Katie Hopkins is one of the most outspoken and polarizing media personalities in the United Kingdom. The self proclaimed “biggest bitch in Britain” is notorious for her controversial statements and tweets. 

Here are the most controversial moments of Katie Hopkins 

Multiculturalism

Katie Hopkins is against multiculturalism. Criticising the Notting Hill Carnival in 2016, Katie Hopkins said: “I don’t buy multiculturalism at all”. She went on to add that a “London bubble” believed in it and “the liberal left wing press, the BBC, they love it! They can’t get enough of it.” Following the 2017 London Bridge attack, Hopkins criticised “Liberals in London”, saying they “actually think multiculturalism means we all die together”. 

Islam

Hopkins has been openly critical of Islam. After the 2016 Nice truck attack, Hopkins stated “Islam disgusts me”, declaring the statement was “entirely rational” and not Islamophobic. She is in favour of a burqa ban and has labelled Islamic culture as homophobic. In March 2017, Hopkins gave a speech at a David Horowitz Freedom Center event, in which she criticised Muslims, stating that a “Muslim mafia” controlled areas of Britain. She also went on to describe London Mayor Sadiq Khan as the “Muslim mayor of Londonistan”. Calling on people to “fight for your country” against Muslims, Hopkins stated that “we can commit to arm ourselves, not just with the help of the NRA,” adding “get furious and fight back”.

Feminism

On the television show Question Time, Hopkins said of feminism: “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 is that they have to toughen up.”

Obesity

Katie Hopkins made these statements about obesity while appearing on an ITV show: “Would I employ you if you were obese? No I would not. You would give the wrong impression to the clients of my business. I need people to look energetic, professional and efficient. If you are obese, you look lazy”, and “To call yourself ‘plus size’ is just a euphemism for being fat. Life is much easier when you’re thinner. Big is not beautiful, of course a job comes down to how you look.”

In 2014, Hopkins illustrated her obesity views by taking part in a TLC documentary series, Katie Hopkins: My fat story, where she gained and lost three stone in weight.

Tattoos

Katie Hopkins is not a big fan of tattoos. This is what she had to say about them: “I really think if you have a tattoo you have to wonder about what kind of future you have ahead of you. As an employer, I wouldn’t employ someone with tattoos as I would wonder what customers would think about them. For me, tattoos are just a way for people to find attention who haven’t found another way in their life to achieve it by conventional means.”

White genocide

Katie Hopkins is also a firm believer in the white genocide theory. She has contended that immigration and multiculturalism are intended to make white people minorities. In February 2018 Yahoo News reported that “her intention was to ‘expose’ the white genocide” happening to farmers in South Africa. She also visited South Africa to report on ‘anti-white racism’.

Illness and fatalities in the UK

Hopkins posted a tweet referring to Scottish life expectancy predictions based upon a 2011 NHS Scotland report, “Healthy Life Expectancy in Scotland: Update of trends to 2010”. This tweet was posted following a heated debate on Scottish Independence during an edition of The Wright Stuff on which Hopkins was a panellist. In the wake of the 2013 Glasgow helicopter crash, the tweet raised widespread condemnation among Twitter users. Hopkins retorted “Following Independence I will only be the Biggest Bitch in England”, and described people’s reactions as “PC tastic”. An online petition to ban Hopkins from shows such as ITV’s This Morning and The Wright Stuff on Channel 5 gained over 75,000 signatures. Hopkins issued an apology the following Monday, restating that her original remark was in reference to the NHS report and was simply bad timing.

Hopkins had tweeted: “Little sweaty jocks, sending us Ebola bombs in the form of sweaty Glaswegians just isn’t cricket. Scottish NHS sucks.” No evidence of criminality was found by the police.  On 7 April 2015, Hopkins made a series of inflammatory tweets which suggested that people with dementia are “bed blockers” and they take up scarce hospital beds. Her comments were condemned by leading UK Alzheimer’s charities.

After five Londoners drowned at Camber Sands in August 2016, Hopkins tweeted a poll mocking the identities of the deceased. Sussex Police reported the tweet to Twitter under the headings of “abusive or harmful” and “disrespectful or offensive.”  They decided while the tweet was distasteful it was not criminal. The tweet was deleted.

Social class

During an appearance on ITV’s This Morning in July 2013, Hopkins said she would stop her children playing with their classmates based on their given names. She expressed a particular dislike for “lower class” names like Charmaine, Chantelle, and Chardonnay, which met with disapproval from co-host Holly Willoughby. Hopkins said that she did not like “geographical location names” either. After Willoughby’s colleague, Phillip Schofield, said that she had given the name India to one of her daughters, Hopkins said that India is “not related to a place”. A viewers’ poll conducted by the This Morning programme indicated that 91 per cent of respondents disagreed with Hopkins’s opinion.

Appearing as a panellist on Channel 5’s The Big Benefits Row: Live in February 2014, she was accused by Terry Christian and others of only expressing her controversial opinions to make money from media appearances. Hopkins has said that financial motives are not the reason she speaks out, and received a “relatively modest” fee of £300 when she was on This Morning speaking about children’s names.

Pakistani men and Rochdale

Hopkins objected to Rochdale commemorating National Pakistan Day on 23 March 2015 and said that she based her objection on a Rochdale sex trafficking case involving nine predominantly Pakistani men and forty-seven white victims. In a series of tweets, she posted images of the felons with the caption “are these your friends too?” 

