And Then It Was Over: Milo Yiannopoulous Has Been Deported
Twenty-four hours. Notice that detail in the lede from
CNN↱:
British right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was deported Friday to the United Kingdom, according to a spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security.
Yiannopoulos was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Thursday at a Louisiana airport after overstaying his visa, DHS said.
The conservative figure was being held by ICE in Louisiana, where several ICE facilities have served as the final stop for thousands of migrants in President Donald Trump’s deportation push.
Milo Yannopoulos was arrested on Thursday and removed from the country the next day.
So, let's be political, for a moment: Any liberal can tell you this is wrong, and that accords with a general pursuit of due process and justice over the years. Any conservative cna also tell you this is wrong because they think some people should be privileged above the law.
And between the two, it was conservatives who voted for the pogrom that just violated Yiannopoulos' rights.
Because that's the kind of people they are. So, sometimes someone might wonder why everybody is so mad when they
just ... but that's the thing, it's no
just or
merely. These voters didn't want an orderly solution to the problems they imagined. That's why the would-be solution to their imagined crisis is a pogrom, and the only remaining rightist argument at this point would seem to be
to complain that somebody said pogrom↗.
It's like the question of the despised and the vulnerable. There's a fafo about how they deported someone's wife or father or whatever, but that person voted for the pogrom, and when they say no, that's not what they voted for, what they mean is that the pogrom wasn't supposed to touch them or affect theirs. And it is very important, for those who choose ridicule, to focus on that part of the lamentation; we should not laugh at the deported victims. But akin to rich men dying in stupid submarine adventures, the deportation of Milo Yiannopoulos is an example of when the despised and vulnerable become one and the same.
And even if we wanted to help poor Milo, nobody would have had any time. Twenty-four hours. Due process is not defined as whatever process the institutions are willing to afford. And for those who sought to prove that wrong, this is what it looks like. Not only are they deporting their supporters, but they are also trying to show you the futility of resistance. They didn't raise a new instrument but their own new master. Them doity libs cheated by not fulfilling dire predictions of authoritarianism and the destruction of the Constitution, so conservatives hired Republicans to do the job. And it worked out very nicely for them, since that mission coincided with the Republican politic of recent generations, one of its most durable values and enduring attractions.
Congratulations. They must be so proud. And what happened to Milo is just the candle on the icing on the dog that followed the dust that followed the horse they rode in on.
He might have had white enough skin for Breitbart, and came from one of the most favored foreign lands, and had all the right attitudes about women and nonwhites, but at the end of the day his name is Yiannopoulos, not something actually English like Smith or Starmer or Farage. And let's face it, being an American citizen, even natural-born, doesn't save people from being deported.
It's also worth nodding to
Wheeler↱, who reminds, "Mug shots are inherently abusive (except for the one of the ICE goon who lied about why he shot two people I posted yesterday)." And while it's true, there is actually a difference, there is also this: That mugshot of Yiannopoulos, for some, might suggest this somehow isn't about skin color, but it also tells people something about who isn't white enough. For instance, during the First Trump Administration, a sitting Attorney General (and former U.S. Senator) invoked
"Anglo-American heritage"↗, and toward the question of controversy about those remarks, I might have said—
For most of us, "Anglo-American" is something we only hear from white supremacists, and it's kind of a weird, specialized thing, because it excludes other whites.
No, really. The term has little or no use to most people. To wit, I can't imagine a day, other than one in which a white supremacist invokes Anglo-American heritage, that I would take the time to point out specifically, by such a term, that, "Anglo-American heritage includes persecution sexual, ethnic, and religious; and, furthermore, the incompetent loss of a continent."
And, you know, I come from a region shot through with white supremacism and nationalism, and one of the reasons people don't bother with terms like "Anglo-American", for instance, is that if you live in Seattle, for instance, you live in a place where the Norwegian-American heritage is so thick that not only do we lead with Norwegian jokes instead of disparaging the Polish, successive Kings of Norway have turned up to hang out in Ballard, of all places. Anglo-American? Ya, sure, you betcha ... and?
—but even then certain other connections just didn't occur to mind, such as the revival of anti-Nordic sentiment among white supremacists.¹
Insofar as this goes beyond the Trump administration, it can even be suggested to exceed the Southern Strategy. I mean, it should be silly to propose that these are Tories holding out for one last desperate chance at victory, but even these tories wouldn't actually know they're Tories, because they believe in alternative facts of history derived from sincerely held beliefs, or, as the theologian² put it, relying "less on instinctive deference to inherited confessions and more on self-evident propositions organized by scientific method".
The thing is, nobody really knows how
far this goes. But history also tells us the shape of what is happening, both the affecting detail and more general themes of paradigmatic evolution. And the question of whether one is
white Anglo white enough is not excluded or unaffecting. It's unclear what
all to make of that, but a seemingly inevitable testing of two plus two will involve funny-sounding names of natural-born Americans. They are, after all, hoping to deport between a quarter and third of the population.
____________________
Notes:
¹
cf., "ICE agents murder bystanders in Minneapolis" #
98↗,
100↗,
in re "Scandinavian cultural transplants" and "Scandinavian imperviousness to Nazi ideology" ca. 1937.
² Mark Noll's description of American Christendom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will find various manifestations in postchristian application; making the point is extraneous and distracting in the moment.
See "On Discussing Religion"
#1↗ (2021) for a basic sketch. And it can be a very important discussion when appropriately applied.
