thebaffer

There are a lot of things I love about Katie Hopkins. She’s loud, she’s opinionated, she doesn’t give a toss what anyone thinks; she’s not a whiny cry baby who makes out she’s being bullied if you call her rude names. I know not everyone likes people like that, but I do.

She calls men “sweetypeeps” as she emasculates them and tucks their balls into her handbag, and best of all she doesn’t apologise for it. I’m not saying this is how all women should be, or even all people, but men behave like this far more regularly, and it’s nice to see a woman have a go occasionally.

Aggressive men nearly always manage to make women back down, but not Katie. I know too many women who could afford to be a little bit more Katie Hopkins.  That said, whilst I used to think she was a powerful category of woman, I now think she’s a first class cunt and I’m going to tell you why.

There are similarities between Katie and I that extend beyond our names. We look vaguely similar, (she could be my mum), we sound alike and we behave alike. I am aggressive, bullish, rude and unflinching, just like she is, so, unlike some of her legions of loathers, I can’t attack any of these things. Like me, she’s smart and well educated, so I’m not going to call her stupid when it’s not true. She seems to get people’s backs up very easily, I have that skill too (it’s actually surprisingly useful) although I also have the skill of super-charm to smooth it over, I’ve not seen evidence of this from Katie, although that’s not to say it isn’t there.

Katie and I come from similar backgrounds- hardworking, middle-class parents who focused their resources on giving their children a good, strong headstart with a private education. Both Katie and I are very privileged people; the main difference being that I recognise this, and she doesn’t seem to. This is the point that ignites my new found hate for her.

The first time I saw something of her that made me wish I didn’t like her so much was the interview on “This Morning” with Holly Willoughby. I don’t watch much TV, but a friend sent me a link to the video with the attached message “Haha! Turned on the telly and there you were, having a rant as usual!”.

https://youtu.be/-fKkMlPpjSA

Hopkins was laying into “lower-class” parents for naming their children things like “Apple” and “Brooklyn” (her daughters are called “Poppy” and “India”???) and saying that the name of a child is a clear indication of what ‘class’ their family is, and that working-class children are not suitable playmates for her infants. I defend people’s right to hold their opinions, even if I don’t agree with them, but when someone is educated, I expect them to be better researched, and not just spouting thoughts off the top of their head, especially on a national forum.

I was also uncomfortable with what I found to be a fairly disingenuous stance; I wasn’t convinced by her own belief in what she was saying. I don’t believe that people can help how they feel, which is why I will respect someone’s opinion, even if I hate it, but I didn’t believe it was her opinion. I’ve included the link to the clip so you can examine her body language. She is very measured as she is attacked by both presenters and the other guest, and she is does not display physical defence mechanisms. When our deeply held opinions are attacked, we naturally and uncontrollably do this because we are letting another person see who we really are and that is not easy. Given that she is on television, she is far too relaxed in her defence, and this suggests even she doesn’t care about the vitriol she’s spinning. I didn’t understand why she was saying those incendiary things if she didn’t really believe them.

The moment I worked out the reason, I started to hate her. She just wants to be famous, she wants attention, she wants people to know who she is. Katie Hopkins is a professional devil’s advocate, a rent-a-gob, a mercenary mouth; she is nothing but an intellectual whore. She is the lowest class of person; she is a self-serving liar.

After growing up in a very wealthy town, I have spent the last decade living in one of the roughest council estates in the country, and it has taught me to love humanity. When the world I knew kicked me out because I had no money, a world I was an alien to accepted me without question. Did I deserve it? If my family’s money hadn’t evaporated in the 90s recession, would I now be exactly like Katie Hopkins? Would we have a two woman show? Kat and Katie Piss On The Poor? I reckon someone would commission that, it would probably sell.

That would be enough for Katie, but it would not be enough for me, because I am not a whore. I think back to when I was rich, and even as a child, I was always in trouble for sticking up for what I thought was right. I remember being about 7, at primary school, and a teacher made a girl cry because she couldn’t tie a shoelace. She was really awful, and I weighed in, shouting at a teacher. At seven years old.

As I got older I have been dragged into school offices and work offices and severely bollocked. Once, I thought the company I worked for was syphoning too much into shareholder profit and not enough into the customers/staff, so I wrote a poem about the injustices and posted it on the companywide internet notice board. It denigrated the establishment and got me a disciplinary; the notion of free-speech probably meant I kept my job. Afterwards, many people I didn’t even know quietly told me how much they admired the act. That poem made me microcosmically famous, but did it make me a fame-hungry, intellectual whore? No, because it was my genuine opinion.

