You’re at a drinks party. Soft jazz is playing, you’re at ease among your work colleagues and the regularly refilled drinks are providing the kind of conversational lubricant normally unseen in the humdrum of normal life.

“I like Janet a lot,” you say to the group in front of you with an exaggerated sigh, (for what are parties for if not indulging this kind of penchant for grand statements) “but we all know what she's like.” The group laugh. They know exactly what Janet is like.

“Why sometimes,” you say with tongue heavily in cheek, “I wish she’d just quit!”

A glass smashes. Outside, a car alarm begins to scream. From behind a pot of hydrangeas, a man triumphantly leaps out, brandishing a microphone, and your stomach sinks. Come Monday, as you walk into your office, there in your chair sits a thunderous-looking Janet. It’s no use explaining to her the context – all that she’s been relayed is your apparent wish that she walk out the door and never come back.

This is essentially what happened on Race Matters – the Facebook group dedicated to discussing race – as one Cambridge student joined the group, apparently with the sole aim of garnering material for his ‘exposé’ on the secret cabal of white-hating militants supposedly hidden behind every fountain, gargoyle and elaborately designed Tudor gatehouse in Cambridge.

Now, to return to my earlier example, while what was said about Janet wasn’t very nice, and in hindsight probably wasn’t a good thing to say, you were talking with friends in an apparently warm environment, unaware that an interloper on an ego trip was hidden behind the white-coated waiter serving canapés – and besides, the remark was taken grossly out of context. Had the said interloper not been there, then Janet wouldn’t even have known, and the party could have progressed as normal.  

If you take a microphone to any event with the explicit aim of finding incriminating material, you’ll succeed. We all have conversations that we would not make public to the world. Masquerading as a Kurd (it would be interesting to discover how the shelled inhabitants of Diyarbakır might react to discovering that their guise had been assumed as a points-scoring exercise), Will Miller capitalised on the well-meaning openness of Race Matters and exploited it.

Mr Miller did not join Race Matters in good faith only to discover that what he found made him disillusioned and compelled to expose it to the world. Joining just a week before the article was published, Miller came looking for dirt and spent his time pushing, prodding and baiting members until he found some.

As a result of the backlash, Mr Miller posted an article casting him in the role of victim – and castigating the "race obsessed" Oxbridge group behind it. (It is hard to understand how a group dedicated to exploring issues of race can be anything besides race-obsessed, but Race Matters has since apparently been investigating diversifying into horticulture to mitigate this criticism.)

Mr Miller made public posts by people who never intended them to be seen outside of Race Matters. Some, including one member’s account of how his sexuality had to be hidden from his religious family, were highly sensitive searches for solidarity among people in similar situations, the divulging of which proves actively dangerous.

Yet Mr Miller, who in willingly writing his article put himself in the public spotlight, now attempts to hold the moral high ground by arguing that he should never have been criticised by those whose privacy he has violated. Zealous activists making his bosses aware of his public views shouldn’t worry the man who is right. Lone rangers outing the private sexuality of those with everything to lose cannot be compared.

Miller received support from infamous journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, something equivalent to the alt-right community’s version of beatification. Support from Yiannopoulos is a bit like receiving a health boost from contracting a cold. Much like Yiannopoulos, Miller has imbibed fully (and with little apparent self-reflection) the alt-right's tendency to present themselves as counter-cultural, all the while wearing the robes of counter-revolutionaries.

The alt-right – that faction of the right wing which rejects mainstream conservatism and has seen a surge in popularity recently – is a community of the disenchanted, who fear globalisation, multiculturalism and the possibility that there might be some discussions in which their voice has no primacy. This is a community that seeks to present itself as a nation of the oppressed, even while turning back the clock. Twenty years after Chuck Palahniuk wrote about the currency of vitriol among disenchanted white men, the beast is not being domesticated but is raising its head still further. This is the politicisation of anger – and it has come to Cambridge.

A close friend of mine, from a South Asian family, was worried about how his family would react to his white girlfriend – a matter I only discovered a year later when at a party he told me that he’d talked it through with a friend from an Indian family. Had he come to me for advice, I would have done all I could, but I would have been unable to access the situation in the way he needed me to. That there are Facebook groups dedicated to speeding up and improving this process makes me glad – and the existence of such safe spaces is not a threat to me in the way the alt-right sees it.

The opprobrium over the institutionally challenged Trinity Women’s Breakfast shows that Cambridge still has some way to go. Sometimes, a select group of people want to talk about issues that affect them – past, present and future – as a group alone. Only within that group can they give each other the support they need. Only within that group can they feel safe. Only within that group can they know that someone won’t jump out with a microphone.

The state of the Union debate is simply farcical

That the insecure feel this as a threat to their position is troubling. We need to be the Robin Williams to their Matt Damon in the film Good Will Hunting – to show them that sometimes people want to do things themselves, and that’s okay. Will Miller alone took issue with Race Matters, and in response to a perceived problem he created a real one. These real problems won’t stop unless we make sure they do.

After a summer that witnessed the murder of MP Jo Cox, we should be more than aware that the narrative of the beleaguered white man gravitates towards violence and hate. While articles like Miller's might not explicitly advocate violence, a Facebook friend of his – their account since deleted – acted upon the screenshots to harass a graduate who had posted on Race Matters.

This graduate, a close friend of mine, was left shaken by the abuse, and in order to keep private who he is I have chosen to write this article anonymously. I myself have no desire to step into the bullpen of identity politics and subject myself to the same abuse. The alt-right do not want debate – they want to scream and shout at all who disagree with them.

Cambridge is a place where we can be ourselves. Cambridge is a place where we can have conversations we never dreamed possible at home, with like-minded people we always wanted to meet. Cambridge is a community. Sometimes, we aren’t invited to a party – and the correct response is not to burn down the house.

Perhaps the alt-right are the messiahs they claim to be, delivering us from sleepwalking into the abyss. Or perhaps, like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, those who proclaim the advent of the end times the loudest are causing it themselves