Following a determined effort to have a number of venues U turn on their booking of hate merchant Katie Hopkins three venues have so far cancelled her shows on her upcoming tour.
Weymouth, Bournemouth and Southampton have showed the decent way but others are still holding out including Blackpool and Wincanton.
For Katie Hopkins it is about cancel culture, as she articulated when invited on to BBC Radio Solent on Tuesday 21st March. Her first opportunity to pollute the UK airways in five years she bemoaned. The problem with the whole concept of cancel culture though is that it originated from her end of the political spectrum.
In the Bible Jesus was cancelled by the Roman Empire for calling out their impact on Palestine and for not being the leader of the revolution many Jews initially believed him to be. To pacify the Jewish religious leaders they cruxified him to keep their support and maintain the status quo they had constructed. Ironically, millenia later the Nazis then cancelled the Jews. The Roman Empire is considered the First Reich and the Nazis the Third Reich. Cancelling has existed across human evolution and is a matter of morality and power exorcised by those who have the opportunity.
Challenging parts of culture should be part of an ongoing discussion and debate not reduced to a peurile phrase thrown out by those who run a mile from intellectual analysis. Many of the topics are extremely important and many of the points have at least some validity but they are swamped by the irrelevant and the absurd. Also the ways in which many people are impacted psychologically and sociologically is an extremely important essence which is also mostly ignored.
To a considerable number of people, this process of publicly calling for accountability, and boycotting if nothing else seems to work, has become an important tool of social justice — a way of combatting, through collective action, some of the huge power imbalances that often exist between public figures with far-reaching platforms and audiences, and the people and communities their words and actions may harm. This appears to be why the right of politics have an issue. They do not like their long held (and often inaccurate) views being challenged. They are now able to shout ‘cancel culture’ or ‘woke’ and shut those people, who threaten their ignorance, down.
This brings us back to Katie Hopkins. The former Sun journalist who sees people’s distate for her having a platform as cancelling her. It is not her being cancelled though is it? If she was a kind, decent, intelligent person who did not attack minorities for a living and did not spread bullsh** and lies no one would be seeking to shut her mouth… down. However, because what she says is vile excrement upon our consciounesses and only appeals to those whose intellectual interaction is limited to spitting out peurile phrases in preference to being informed interlocutors, many just want her influence and hate legitimation silenced. Fair play!
Some of Hopkin’s hate speech:
Nothing makes me want to scream louder than oldies doddering on to a train at a slow shuffle when the rest of us are just trying to get on with our day.
A state school class can only learn as fast as its thickest child. Your kid misses stuff, mine has to wait while yours catches up.
I am proud to be called the Queen of Mean, and I never mince my words – especially when it comes to fat people.
I think overweight people are lazy and that they are bankrupting the country.
There are all sorts of parents I hate – super-keen parents, PTA parents, and fat parents on a bus.
On having ginger hair:
On tattoos:
As an employer, I wouldn’t employ someone with tattoos, I would worry what customers would think about them. For me, and for lots of people like me, when you see tattoos you think of someone who is just looking for attention, who hasn’t managed to find a way in their life through conventional means and who is just shouting ‘I want attention, I want to be looked at’.
On women:
I think women are really vicious in the work place, they’re really jealous, really competitive. Women are emotional, they cry in toilets. The sisterhood only extends as far as the kitchen door. Men talk in logic and rational terms, they don’t squawk and make a noise.
Women don’t want equal treatment, they couldn’t handle it if they got it. It’s a tough world out there. What a lot of women are actually looking for is special treatment. What women need to realise that they have to toughen up.
For those who want to find more of Hopkins’ hate the internet has plenty of other comments aimed at others. We could get in to the psychology of offloading but this is not the place. However, one final and probably the most important point is that Hopkins is given a platform at all. The vast majority do not have the opportunity to be paid to be vile. Jim Davidson, Bernard Manning, Roy Chubby Brown and others have made a living from being bigots as have many right wing politicians but they all have a category. Hopkins does not have one. One could book anyone to be a vile c*** so what makes Hopkins so special?
I cannot see why anyone would be entertained by someone so arrogant, ignorant and specious. Obviously though she is rubbing her hands with glee that some would be. Perhaps shouting “cancel culture” and “woke” for some is just to hear the sound of kerching.
Perhaps there is no more to it.
Penny Lane
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