The Worst of the Younger Generation

 Well, Milo Yiannopoulos—that one-time enfant teribble of the MAGA alt-right—has been deported from the country, allegedly for overstaying his visa. 

Before anyone crows about this as poetic justice, though—or, still worse, concludes something like "wow, ICE may be cruel, but at least they're even-handed!"—John Ganz cautions us that this deportation appears to have been almost entirely the product of a creepy factional dispute within MAGA. 

Laura Loomer has claimed credit for ejecting him from the country; and she has a track record of influencing actual personnel decisions in the White House. "If this is how they treat their former friends," Ganz rightly asks, "how will they treat their enemies?"

In the same way that the Night of the Long Knives was not a good thing just because some Nazis ended up on the sharp end of the blade, then, we should not be gratified that the American far-right sometimes decides to eat one of their own. 

In one of the many ironies of fate about Yiannopoulos's case, he reportedly once used the phrase "longknives" in an email password, in one of his various winking overtures to the Nazi faction of MAGA (he has also worked for Kanye and allegedly brokered the Nick Fuentes/Trump meeting in 2022).

Now, Yiannopoulos has found that the long knives have come for him. The Trump MAGA movement he served so well—and helped to radicalize—and helped to install in power in 2017—has dispensed with him, now that they no longer find him useful. 

As one of Richard III's quondam allies puts it in Shakespeare's play, now that he realizes his own head is about to be on the chopping block: And is it thus? Repays he my deep service / With such contempt? Made I him King for this?

Some of Yiannopoulos's most trollish behavior from Trump's first term may sound tame by the standards of any given tweet from the official government social media accounts of today's DHS or the Pentagon. Milo, at least, never posted snuff films of his own extrajudicial killings. 

And Milo at least reportedly made some weak excuses about eye trouble when he was filmed surrounded by Nazi salutes—whereas our current administration just uses white nationalist anthems unapologetically in its recruitment ads. 

But it's worth at least recalling the fact that Milo publicly supported mass deportation—seemingly up to the moment he fell victim to it himself. As the Guardian notes, he wrote just last year: "We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters."

Now, he is one of those millions. The leopard ate his face, as they say. I am reminded once again of one of my favorite poems of D.H. Lawrence's:

The worst of the younger generation, those Latter-Day sinners,
is that they calmly assert: We only thrill to perversity, murder, suicide, rape
Bragging a little, really,
and at the same time, expect to go on calmly eating good dinners for the next fifty years,
They say: Après moi le deluge! and calmly expect
that the deluge will never be turned on them, only after them.
Post me, nihil!—But perhaps, my dears,
nihil will come along and hit you on the head.

Milo was one of those young firebrands and provocateurs of the Trump 1.0 period who openly courted "nihil" and "the deluge." They winked and snickered about Nazism and rape and racism and mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing and said—"it'll never happen to me; only after me." 

But this week, the deluge came for Milo. He reaped the whirlwind he had helped to sow. Nihil came along and hit him on the head. 

"If I had any clue that anything remotely like this was even possible," he apparently told Piers Morgan in a follow-up interview after his expulsion, "I would never have gotten involved in supporting Trump in the first place and I’m very ashamed that I did."

Made I him King for this?