ICE agents arrested Milo Yiannopoulos at New Orleans airport on Thursday. DHS officials say that he will be deported to Britain for overstaying the visa, and marked the occasion by posting his mugshot online.

The deportation marks a remarkable fall from grace for a man who, at his early 2017 peak, held Mercer family patronage, a Simon & Schuster book contract, a Breitbart pulpit and a CPAC speaking slot. His career arc is like a compressed version of the online Right’s own evolution, and his removal from the country is the logical endpoint of the process.

A speedrun, in gamer parlance, is an attempt to beat a game in record time. Yiannopoulos did just that with the political movements around him: the alt-Right devoured the “cuckservative” and neocon establishment, MAGA absorbed the alt-Right, and the Groypers are now gnawing at MAGA’s bones. Yiannopoulos ran through each stage ahead of the movement itself, burning through one political incarnation after another until he met his sorry end.

He came onto the scene during Gamergate, the 2014 online campaign in which video-game fans, nominally exercised about “ethics in games journalism”, took aim at feminist critics and female developers. Yiannopoulos, then an obscure British tech blogger, championed the mob in a string of columns and was rewarded with a position at Breitbart. Until then, Right-wing provocation had been the province of radio shock jocks and Fox News talking heads. Yiannopoulos proved a virtual unknown with a keyboard could do the job better.

His great innovation consisted of translating the emerging internet culture — gaming, alt-Right politics, meme warfare — into a product that mainstream conservative institutions would buy. The “Dangerous Faggot” tour, a deliberately incendiary 2016-17 campus circuit aimed at feminism, Islam and political correctness, ran on Robert Mercer family money (the financial backing for Breitbart). When a February 2017 riot led by Left-wing students at the University of California, Berkeley forced the cancellation of one of his tour stops, Yiannopoulos became the online Right’s first extremely online martyr. Even Donald Trump came to his defence, threatening to withhold federal funds from the university.

Unfortunately for Yiannopoulos, the expulsions eventually came from within his own team. Breitbart forced him out in February 2017 for comments he made about paedophilia that also cost him a Simon & Schuster book deal and a CPAC slot. The Mercers, major financial backers of Breitbart, cut his funding in November 2017 after BuzzFeed published emails showing him working white-nationalist talking points into the magazine’s copy.

After a few years in exile, Yiannopoulos resurfaced in Ye’s presidential orbit, only to be pushed out after the 2022 Mar-a-Lago dinner at which he helped bring Nick Fuentes into Trump’s orbit — a dinner he later claimed was designed to make Trump’s life miserable. He spiralled down the food chain, eventually resurfacing in 2022 as an unpaid intern in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s congressional office.

When Trump returned to the White House, Yiannopoulos’s own star was already fading. He mustered a few appearances on Tucker Carlson’s and Candace Owens’s podcasts — at one point telling Owens that Trump was “bought, paid for, owned and operated” by Israel — but could not recapture the audience he once had. Now, all that’s left for him is a flight back home to Britain.

A decade ago, Yiannopoulos’s great talent was translating internet provocation for mainstream conservatives. Once the Right learned to speak fluent internet itself, the translator became redundant. Now, with his return to Britain imminent, the man who taught the online Right that there is no such thing as bad publicity will have to test that proposition from home.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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