Loomer says she reported Yiannopoulos to ICE and FBI
Milo Yiannopoulos, the British-born far-right provocateur, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana and deported from the United States this week, according to Guardian US columnist Moira Donegan. In an opinion column published this week, Donegan wrote that several of the influencers who once competed with Yiannopoulos are now claiming victory and declaring themselves responsible for his removal.
Yiannopoulos was among the first media figures to ride the “gamergate” controversy and the rightwing populist wave that brought Donald Trump to office in 2016, Donegan wrote. An editor of Breitbart News from 2014 to 2017, he built a following through what she described as algorithm-optimized outrage bait — writing a story mocking a feminist or firing off a tweet saying something racist about Muslims, then watching the ensuing firestorm raise his profile.
His standing eroded over the years that followed. He was banned from Twitter, then from Facebook, and was banned from Australia, Donegan wrote. In 2017 he resigned from Breitbart and lost a book deal with Simon and Schuster after comments resurfaced in which he claimed that sexual abuse of children by adults could be consensual and “hugely positive experiences” — comments he later apologized for.
Donegan wrote that Yiannopoulos spent the past few years at the fringe of the right, working with figures including former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, and the antisemitic rapper who now goes by Ye. In one bid for relevance, she wrote, he declared himself “ex-gay” and set about promoting conversion therapy.
Loomer, a far-right influencer and conspiracist who has become a confidante of Trump, quickly claimed to have orchestrated Yiannopoulos’s arrest. “I reported him to ICE and the FBI,” Loomer posted. “I told you all that Milo was an illegal alien.”
Donegan noted there is reason to take Loomer seriously: last year, Trump fired several high-ranking national security officials after their names appeared on a list of alleged enemies that Loomer presented to him in the Oval Office.
As Anna Merlan of Mother Jones reported, two other far-right influencers — Raheem Kassam, a onetime Breitbart UK editor and current Washington DC restaurateur, and Benny Johnson, a Maga-aligned writer and social media personality — also claimed to have advance knowledge of the Department of Homeland Security’s plans to remove and deport Yiannopoulos. If the boasts are true, Donegan wrote, it would mean at best that figures within DHS are leaking information about confidential proceedings to online grifters, and at worst that the federal security apparatus is being deployed to settle internet feuds among influencers.
Donegan argued the deportation is more than another case of the “Maga revolution eating its children.” She wrote that it appears to be the product of a bigger rupture within the Trump movement, in which the isolationist, anti-Zionist, and increasingly antisemitic faction is in revolt against Trump and the neoconservative, expansionist, pro-Israel and pro-military wing that persuaded him to go to war with Iran.
Donegan described the war as unpopular and unwinnable. She wrote that as it drags on, sending prices soaring and making it seem more likely that irate voters will look to punish Republicans in the November midterms, major players within the coalition are looking to dilute their own responsibility and find someone else to blame — and that Yiannopoulos’s deportation may be one instance in the fight to come as those figures seek to throw one another under the bus.
Donegan wrote that there is “always a bit of schadenfreude” in watching the Trump camp dissolve into infighting, but that there is “something gruesome” about seeing the government deployed this way. “It is humiliating to be ruled over by such people — conspiracists and bigots and idiots, people without virtue or competence or even dignity to match their power,” she wrote.