Katie Hopkins - Troll of the Month

The Troll of the Month is an incident we choose every month to expose anti-religious haters and to show positive outcomes in the fight against intolerance in Europe.

British media personality Katie Hopkins released a propaganda movie called “Homelands” this month. The film promotes anti-Muslim and xenophobic ideas, and pits the Jewish and Muslim communities against one another. 

“Homelands” uses the aesthetics of a documentary, but is in fact a propaganda movie for the Europe of Nations and Freedom, a far-right political group in the European Parliament. Members of the ENF use this propaganda mockumentary to label Islam a 'cult', implying that Brussels is a ‘hellhole’ due to the Muslim population there and claiming that migrants are making cities dangerous for women. 

The whole project is akin to a mini-library of far-right conspiracy theories, from discussing alleged “no-go areas”, talk of Muslim grooming gangs, and supporting the idea of a Great Replacement of white Europeans with talk about birth-rates among Muslims. The focus on Jews moving to Israel is a toxic otherization cocktail – at the same time, Hopkins dispatriates European Jews claiming that they are only safe in their “homeland” of Israel implying that they do not actually belong in Europe, she uses the old trope of setting minorities against each other by ascribing the European rise in antisemitism to Muslim immigrants, and reinforces the idea of a “Muslim takeover”, at one point explicitly saying that we are “losing the silent war with Muslims”.

Hopkins has largely used her Twitter platform to promote the documentary, where she has over 950,000 followers. In response to her tweets about the documentary, many of Hopkins’ followers have praised her work and the content of the film. Hopkins has also used her Twitter platform to ask for funds for future similar work, linking to her PayPal account. Get The Trolls Out! Partner the Media Diversity Institute (MDI) has reported this account to PayPal and complained directly to the platform. PayPal’s acceptable use policy states that PayPal services may not be used for activities that “relate to transactions involving […] the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory or the financial exploitation of a crime.” Hopkins is in clear violation of this policy. She is using the PayPal platform to fund further work like Homelands, content which promotes hates and intolerance. 

At the time of publishing, MDI has received no response from PayPal and Hopkins’ account is still up on the platform.