HARDLY A WEEK passes without someone angrily and righteously sticking a link to one petition or other on their Facebook page and inviting their mates to sign up to demand something or someone be stopped/banned/imprisoned/sacked/tarred and feathered or whatever. Duly followed by said mates posting a smug “Done” in reply.
It rarely gets anything done but it does allow the social justice warriors to let off steam and feel they’ve saved humanity from itself yet again.
Katie Hopkins, businesswoman, columnist, all-round controversialist and sporter of such epithets as “the most hated woman in Britain”, “rentagob”, “professional shit-stirrer”, “xenophobic” and “viscous” — yes, presumably vicious in a sticky sort of way — has attracted a number of such petitions calling for her to be silenced.
Last year she tweeted some unpleasant comments about a Scottish nurse who developed ebola after returning from Africa: “Little sweaty jocks, sending us Ebola bombs in the form of sweaty Glaswegians just isn’t cricket. Scottish NHS sucks,” she said. A tad rude, I have to say, but pretty anodyne compared to the things many “sweaty jocks” say about the English all the time with impunity. Anyway, It was enough to trigger the tartan milquetoasts into action. She was branded racist (what else?) and petitions were launched demanding she be dragged in front of the beak and banged to rights.
Such is the febrile atmosphere in the country that drawing attention to an uncomfortable fact is enough to provoke the ire of the Twitter mob and the indignation of the elite.
More was to follow when she engaged in a spat with Labour MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk. She took issue with him for “his decision to mark National Pakistan Day on 23 March in Rochdale by raising the Pakistani flag for 30 minutes.” According to Hopkins this wasn’t the right thing to do given that of nine men prosecuted for being part of a local paedophile ring eight were of Pakistani origin. Many people would agree with her on that, since the majority of men prosecuted for similar crimes up and down the country recently have been from the Pakistani community. Such is the febrile atmosphere in the country, however, that drawing attention to an uncomfortable fact is enough to provoke the ire of the Twitter mob and the indignation of the elite. Danczuk predictably (automatically, robotically, tiresomely) said he had reported Hopkins to the local plods for possibly inciting racial hatred.
Shortly after that she compounded her crime by likening the migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe to cockroaches. This must have been important because even the United Nations joined in the outrage. Zeid Ra’Ad Al Hussein, High Commissioner for Human Rights, castigated Hopkins for using language that was “clearly inflammatory and unacceptable”. Al Hussein describes himself as an “unswerving advocate of free expression” although like most of his ilk he swerves pretty quickly when it comes to anyone expressing opinions contrary to the liberal orthodoxy to which he subscribes.
The Society of Black Lawyers also saw an opportunity to big itself up over the issue and reported Hopkins to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. I bet they’re hoping this won’t be their only moment in the sunlight of publicity, courtesy of hopkins and others.
‘I don’t give a damn if her contrarianism is completely fake.’
THERE ARE PEOPLE who think that Hopkins only makes these outrageous comments to garner publicity (and hence work) for herself. I don’t know whether this is true or not. It is certainly an effective tactic for creating a brouhaha. Personally, I don’t give a damn if her contrarianism is completely fake. It serves the purpose of agitating the bien pensants by reminding them they don’t have a monopoly on opinion and haven’t managed to shut everyone up. No one in the media or the political elite will discuss these issues (immigration, the failure of the multicultural project, the problem of islamisation, the increasing stifling of individual expression, etc) in an honest way. People such as Hopkins act as public provocateurs, saying what millions think. What she does is help kick down the ever-encroaching fences of the self-elected speech police.
And talking of police — the real ones this time — the Scottish police have said there was “no evidence of criminality” in her ebola tweets. Well, of course not; as any intelligent person could tell you. Hopkins 1, milquetoasts 0. So isn’t it about time the police ignored these continuous requests to imprison people for what they say on Twitter? Isn’t it about time the idiots who constantly drag them into these spats were taken to court themselves for wasting police time?
When it comes to “sign here to shut this person up” petitions there’s none that can approach the monumentality of the “Bring Back Clarkson” one. This followed Jeremy Clarkson’s suspension by the BBC after his famous “fracas” in which he punched his producer in the face for not having a hot dinner on the table for him after a hard day’s filming of Top Gear. Unlike the petitions by the social justice warriors, this was a positive endorsement of someone — someone all the bien pensants hate, of course, and it received over a million signatures. The number calling for Hopkins’ immolation never made it to a quarter of that. The bigoted masses had typed in their names and hit Enter. The midget-minded commissars are in the minority and we should never let them forget it.
