Katie Hopkins is a prominent conservative British journalist and commentator. She’s currently attending CPAC 2018 and appeared on a panel moderated by Frank Gaffney titled “Wither Freedom?” along with Diana West & Deborah Weiss. The video of that presentation can be found here. I spoke with Hopkins today by phone. The interview has been edited for clarity. Special thanks to Lonny Leitner for facilitating the interview & to Ms. Hopkins’ personal assistant, Karla.
JG: You’re currently attending CPAC in Washington, D.C. What’s your take on how things are going among conservatives, populists or however you’d like to categorize things?
KH: It’s a very odd thing as we resist labels. I’m called racist, xenophobic, misogynist, islamophobic on a regular basis. I tend to resist those labels and I think that’s true of you as well. My take here, being amongst these brilliant people at CPAC, is that there’s a whole bunch of people in one place that are joined by a common interest in protecting their families, protecting their country and protecting their freedom.
Trump standing on stage yesterday, delivering the speech that he gave, which I think is the best speech he’s given of his presidency to date, was an entirely unifying moment. Watching so many young people championing the man onstage and saying they will take him through 2018 and then 2020. So that’s been an electric moment.
JG: Marion Le Pen spoke at CPAC and she drew outrage from the neocons, the Never Trumpers and the globalists. What did you think of her appearing in the first place and what did you make of her actual speech?
KH: I think her appearing here is a fantastic and a positive thing. I have a lot to say about the Le Pen family. Mariane was fabulous during her campaign for the presidency of France. I was with her when she was in one of her halls where people were waving the French flag. It was fabulous.
By comparison, I went to Macron’s celebratory party, it was very dire, in a park with him kind of celebrating himself and his wife, when he marched up to the stage to the EU anthem! The people managing –staging that performance, is exactly the word–were handing out EU flags. And that’s very much the difference.
When I think of the Le Pen family–it’s all very well to look back at the father and kind of bring up sins of the past or whatever people think–if you look at the daughters, if you look at the family members, they are true patriots.
I also think, rather importantly, one of the key tools of the Left, as we know of liberals, is to try to silence us. And that’s what they did: they got the CPAC speakers list and they made it their goal to try to get members of that list taken off. And it worked pretty effectively, actually. We lost Pamela Geller and we lost Dinesh D’Souza.
JG: Do we on the Right have to be concerned about policing speech, which we usually think of as a problem coming from the Left?
KH: Absolutely. I admire Pamela Geller very much. She had a really good panel on censorship, a great lineup, with James Damore and others. A lot of people were really looking forward to it, it was one of the highlight panels for a lot of the people I’ve spoken to.
As I understand it, she had a call telling her she had to drop one of the members of the panel–Jim Hoff of Gateway Pundit. Because Pamela is a good woman, she stands for the principles that we do, that if you silence one of us you’re effectively trying to silence us all, she said no.
She said, well no then. If you want me to lose one of my panelists and make that call to tell him he’s been dropped, then I’m not going to come and the panel’s been pulled. She actually made a strong stand, which I thought was brave and true.
I think what you see there was Matt Schlapp [CPAC’s organizer] under increasing pressure because the Left campaigns until it can get one or two heads.
JG: It seems to suggest a needlessly self-inflicted wound that demonstrates we haven’t learned how to resist this powerful organized force on the Left.
KH: Exactly right. Of course what happens is if you give them a head, as Matt Schlapp gave them Dinesh and Pamela, that’s a celebration of what they’ve done, they’ve achieved a successful outcome. They’ve campaigned, they got someone removed, they’ve learned that it’s successful.
The next day, in fact, you’ve got boycott the NRA stuff going on. You’ve got them targeting the advertisers of the NRA. And just exactly the same, we have Enterprise Cars–and I urge all of your readers not to rent from Enterprise Cars–saying “oh yes, we’ll give up our relationship.” I think it’s time to call on advertisers and say once you’ve signed up with us you do not drop us in order to virtue signal to the Left. We now need advertisers with some kind of backbone, we need conservative advertisers to be given priority so that they can’t damage the people and the messages that they’re associated with.
JG: At David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend, you famously warned America not to become Europe with respect to mass Islamic immigration. For readers who may not know, what exactly did you mean?
KH: It’s very interesting that a time when there’s a real parallel to be drawn in political decision making, we make policy with emotions, with our hearts. We make very poor decisions. So in my case, the example for Western Europe, I’d talk about Alan Kurdi, the little boy your readers may remember who was washed up on the beach, drowned trying to make the crossing over.
His picture made all of the front pages of all of the media. It was a pitiful moment in the migrant crisis because leaders were called upon by people to make an emotional decision based on a reaction to that one photo.
