The leopards finally got round to Milo

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 08:19:32 +1000

In October 2015 Adrian Bott wrote a 25-word tweet that has outlived most political careers.

“‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”

It now has its own Wiktionary entry. It gets wheeled out every time someone is astonished to discover that the policy they campaigned for applies to them too. This week the leopards ate far right agitator and Trump supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos.

The campaign

Yiannopoulos is a British far‑right political commentator and former senior editor at Breitbart News, best known for his provocative, anti–political correctness style. Along with Steven Bannon he played an active role in getting Trump elected in 2016.

He most recently entered the United States in May 2019, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and stayed. From that position, as a non-citizen living on someone else’s paperwork, he spent 2025 demanding that the Trump administration deport people like him.

In June last year he posted: “We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.” A week later he wanted California to have “ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally”.

Read that second one again. On the spot. No hearing. No lawyer. No phone call. That was the ask.

The leopard

Last Thursday ICE officers arrested him at New Orleans airport. By the weekend he was back in the United Kingdom. DHS says an immigration judge issued a final order of removal on 22 July after he failed to show up for his own hearing. He disputes that, says he is married to an American and says he held a green card. None of which mattered on the day, which is rather the point of on the spot deportation.

The Guardian’s Anna Betts reports that he surfaced on Piers Morgan’s show on Tuesday. The quotes are extraordinary.

“For the first time I know what it feels like to be really, really terrified.”

“I didn’t really understand the physical reality of how institutionalised the brutality is in America.”

“No one would tell me anything.”

“I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

And the one that closes the loop:

“If I had any clue that anything remotely like this was even possible, I would never have gotten involved in supporting Trump in the first place and I’m very ashamed that I did.”

Nothing remotely like this

He had every clue. He wrote the clues down. Checkpoints at the supermarket. On the spot removal. Millions and millions and millions. The only new information Yiannopoulos received last week is that the machine does not check your politics before it checks your papers.

That was always the design. A deportation apparatus built for speed and volume cannot afford to distinguish a Breitbart editor from a Honduran fruit picker, and nobody who cheered it on asked it to. “No one would tell me anything” is not a malfunction. It is the product working as advertised, and he was one of the people writing the advertisements.

Bott’s tweet is nearly eleven years old. It keeps getting quoted because the genre it describes never runs short of new material. The Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party has just lost a member, and the leopards are not sorry.

Sources:

Deported Milo Yiannopoulos says he is ‘ashamed’ of support for Trump - Anna Betts, The Guardian
Milo Yiannopoulos detained by ICE - The Guardian
Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party - Wiktionary
Original tweet, 16 October 2015 - Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn)
Milo Yiannopoulos post on deporting “millions and millions and millions” - @Nero on X, June 2025
Milo Yiannopoulos post on ICE checkpoints in California - @Nero on X, June 2025

Rambling Rows

The leopards finally got round to Milo

The campaign

The leopard

Nothing remotely like this