Immigrants

A 2015 column in The Sun by Katie Hopkins compared immigrants to “cockroaches” and “feral humans” and said they were “spreading like the norovirus”. She wrote that gunships should be used to stop migrants from crossing the Mediterranean.  Her remarks were condemned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein. In a statement released on 24 April 2015, he urged the UK to “curb incitement to hatred” by its “tabloid newspapers”. 

Hopkins’s column also drew criticism on Twitter, including from Russell Brand, to whom Hopkins responded by accusing Brand’s “champagne socialist humanity” of neglecting taxpayers. Simon Usborne, writing in The Independent, compared her use of the word “cockroach” to previous uses by the Nazis and just before the Rwandan genocide by its perpetrators. He suspected that if any other contributor had written the piece, it would not have been published, and questioned her continued employment by the newspaper. 

In 2015 a Change.org petition was initiated with the aim of getting The Sun to sack Hopkins. By 26 April, it had attracted over 310,000 signatures. In early September, The Sun retweeted an earlier comment from Hopkins expressing her disinterest in migrants. The tweet was pulled after the Prime Minister David Cameron publicly announced Britain would do more to help those seeking asylum in the UK. A further Change.org petition for Hopkins to be replaced with 50,000 Syrian refugees gained more than 20,000 signatures in less than 48 hours in September 2015.

In November 2015, Peter Herbert, chair of the Society of Black Lawyers, reported Hopkins and The Sun to Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. By December 2016, the original article had been removed from The Sun’s website.

Manchester Arena bombing

Regarding the Manchester Arena bombing, Hopkins wrote that “Britain is faced with some hard questions the people charged with protecting us are going to have to answer sooner or later”. Katie Hopkins questioned how the suicide bomber Salman Abedi was allowed to re-enter Britain after visiting Libya. She said: “Our leaders allow such deeply suspicious characters back into Britain, and then expect us to swallow their lies that we will not give in to terror?” 

The journalist Nick Cohen was among those who responded on Twitter: “Even if Hopkins knows nothing of Nazism – which I doubt – her “final solution” can only mean ethnic cleansing”. Others, such as Owen Jones, called for a boycott of the LBC radio station while they employ her. Interviewed later on Fox News by Tucker Carlson, she called for people to insist on deportations among other responses to terrorist acts. 

Following the June 2017 London Bridge attack almost a fortnight later, Hopkins called for internment camps to be used for those suspected of being Muslim extremists on Fox News’ Fox & Friends. The host Clayton Morris said, on behalf of the network staff, that everyone considered the “idea reprehensible”.

Hopkins’ comments have been linked in the media with a hate crime against a Muslim in 2017. A Muslim man in Heckmondwike stated that he was attacked by assailants who graffitied his house with Hopkins’ tweet, including her misspelling “#Machester”.

Donald Trump

Hopkins supported Donald Trump’s Republican presidential nomination in the Daily Mail during December: “I hear cries that he is a blithering idiot. I have often been called a deranged fool. But if this were true you could ignore me, ignore us, imaging [sic] the two of us shouting naked at the rain. It’s because we articulate sentiments repressed by the politically correct consensus that we have a voice”. Hopkins defended Trump’s remarks that all Muslims should be banned from entering the United States. Trump later thanked Hopkins for her support and for her “powerful writing on the U.K.’s Muslim problems”, calling her a “respected journalist”. Hopkins stated that Britain is in part “radicalised” and “it does nobody any favours to deny the obvious”. When asked by BBC’s Daily Politics presenter Andrew Neil in a December 2015 interview to name the “swathes” of Britain that are no-go areas for non-Muslims, Hopkins replied that she couldn’t for “legal reasons”. When Neil said there could be no legal problems with identifying an area she continued to refuse, saying only “I know those places exist”.

Racism, racial profiling, and Black Lives Matter

In January 2017, a caller to her LBC programme named Joseph said she came over as racist, following which she said: “I genuinely believe ‘racist’ as a word has been used so much. I am sorry for the word racist in a way. I love language so much … it’s like a regular word now, it’s lost all meaning to me”. When tweeting the clip she added, “Call me racist. I don’t care. I will stand up for white women being raped because you’re scared to offend Muslims”. Hopkins tweeted shortly afterwards: “Racial profiling is a good thing, call me racist. I don’t care… it has lost all meaning”. She later briefly retweeted a favourable response from an account named Anti Juden SS, whose avatar featured the Swastika (and the United States flag), later stating that she had not looked at the handle.

In August 2016 she urged the London Mayor Sadiq Khan to use water cannons against Black Lives Matter protesters at Heathrow Airport, who had chained themselves to the tarmac of an approach road.

In February 2018, Hopkins was detained and had her passport briefly confiscated in South Africa for allegedly spreading racial hatred.

Refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean

In July 2017, Hopkins flew to Catania in Sicily to visit a ship known as the C-Star hired by the Defend Europe movement, which has the intention of hindering the work of “search and rescue” vessels in the Mediterranean used by charities such as Save the Children to save trafficked migrants and refugees. Defend Europe is supported by the American white-nationalist David Duke and the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website.

An article headlined “Katie Hopkins on NGOs colluding with traffickers in Sicily” was briefly published on the Mailonline website in mid-July 2017. According to a report on the HuffPo website, the article offered no evidence to match the title. Shortly after her article was deleted, Save the Children rejected Hopkins’ claim that she had “spent time” with the crew of one of their ships. “Nor will she set sail with us on any of our rescue missions”, they stated. The deleted Mailonline article was her only contribution to the planned series.

Hopkins’ opinions on Mediterranean migrants resurfaced in 2018 after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. Hopkins suggested that Chief Rabbi of the UK’s “support for mass migration across the Med″ explained the shooting. She later deleted the tweet.