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 MAGA right’s critics – Yiannopoulos’s critics – appeared........

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