headline Gay Rights Have Made Us Dumber, It’stime to Get Back In The Closet and posed the question: “Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?”

He’s described as a spokesman for the alt-right 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, simply fuels that fire. When you suppress someone’s voice they simply get louder, more angry and, it would seem, more popular.