He was one of the most vocal early supporters of Donald Trump’s mass deportations – beguiling the credulous icons of the President’s inner circle with his purported intellectualism and carefully maintained British accent.
But after Milo Yiannopoulos became mired in scandal over his remarks on underage sex, the commentator and influencer broke with Trump to become one of Maga’s most divisive figures.
Yiannopoulos’s downfall and eviction from the United States, after he reportedly overstayed the expiration of his visa, looks much like a case of hubris – but it was also masterminded by the hard-right community that once embraced him.
A haunted, unkempt mugshot shows the 41-year-old scowling at the camera from inside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre as he realises that the jig is finally up.
Twenty-four hours later, with none of the fanfare that has traditionally attached itself to his various antics, Yiannopoulos was unceremoniously marched on to a jet and deported back to the UK, his efforts to salvage what was left of his career brought to an abrupt halt by his arrest at Louis Armstrong New Orleans airport last Thursday.
Yiannopoulos cannot have expected to survive for long, living illegally in the US. But his deportation was also carefully orchestrated by other influencers within Trump’s inner circle who had fallen out with him and concluded that America – and particularly, its far-right movement – would be better off without him.
To be fair to Yiannopoulos – a man of limited range but inestimable self-confidence – his far-right, British schtick served him well for several years in the US. He emerged on the scene as a campus speaker, writer and editor for the conservative website Breitbart News, the bible for Trump and his Make America Great Again followers in much the same way as The New York Times fills that role for America’s liberal elite.
The hard-right commentator at the University of California’s Berkeley campus in September 2017 (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP)Born in Kent, Yiannopoulos boasted a CV that included dropping out of the University of Manchester and then getting expelled from Wolfson College, Cambridge – alluring credentials for a man looking to burrow into the engine room of Maga.
At Breitbart, Yiannopoulos honed his rage-bait viewpoints. Feminism, he argued, makes women ugly and is tantamount to cancer. He claimed that women would only be happy if the birth control pill and washing machine were “uninvented”. He was also an early voice condemning transgender rights, claiming he would prefer teenagers to self-harm than discuss trans issues online.
His Breitbart career came to a sudden end in February 2017, weeks after Trump first took office. Remarks resurfaced that Yiannopoulos had made a year earlier in a podcast suggesting he endorsed sexual relations between “younger boys and older men”.
Describing his own experiences as a gay “sexually aware, promiscuous 13- to 14-year-old perfectly able to give consent”, he said that relationships between 13-year-olds and 25- or 28-year-olds “do happen, perfectly consensually”. He later claimed to have been quoted out of context.
For Breitbart and Maga, Yiannopoulos had touched one of the few third rails in America’s hard-right movement – paedophilia. The fury of Trump’s grassroots over the crimes of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein meant that Yiannopoulos was quickly cast out into the cold. He lost a $250,000 (£184,000) book deal and prominent speaking engagements in the process.
He attempted various comebacks, including signing on as an unpaid congressional intern for former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2022, whose stance as an aggressive anti-paedophile campaigner demanding full transparency over the Epstein files led to her own falling out with Trump. Yiannopoulos may have hoped his association with her would somehow steer him back to respectability among the Maga in-crowd.
Twelve months ago, Yiannopoulos’ break with Trump was complete. Appearing on Candace Owens’ podcast, he claimed to have been one of seven original members of Maga who determined that Trump was the vehicle they needed to transform America. Even before this year’s US war on Iran, he said, he had concluded that the President was “bought, paid-for, owned and operated” by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He hoped in future to “make it politically impossible to run for president … and be an unreconstructed Zionist”.
Yiannopoulos’s undoing appears to have been orchestrated by Trump whisperer Laura Loomer, another maven of the far-right. Once friendly, they appear to have had a spectacular falling out, with Loomer announcing on social media that she had tipped ICE off about Yiannopoulos’ immigration status after “he incited violence against President Trump” and “called for me to be assassinated”.
She provided no evidence to support those claims but trumpeted that “Milo is going to be deported back to the UK, where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace”.
In the UK, Yiannopoulos now faces unenviable choices. With a chequered career behind him, the hypocrisy of his position on Trump’s deportation campaign is a stain on his character that will not easily be overcome. He may never be permitted to enter the United States again. But with 815,000 followers on X he still has something of a blow-torch at his disposal, and no shortage of far-right figures in the UK who may yet embrace him.
In the meantime, Yiannopoulos’s many detractors will celebrate his departure from America, and revel in a message he published on X on 5 June last year.
“There is one concrete thing we must insist on this administration delivering,” he wrote. “We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.”
Fifteen months later, the author was grimacing for his own ICE close-up.
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