Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained and deported British provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos last week. The official X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted his unflattering mugshot online, which has roughly 24 million views as of this writing. You would never guess, looking into that defeated face, that Yiannopoulos had been one of the earliest supporters of the President whose administration ultimately sent him packing.
Yiannopoulos built his brand as a habitual line-stepper who danced through the highest halls of right-wing celebrity, pioneering political provocation through the power of the internet. He rose from a sharp-tongued media fixture to blazing along the campus speaker circuit and inking Big Five book deals. But in a movement that is willing to tolerate Holocaust deniers, white supremacists and misogynists, Yiannopoulos finally crossed the one uncrossable line: Donald Trump. Turn on him, as the flamboyant firebrand did in the end, and protection will recede from you like the sea from the shore as a tsunami approaches.
What makes this story interesting, however, isn’t that Yiannopoulos got his comeuppance. It’s the fact that most of the people who defended him when it came leaned left and libertarian. In other words: it was the crowd that Yiannopoulos had spent his entire career attacking in the most offensive, uncharitable terms imaginable. And yet, their voices issued the most principled defenses of liberty and individual rights while his former comrades largely gloated at the ignominy of his fall. The image brought into relief by that contrast showed how the MAGA right’s critics – Yiannopoulos’s critics – are more civilized, more virtuous and hold a stronger claim to the moral high-ground.
“Let him go unless he’s a violent or property criminal,” wrote Alex Nowrasteh, the senior vice president for policy at the Cato Institute. “It doesn’t matter that I don’t like him, I don’t want to deport people just because I disagree with their politics.”
Sam Biederman, a public relations specialist for civic institutions, described the treatment of Yiannopoulos and detainees in general as a “violation of human dignity & good governance.”
“I get that people are enjoying the fact that Milo Yiannopoulos – who gleefully cheered mass deportations – has now been hoisted [sic] on his own petard,” wrote Patrick Jaicomo, a litigator at the Institute for Justice. “But we should all be leery of the continued weaponization of federal law enforcement against the government’s (or its allies’) critics.”
Democratic strategist Mike Nellis called Yiannopoulos a “garbage human being,” but concluded that it is “not great that the federal government will target and embarrass someone like this because Laura Loomer doesn’t like them.”
Nellis is right. Yiannopoulos indeed overstayed his visa, but that doesn’t change the fact that this was a campaign to humiliate a Trump-supporter-turned-defector. If the decision to parade his mugshot wasn’t a hint enough, MAGA influencer Laura Loomer removed any doubt. Loomer, a Trump enforcer who enjoys remarkable access to the corridors of power, told the Washington Post that she is “100 percent” responsible for his fate. She claimed on X that he had “incited violence against President Trump,” but didn’t explain how. Not that she needed evidence. The right has largely devolved into a cult of personality around Trump – and going against the leader is perceived as, in a sense, a violent act, one that can be met with violence in turn.
If Yiannopoulos were mistreated or even killed during this process, there’s little doubt many on the right would make peace with it. It would, at best, be rationalized as the self-inflicted tragedy of a man who forgot his place; at worst, his demise would be met with the same glee as the killings by federal agents of Renée Good and Alex Pretti during the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Perhaps that seems like a claim beyond the pale. But surely some would have said the same about the notion that the awesome machinery of Homeland Security would be weaponized for right-wing score-settling.
None of this is surprising when you understand the right as a movement not governed by laws or principles but by will.
People balked when the New York Young Republican Club declared in a statement that Trump’s “soul is totally bonded” with the right’s “core values and emotions.” Certainly, there’s an element of attention-seeking there. But it also accurately describes the right as a movement led by a man who said himself that he recognizes no limits on his power apart from his own “morality.” It follows from Trump’s vision of power that his supporters will also see themselves unbound by any external restraints, justifying their actions solely on the “who whom” principle, reducing the objective of politics to nothing loftier than distinguishing between an ever-shifting gallery of friends and enemies. That is how you get a regime that threatens allies abroad who refuse to kowtow, while assaulting the First Amendment at home with the same post-9/11 security apparatus it uses to make examples of critics and defectors.
The way the right is configured in the age of MAGA is very effective at demolishing opposition in the pursuit of power. It is a wrecking ball and a lit stick of dynamite. However, it’s incapable of building and sustaining a flourishing political order. Partly because it refuses to recognize authority beyond its own power and constantly seeks to undermine external constraints, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because it cultivates vice instead of virtue in the individual. It preaches revenge instead of forgiveness, viciousness rather than compassion, sadism over magnanimity. These are qualities one would want in the subjects of a tyranny, and “I fucking love tyranny,” Yiannopoulos declared last year. “Tyranny please,” he reiterated.
As it turned out, the opponents of tyranny were among the only people who defended Yiannopoulos. Not because he is special or even likable, but out of recognition of principles that stand above any individual – principles that serve as the support struts of civilization. And that is why these people, clustered along the political spectrum opposite the MAGA right, have a better claim to being defenders of political order.
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