Katie Hopkins is a TV personality and newspaper columnist of a kind more common in the States than in Britain. Think Ann Coulter, Pamela Geller or Tomi Lahren. They're all female and right-wing. I don't pretend to understand the gender dimension, but it seems to be a thing. The difference between over there and over here is that while a lot of people seem to like Coulter, Geller et all, Hopkins is regarded with near-universal horror – while at the same time raking in large amounts of money for her work.
Hopkins has made a career out of saying the unsayable. She's a great writer, fiercely witty, and has, as she says, 'no filter'. Has she gone too far this time? She's been reported to police after calling for a 'final solution' after the Manchester bombing.
Hopkins has form when it comes to Muslims. She wrote on one occasion: 'It is them and us. And THEY have no wish to be anything like US.' And: 'Multiculturalists are determined to distance Muslims from Islamic extremism, imagining it to be the acts of the alienated few. But the reason we so seldom hear Imams and leaders in the Muslim Community speaking out against terrorists is that in truth, many are right behind them.'
So when she called up the spectre of the Holocaust in a tweet to Philip Schofield urging a 'final solution', it's clear whom she had in mind. That she had second thoughts and deleted it, replacing it with 'true solution', will probably get her off the hook legally.
However, what makes Hopkins such box office is that while a lot of people read her in order to be shocked that people can say such things, a lot of others read her and think, 'She has a point.'
I think that's really important. I don't think she should be silenced. I don't like the culture of what US Vice-President Mike Pence called 'speech codes, safe zones, tone-policing, administration-sanctioned political correctness'. Hate speech should be stopped, certainly, and Hopkins does sail close to the wind. But if you stop people saying things in the open where they can be challenged, they'll say it in secret where they can't. That's how extremism grows: you drive it underground and create a tight-knit group of illuminati who alone have the truth. Then they emerge when it's too late to stop them, and they're Islamic State.
So, how to challenge Katie Hopkins? Let's assume her advocacy of the extermination of Muslims was a slip of the keyboard. She's still calling for a 'solution' that will be 'true' – simple, clear and decisive.
In doing so, she's falling in with the same fallacy that has driven the Trump administration close to the precipice (and that arguably, with the invasion of Iraq, got us into this situation in the first place). It is that all problems are solvable; that there's a clear enemy who can be engaged and defeated; that the idea of a 'war on terror' makes sense; and that strong leaders can fix things.
In reality, they can't, not always. Trump found this very soon after taking up office. He's being exposed to it in Israel now. Not everything is a nail just because you happen to have a hammer. Human life and motivations are infinitely complicated. Yes, you have to resist evil and frustrate the wicked wherever you can. But that won't always be possible. The terrorists only have to be lucky once, and last night they got lucky.
What matters from now on is not half-baked plans to 'deal with' Muslims, as though that would solve anything. It's the slow, unglamorous process of creating trust, bringing bad arguments into the light, drawing communities together and helping build a society where such atrocities become less and less thinkable, because fewer and fewer people are on the outside. In the long run, the rhetoric of opposition and division isn't going to help. What will help is patient love.
Manchester is still stunned by what's happened. There are still families desperately searching for loved ones. Others are already grieving. It's all so raw, and the call for a final solution is so tempting. But we shouldn't listen. It doesn't work like that.
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
