Katie Hopkins - Beyond Bigotry

The behaviour of some pundits out there on the rabid, paranoid, insular nationalist right does not improve over time, no matter how much slack they are cut or whether they are ignored and left to their own devices. This, inevitably, leads us to pro-am motormouth Katie Hopkins, who saw the tragic drowning of five young Londoners at Camber Sands the other day not as a time for quiet reflection, but an opportunity to spread a little more hatred.

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So it was that, like the hacks at her previous berth, the Sun - the paper that dispensed with her services because she was too poisonous even for them - Hatey Katie did not concern herself with waiting for such minor inconveniences as facts, but immediately concluded that the five must have been illegal migrants. This may not have been true, but it fitted her agenda and her paranoid state, which for her is more important.

Ms Hopkins took to Twitter to conduct what she no doubt believed was a jolly funny poll, stating “5 dead at Camber Sands were …”, with the possible answers “Aspiring footballers”, “Mentally Ill”, “Fans of Anders Brevik [sic]”, and “Big fans of inflatables”. Thus her own prejudices: nobody who is not white is allowed to suffer from any kind of mental health condition, because they’re all Scary Muslims (tm) and terrorists!

And the Police all over Europe are covering it up! That, and the other equally unfunny and feeble not-so-wisecracks did not impress very many people, and those least impressed included Sussex Police, who, in a bizarre twist, concluded that, while nothing criminal had been done, they would report Hatey Katie to Twitter anyway. Whether forcibly or otherwise, the Twitter poll has since been removed. But that was not the end of it.

Why should that be? Well, if you’re going to have a self-awareness failure, you might as well do it properly, and Ms Hopkins has in her lack of wisdom decided that, no matter how significant the show of disgust at her bigoted insensitivity, she was right, and she would make sure all those rotten lefty whingers knew it.

So after the BBC reported “Six men are due to be interviewed by Border Force officers after being recovered from a small boat off the Kent coast this morning”, off went Hatey Katie to shout “look over there”, Tweeting “Not to worry, as long as we are policing Twitter, all will be well”. Hello Katie, the five dead were still not migrants.

Oh, and the Police were not “policing Twitter”, they had merely passed it on to, er, Twitter. That was a concept Ms Hopkins found too challenging to grasp, and hence off she went again: “Our police are busy policing Twitter. So I thought I'd go try and offer our hard grafting truckers any help I can”. Well, quite so, they might have some sympathy with all those refugees, and that would never do - Katie to the rescue to stiffen their sinews with few tutorials in plain old-fashioned paranoid bigotry.

Katie Hopkins is so blinded by her combination of prejudice and paranoia that she cannot see when she is not just wrong, but totally out of order. And it’s pointless suggesting she says sorry, because her intellectual capacity does not stretch that far. Sad, really.