At that point, Angela Merkel stood up and said “Wir schaffen das.” “We can do this.” And she opened her borders, opened the country, opened up Europe and said “Come.” She told all migrants from Libya to Syria to North Africa, from Greece, people moving up through Turkey, she told them to come.
It was a defining moment: the moment that triggered the fall of Europe.
The moment that meant that my children are now fifth in line for a school place behind others. The moment that meant English is now the fourth language in British state schools. The moment I can’t get into a hospital anymore because we’re at the back of the queue because minorities come first in my country.
And I think the same is true here in America at this moment in time. If you make emotional decisions, about guns for example, or the Second Amendment, based on a child crying, you’re not making a good decision.
I came to CPAC and my message is consistent: America does not want to become the UK. Do not let yourselves fall as we in Europe have fallen, at a time when we are under attack, where there will be more births to muslim families by 2050 than there will be to white British families.
My country is a place where many cities are no go zones if you are white or particularly a white woman.
JG: I interviewed Raheem Kassam on the publication of his book “No Go Zones.” You have famously gone to many no go zones, including the ne plus ultra Calais. The media and the Regressive Left deny they exist. Do you think the reality is seeping through to the general public?
KH: Yes, particularly on the conservative side, people are aware. For example, they’re aware that Sweden has giant swaths of its territory that you cannot go into. I’ve walked those no go zones, I’ve been there. People are fearful for you. First generation migrants, who are good people, are fearful for you if you walk there because they know you’ll be attacked.
Having spent time in those jungle camps in Calais, and having spent a summer traveling from Libya to southern Italy with the migrants, following them, seeing how it’s structured, seeing the funding behind it, seeing the mafia links to people trafficking, my view is that we’re given a rather different view to the darker message.
It is systemic, it is organized, it is coordinated and it is very financially profitable to transport humans on a massive scale. There is a lot of European money tied up in that.
What’s really curious to me is that we have these men of fighting age coming to our countries, 19 to 25 year olds mainly, and older, but the “packaging” of the story by the Left and the liberal media is that it’s unaccompanied minors, it’s children and it’s women. And if they can find one picture of one child, ah you’re going to see that picture.
Even the boats that are now used as ferries, essentially, across the Med, because they’re scheduled, they’re coordinated, they’re paid for by mafia, they’re called “Save the Children.”
I’ve watched those boats come in and there was not one child that came off any of them. The packaging, the presentation of these migrants is as “battered children.” It’s very different in reality. And I tell you: they bring their old conflicts with them.
JG: I’ve written extensively about Muslim reformers but Minnesota media only rewrites talking points from terrorist affiliated CAIR. How can we support reformers who want nothing to do with the likes of CAIR?
KH: My best ideas for supporting them is three simple steps and they don’t feel simple at times because it can feel overwhelming and there’s nothing we can do. But there is something we can all do: defend our family, in terms of keeping our family unit strong. That’s something the globalists don’t want, they’d very much like to rip families apart, destroy the traditional family unit because that’s our core strength. Look after your family is number one.
Number two is about knowing your truth. Be very clear about what you do believe in and keep reminding yourself of that. Sometimes the news agenda, the news cycle, can make us a little crazy and we lose track of what we actually think. Being very clear with yourself about what you think really matters.
Third, people can resist the narrative. Once you’re very clear about what your position is, resist the current nonsense. When CNN uses kids, puts them in front of a camera with a very emotional interview, don’t let go and take some metal saw to your gun just because you saw one child crying. That’s not the right response.
My final thought is to get furious and to fight back. Stand up and dig in your heels and say “Okay then, we’re going to stick together.”
That’s something here at CPAC, that’s something we in Western Europe, look to Trump for leadership.
JG: Help Americans out: Prime Minister Theresa May and Brexit. What the ***k?
KH: In my opinion, Brexit won’t happen. There’ll be a formal divorce but it will be like a divorce where the husband and wife end up still sharing the same house, sharing the same bills and arguing about the same things they always argued about. We will get a notional nod at Brexit but it’s not Brexit. It’s not what we went into the booth and put our crosses against the box for: it’s not our sovereignty, it’s not our country, our people, our borders. We’re still going to have open borders. We’re still going to be under the European court system.
So we won’t ever get Brexit. It’s a truth and a hard truth that the people that got us Brexit, brilliant people like Nigel Farage, unfortunately put the baton down on the track when they got to third. What we needed to do was get over the line and we didn’t have someone that took us over that line.
So in my personal opinion, the Brexit that 17.4 million people voted for, it won’t happen.
John Gilmore
John Gilmore is an author, freelance writer & former opinion columnist for Alpha News. He blogs at minnesotaconservatives.org & is @Shabbosgoy on Twitter
