It’s been a long, slow decline for Milo Yiannopoulos. From the vantage point of 2026, it’s easy to forget that he was once a big deal.
The British-born far-right provocateur, who was arrested by ICE in Louisiana and deported from the US this week, was among the first media figures to ride the “gamergate” controversy and ensuing rightwing populist wave that brought Donald Trump to office in 2016. An editor of the then ascendant Breitbart News from 2014 to 2017, Yiannopoulous was an early adopter of the media strategy of algorithm-optimized outrage bait, trawling the internet and consulting a large network of well-placed sources in search of stories he could use to fan the flames of online culture war discourses. He would write a story mocking a feminist, or fire off a tweet saying something racist about Muslims, and the ensuing firestorm of controversy would result in online arguments, media coverage, and his own promptly and decisively rising star. Rinse, repeat.
Back then, at the start of the Trump era, Yiannopoulous was something of a novelty. Rightwing provocation peddlers had not previously come in his millennial, digitally savvy mold; few others had adopted a fey, gregarious kind of gay male humor for the increasingly theatrical right. But soon, Yiannopoulous was overrun with competitors. The rightwing influencer field became crowded, then saturated. He has spent the past few years at the fringe of the fringe, working for and hobnobbing with a hodgepodge of odious figures who aim to critique Donald Trump from the right, such as the former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, and the antisemitic rapper who now goes by Ye. In a particularly pathetic bid for relevance, he once declared himself “ex-gay” and set about promoting conversion therapy.
His downfall had been a long time coming. Yiannopoulous, often willing to say in vulgar terms what many parts of the American right were only willing to allude to in polite ones, often found himself overstepping. He was banned from Twitter, then from Facebook; he was banned from Australia. In 2017, he resigned from Breitbart and lost a book deal with Simon and Schuster after comments resurfaced in which he claimed that sexual abuse of children by adults could be consensual and “hugely positive experiences”. Yiannopoulous’s comments, which he later apologized for, are not so far out of line from what some on the far right have said about child marriage, or the need to encourage childbirth among teen girls. But Yiannopoulous was talking about boys, not girls, and by then the Maga movement he had helped to galvanize no longer needed him. There were already plenty of Milo imitators, eager to see a rival deposed and ready to fill his grotesque niche.
Several of those imitators are now claiming victory, declaring themselves responsible for Yiannopoulous’s recent deportation. Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer, provocateur and conspiracist in Yiannopoulous’s mold, who has become a confidante of Donald Trump, quickly claimed to have orchestrated Yiannopoulous’s arrest. “I reported him to ICE and the FBI,” Loomer posted. “I told you all that Milo was an illegal alien.” As Anna Merlan of Mother Jones reported, two other far-right influencers – who, unlike Yiannopoulous, are still in good standing with the Maga regime – also claimed to have advance knowledge of the DHS’s plans to remove and deport their enemy: Raheem Kassam, a onetime Breitbart UK editor and current Washington DC restaurateur, and Benny Johnson, a Maga-aligned writer and social media personality. There’s reason to take at least Loomer seriously: last year, Trump fired several high-ranking national security officials after their names appeared on a list of alleged enemies that Loomer presented to him in the Oval Office. If these figures’ boasts are true, this would mean, at best, that at least some figures within the DHS are leaking information about what are supposed to be confidential proceedings to online grifters and grievance peddlers, so that those influencers can get in a bit of satisfying mockery online. At worst, it would mean that the country’s massive federal security apparatus is being deployed to settle internet feuds among crackpot influencers.
Read more:Celebrity birthdays for the week of Sept. 6-12 include Emmy Rossum and Harry Connick Jr.
There’s always a bit of schadenfreude to witnessing these incidents, watching the Trump camp dissolve into infighting and treachery, and seeing the amorality, bigotry or cynical opportunism of those who once sided with Trump be punished with a blow to something those actors actually care about: their own status and careers. By now, there have been so many purges and abrupt reversals of fortune for the once-ascendant members of the Maga coalition that it is hardly worth enumerating them all: Trump, it turns out, has done his purging more frequently and unexpectedly, less a single Night of the Long Knives and more a recurring series of Afternoons of the Mean Tweets.
Read more:Bayern boss Kompany won’t ‘pressure’ Musiala after collapses
But Yiannoupoulous’s downfall is more than just another case of the Maga revolution eating its children. His abrupt arrest and deportation seems, instead, like the product of a bigger rupture within the Trump movement, wherein the isolationist, anti-Zionist, and increasingly antisemitic faction is in revolt against Trump and the neoconservative, expansionist and pro-Israel and pro-military adventurism wing that persuaded him to go to war with Iran. As the unpopular, unwinnable war drags on, sending prices soaring and making it seem more likely that irate voters will look to punish the Republicans in the November midterms, fingers are pointing within the Maga coalition, as major players look to dilute their own responsibility and find someone else to blame. Milo’s deportation might be just one instance in the much uglier fight to come as these figures seek to throw one another under the bus. If they were honorable people, after all, they wouldn’t be in the Trump camp in the first place.
Read more:Everything you need to know about the 2026 Venice Film Festival
Those of us hoping for a sizable Democratic victory might understandably welcome this outcome. Let them fight; let them tear each other to pieces; let them destroy themselves, and nothing of value will be lost. But there is something gruesome, too, about seeing the government deployed this way. It is humiliating to be ruled over by such people – conspiracists and bigots and idiots, people without virtue or competence or even dignity to match their power. They’re all going to suffer in the ugly infighting that’s coming. But we’re all suffering, too.
