Visa cancel culture and Seven’s deadly sins

Hopkins skipkins jumpkins What a difference a weekend makes — the time between people idly wondering what shameless far-right grifter Katie Hopkins was doing in a hotel in Sydney while so many people’s friends and relatives were well into their second year of being stranded overseas, to the cancellation of Hopkins’ visa, was a little over 48 hours.

It followed the customary script of Hopkins employment these days — a network chasing ratings via her performative bile, swiftly finds the Hopkins of it all is a bit more than they can handle. In this case it wasn’t her fondness for spewing the rhetoric of conquering war criminals, but her yawn-inducingly predictable anti-lockdown stance and attendant shock tactics.

Since, we have gold-standard buck-passing from those responsible for bringing her to the country. Channel 7, whose googling of Hopkins apparently didn’t get as far that time she told a meeting led by a high-profile Holocaust denier she was “on [their] team”, were shocked, just shocked, to find out she would flout COVID-19 restrictions. Then Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews, in announcing that Hopkins’ visa had indeed been cancelled, argued that her application to be let in had been supported by “a state government”. Which slightly ignores that Australia’s immigration minister has unparalleled personal discretion over who gets let into the country via the “Character Test” — something that has been used to keep Chelsea Manning out of the country, but not, say, Lauren Southern.