I don’t hate Katie because she’s opinionated, I don’t actually think she is. I don’t hate Katie because she uses racially and socially offensive language, many people do this. I hate Katie because she will say or do anything for money and fame, without ever considering the consequences of her own actions. I’d be less enraged by this if she was an idiot, but she’s not, and it makes her so fucking dangerous.

She is smart enough that she must know what’s going on, she just doesn’t care. She will continue to say more and more offensive things, not because she believes in them, but because it makes her famous. She doesn’t care about anything else, not the tax-payers, not the economic situation, not the state of the NHS; she just cares that more and more people know her name.

Katie’s Wiki entry states she is “known for making controversial remarks in the media”, what an accolade, eh? Her notoriety escalates her notoriety and she still fails to do anything approaching research on the huge and important topics that she so publically discusses. She doesn’t need to, incendiary rhetoric is potent, just look at what Hitler made it do.

Everyone’s struggling in the current economic climate, even the middle-classes. They’re having to take less holidays, keep their cars for more than a year and are not able to buy as many extra houses. Of course, the working-classes are standing in food-bank queues, but you know, the middle-class tax-payers that Katie claims to speak for are obviously in greater need of a defender.

Except it’s not the middle-classes that love her, in the main, they think she’s awful, because she apparently has no compassion, lacking the ‘love for humanity’ that the middle class assume they have as they discuss poverty over a biscuity Chardonnay. It’s the working-classes that love her, because they see a posh bitch who seems to be ‘on their side’, who seems to be saying ‘what they think’.

If I’d met a Salford local in a pub who’d said the things to me that Katie wrote in the recent ‘Gunships For Migrants’ article, I’d have been more accepting. He’s had a hard life, and just as I stated at the start of this article, it’s impossible to blame someone who is exactly the same as you, so you have to look for difference. Race and nationality are such obvious differences, that I cannot immediately blame someone for turning to that. If someone is born with low intelligence and not offered educational opportunities, I cannot hate them for not having clever and/or well-educated opinions.

I believe in free-speech, as far as it is a real possibility, which is arguable in itself from a philosophical standpoint, but that’s not the issue here. If we assume free-speech really does exist, then we have to see that Katie Hopkins is abusing it. She does not demonstrate free-speech, she uses monetised words.

There will not be a viral explosion if she writes an article being moderate about migrants, or stating actual statistics, because it’s not controversial. If Katie thought that displaying a modicum of humanity towards men, women and children dying alone in the sea for no other crime than being born at a massive social disadvantage would make her more famous, then she’d have written that article instead.

When you read Katie Hopkins, you are not reading an opinion, you are not enjoying the fruits of the much lauded state of free-speech, you are reading self-promoting propaganda from an ex-PR woman who has branded herself effectively and is now maximising all fiscal and intangible profit streams. She does not care about the issues on which she speaks.

She is engaging because she is clever, she is educated and she is good at speaking and forcing her words into the arena. I hate her, because all these skills could be used for positive development, but, because that is so much harder, she cheats and, disingenuously, takes the easy route, every single time.

Katie Hopkins is lazy, like she claims fat people are; it may be intellectual laziness over physical laziness, but the trait is still prominent. She is an awful example to young women, as she claims tattooed people are. She is exactly what she claims to hate, just in an expensive dress and designer shoes. The reason she doesn’t recognise this is that she doesn’t actually hate these people, she made all that up to get attention, and it worked, as she knew it would, because she’s very clever.

The worst part about Katie is that she doesn’t even care about how this affects her own children. She admitted in an interview that the negative attention in the press affected her family, but she still hasn’t stopped, her own fame is so much more important than her children. How can anyone take life guidance from a parent who puts themselves before their children?

If I had children, I wouldn’t let them play with Katie’s children, because those kids are gonna be royally fucked up; who knows what misery they carry around that might spread to my infants? I feel much sorrier for the Hopkins children than I do a working-class child called Tyler whose fat, unemployed Dad has neck tattoos. Katie’s children have a mum who doesn’t love them as much as she loves public notoriety. I don’t know how a person recovers from that.

The latest article from Katie Hopkins has broken the law, and she needs to be punished. When poor people steal stuff, they are punished. Katie has stolen from the Bank Of Intellect and is somehow being allowed to dance around with her booty and rub it everyone’s face.

She is on track for disembowelment, when the balance tips and she becomes an untenable tool for selling papers and encouraging clicks, she will be dropped. The media monster will extract its hand from up her puppet arse, and she will be left in a lifeless pile of damp, social ridicule. I look forward to the day, and I will not feel pity for her, I will be glad that she drowned in the sea.