Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

She’s wrong, but Katie Hopkins has a right to call migrants ‘cockroaches’

I know we’re all supposed to be spitting blood over Katie Hopkins’ Sun column about African migrants. In fact, anyone who isn’t currently testing the durability of their computer keyboard by bashing out Hopkins-mauling tweets risks having their moral decency called into question. Hating Katie has become the speediest shortcut to the moral highground in this slacktivist age, when people prefer to make a virtual advert of their moral correctness than to do anything so tough as try to change the world outside their bedroom door. And if you aren’t hating Katie, if you aren’t partaking in this orgy of competitive benevolence, what is wrong with you?

And yet, I find myself far more infuriated by the Hopkins haters, especially those who want her sacked, than by Hopkins herself. Sure, her article, with its comparison of migrants to cockroaches and its suggestion that gunships be dispatched to the Med, was nasty. It also expressed polar opposite views to mine: I think we should open Europe’s borders.

But the ideas she expressed, and the language she used, are rare — that’s why we found them so shocking. In contrast, the response of her detractors, their demand that Something Must Be Done — the ‘something’ ideally being Hopkins’ sacking — are all too common in this censorious century. Hopkins gave vent to a thankfully now rare form of intolerance. Her haters are expressing a more mainstream, and thus more dangerous, form of intolerance: intolerance of offensiveness, of extreme views, of anything that isn’t in tune with the political hymn sheet all good people are expected to warble from these days.

It’s the casualness with which people now demand the censure of people who have offended them that is most shocking. The storm from the Twitterati arrived almost immediately.

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