I’m getting tired of this ‘Free Speech’ defence. I’m getting tired of her being given a soapbox to defend her hateful comments as ‘opinion’. Opinion is great if it’s backed up by facts. Otherwise it’s just some bullshit that some dumb person has said.
Katie Hopkins and cockroaches
Being outspoken is one thing, I’m more than aware of that.
But calling people cockroaches, suggesting we greet those trying to escape the financial, envirionemental, social and cultural decay of the rest of the world to a country that is loaded and puts on a facade of acceptability and liberalism, isn’t fucking on. She is stoking the fires of an ugly, xenophobic and insular trend in British opinion and she expects to get away with it cos ‘it’s a free country ain’t it’.
She can say whatever she wants, I won’t take that away from her. But free speech works both fucking ways and if people from all backgrounds are saying ‘that’s fucking horrible, what’s your damage, why are you so toxic?’, there is a quantifiable issue.
Having read her latest article, it’s hard to think of anything left for Katie Hopkins to do now, other than to just kill some people.
— Matt Lucas (@RealMattLucas) April 18, 2015
Freedom of speech
Speak freely, but expect people to speak back. The opinions that Katie Hopkins should be starved of attention, arrested or sacked are opinions that have logic behind them. Her words are damaging, her views amoral at best and her esteem built on dehumanising and demoralising human beings.
She is an icon and conduit of the worst elements of humanity and the furore she creates is how we know we’re still human beings with a shred of decency in an thoroughly indecent world.
I appreciate that she is a desperate, likely lonely and damaged human being. I appreciate that everyone has the right to be heard. But her voice is so fucking loud, obnoxious and bile-filled that people must and do recognise the hideous consequences her vulgar diatribes have. In fact, this week, the UN chastised the UK for allowing ‘irresponsible rhetoric’ to hamper the rescue of mediterranean migrants. Migrants fleeing form a third world our privilege created.
This Morning sofa-buddy
Hopkins reeks of privilege and an easy life. She’s been handed everything on a plate, and all for being ‘ballsy enough’ to say terrible, mean spirited and inhumane things for entertainment’s sake. But Frankie Boyle (or even Roy Chubby Brown) she is not, she is regarded as noteworthy journalist, not a hyperbolic comedic caracature. Where islamist hate preacher Anjem Choudary and his ilk were regarded as an extreme, outsider voice, Hopkins is a Big Brother contestant, editorial piece writing journalist and This Morning sofa-buddy. Her cultural acceptance swings British opinion vastly to the right and normalises the EDL/BNP/UKIP mindset. Her exposure to increasingly xenophobic minds in a mainstream newspaper heigtens the potential damage she could have. Hopkins is famous, a celebrity, for her hate-filled views.
.@KTHopkins to write about immigrants so hatefully you cannot love yourself. Come back to humanity, you must be shattered.
— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) April 17, 2015
The column should not have been run. As Owen Jones said it read like ‘Neo Nazi propaganda’ and that has no place in our daily Newspapers. The fact it can and did, is a bad omen. If this because commonplace, we are heading down a dark road. At least as she becomes increasingly desperate to hold onto a career built on hateful statements, she will edge ever closer to being arrested for hate crimes, jailed and out of the public sphere.
