Last week I ‘unfriended’ on Facebook an in-law from my wife’s large and extended family in the US. I don’t think I’ve ever ‘unfriended’ someone before. It was not, I wrote to her at the time, an ‘unfriending’ in real life: in real life I still loved her as a friend and a member of our family. But what I couldn’t stand was the alt-right messages she insisted on circulating – unwanted, hostile, and deeply distasteful. Nor did I want people I know and like and respect to associate me with this kind of thing simply because of the way we are all immersed, nowadays, in social media. Let’s be clear: this was not about who supports whom in the American election. I can see that it is as hard for her to imagine how I could possibly endorse Clinton as it is for me to get my head around how anyone with a heart or a brain cell could possibly support Donald. I
