Before last week, Milo Yiannopoulos was one of the most noxious, divisive, and broadly unpopular far-right figures in the country, having whittled down his allies in the movement over the past decade with a combination of exuberant misogyny and bigotry, catty infighting, an infamous moment of pedophilia apologism, and increasingly pointed criticism of Donald Trump. Now, he’ll have to settle for being a broadly divisive and unpopular figure in the UK, having been swiftly and very publicly deported back to his home country on Friday after being arrested at the New Orleans airport.

But while Yiannopoulos’ deportation contains an extremely rich vein of schadenfreude—he previously called for deporting “millions and millions of people” and joked about masturbating while witnessing ICE raids—it’s also indicative of how power, punishment, and influence currently work in the MAGA movement, and broader crackup within that feud-heavy world, where fragile alliances are constantly being made, broken and remade anew. Three far-right figures—Trump confidante Laura Loomer, former Breitbart UK editor Raheem Kassem, and MAGA propagandist Benny Johnson—have either taken credit for or claimed advance knowledge of Yiannopoulos’ deportation. All have indicated they’re in communication with inside sources at the Department of Homeland Security, who shared what would normally be confidential information about a supposed hunt for Milo, who had allegedly overstayed his visa, in order to remove him. And both Loomer and Kassem implied that more of their enemies could face imprisonment and deportation very soon.

Yiannopoulos is, to be overly clear, no one’s idea of a sympathetic victim and someone whose favor even with his ideological fellow travelers has been steadily waning for years. A Breitbart columnist from 2014 to 2017 and an enthusiastic early backer of Trump, he mostly made his name in the mid-2000s as a gleefully offensive all-purpose troll and rank Islamophobe who was barred from Australia in 2019 for branding the religion “barbaric” in the wake of the Christchurch, New Zealand terrorist attacks. He was also an enthusiastic backer of Gamergate, a supposed crusade for ethics in video game........

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