MAGA Delights in a Post-Milo World

Right-wing media was rocked last Thursday when news broke that ICE agents had detained pro-Trump commentator Milo Yiannopoulos on an expired visa. Within hours of the story coming out, Yiannopoulos was on a plane back to his native United Kingdom, and the Department of Homeland Security had tweeted out a decidedly unglamorous mugshot.

Yiannopoulos’s decade-long reign as one of the American right’s leading provocateurs was over.

Many liberals have enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude at the news, noting that Yiannopoulos had himself called for widespread ICE checkpoints and ICE executions of protesters. He has even talked about getting sexually aroused by ICE detentions.

But the liberal reaction is nothing compared to the sheer delight of Yiannopoulos’s enemies on the right—many of them his former friends. From Zionists to groypers to a felonious former congressman, a coalition spanning the Trump movement has longed for the day Yiannopoulos might be physically removed from American politics.

Why was Yiannopoulos so hated among people who otherwise tolerate so much terrible behavior? Perhaps it’s because Yiannopoulos was clear-eyed about the circus that much of right-wing media has become.

Consider Yiannopoulos’s bitter feud with Laura Loomer, which may have precipitated his deportation. Loomer certainly thinks she’s responsible, telling me that she reported her former friend to Homeland Security years ago.

Loomer and Yiannopoulos were once best pals, existing on the fringes of the MAGA movement during the waning years of the first Trump administration. Back then, Loomer was grappling with her Twitter ban and Yiannopoulos was struggling to come back from the negative reaction to his lax stance on pedophilia. In 2018, they posed triumphantly together at the site of a fatal bridge collapse. In 2019, Yiannopoulos even joined Loomer at a rally in drag as Loomer herself. When Loomer ran for Congress in 2020, Yiannopoulos fundraised for her and flogged her campaign.

But by 2022, the love affair was over. Yiannopoulos had by then teamed up with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), alienating Loomer, who saw Greene as a rival. Loomer and Yiannopoulos traded legal letters about Yiannopoulos’s numerous accusations against Loomer (both sexual and financial), and Yiannopoulos claimed to be interviewing her former sexual partners.

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Then there were the right-wing media figures Yiannopoulos accused of being gay, like Nick Fuentes and pro-Trump podcaster Benny Johnson. Late last year, Johnson and his wife vowed to sue Yiannopoulos over his insistence that Johnson is gay. That lawsuit still hasn’t been filed. In the aftermath of the deportation, Johnson has now claimed he couldn’t sue Yiannopoulos because he was on the run from ICE.

There were more sexual peccadilloes alleged. Yiannopoulos broke the news of right-wing commentator Elijah Schaffer’s affair with a prominent trad-Catholic woman. Schaffer, emboldened by ICE, now claims he was the one to tip off ICE about Yiannopoulos.

Yiannopoulos once made a public show of paying child support for a child fathered by Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, mocking the would-be masculine leader as a deadbeat dad. To celebrate the deportation, Tarrio posted on X that he hoped ICE “pepper sprayed [Yiannopoulos] in his dickhole.”

In the aftermath of the deportation, there’s been some online excitement that Yiannopoulos could finally publish “the vault,” an external hard drive he would sometimes wave around in videos, McCarthy-like, claiming it held an archive of damaging material on his friends and enemies. Supposedly, he had a ‘dead man’s switch’ prepared in the event of his untimely demise: “If I go down my entire vault goes online within 24 hours.”

Color me skeptical. Yiannopoulos’s hard-drive treasure trove once intrigued lawyers for Charlottesville residents and protesters suing white-nationalist leader Richard Spencer and others involved in the planning of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, since Milo’s info holdings seemed to hold out the promise of a deeper look into the alt-right. Yiannopoulos initially cooperated with the plaintiffs, earning Spencer’s enmity. But he refused to hand over “the vault,” describing it in a court hearing as more of a “meme” or a “metaphor” for the “various things I’ve got up my sleeve about various previous reporting subjects” than an actual discrete thing.

With Yiannopoulos out of the country and “the vault” nowhere to be seen, it seems as though the clowns and philanderers in MAGA media can indeed rest a little easier. At least until he gets back online.