The Milo and Loomer Fall Out

Funny and Scary

There’s a grimly satisfying irony in the news that the right-wing ‘provocateur’, as the news media calls him, Milo Yiannopoulis was deported by ICE last week. His name now recalls another era: he’s MAGA 1.0. This is the culmination of a long fall, as he went from the alt-right’s most visible public figure to a greatly diminished character skulking around for employment on the edges of the movement. He lost the funding from the Mercer family when the extent of his association with white nationalists became public. In his saddest bid for reinvention and renewed relevance, he eventually announced that he was “ex-gay,” rededicated himself publicly to Catholicism, and declared that he wanted to rehabilitate conversion therapy.

Milo found himself on the wrong side of a MAGA feud between the anti-Israel and anti-semitic—Milo is Jewish by birth, a fact that has not prevented his open flirtation with Nazism—national socialist wing and its fascist, imperialist and ultra-Zionist wing. As Kayne West’s chief of staff, Yiannopoulos was a key was instrumental in bringing Nick Fuentes to Mar-a-Lago. His old pal Laura Loomer, a deranged Batman villain who has extended her career as alt-right clown by hitching her wagon to Israel, crowed that she had sicced ICE on Milo, who had overstayed his visa. (Milo had previously proposed ICE checkpoints at supermarkets, where anyone unable to produce proof of legal residence would be summarily deported, but it feels ingenuous to point out hypocrisy at this late date—Milo never meant white people.)

There’s at least circumstantial evidence to take Loomer’s boasts seriously. This is not the first time she has presented herself as a kind of freelance commissar for Trumpism. In April 2025, Loomer met Trump in the Oval Office and urged him to purge National Security Council staff whom she considered insufficiently loyal to MAGA. The next day, at least three senior NSC officials and several lower-level aides were fired.

Here’s where the wry smile of Schadenfreude must give way to the furrowed brow. On its social media sites, ICE publicized its deportation with a mugshot of Milo. Think about it: the security state is being used to settle factional disputes in the ruling party. And apparently at the behest of a person–have you seen this woman?—who makes the screeching Goebbels seem like a paragon of steadiness. Manifestly insane and idiotic people are running our government. They are using its tools to punish and humiliate their enemies. What country are we living in?

It’s easy to dismiss Loomer and Yiannopoulos as two particularly flamboyant and strange characters, but they are just exaggerated caricatures of a broader right wing that broadly shares their features. The state has been captured by influencers and propagandists. This is how these people fight each other: They are low, miserable bastards and bitches. You can expect an uptick in doxxing, lawfare, and the release of kompromat—remember that fun term?—as factions position themselves for the Trump succession. If this is how they treat their former friends, how will they treat their enemies?