The far right British activist Katie Hopkins told a cheering crowd at an event on Mannheim, Pennsylvania that she is in the United States illegally and challenged President Joe Biden to “Come at me! Lock me up!”
Ms Hopkins made her remarks at the Great Awakening, a Christian nationalist speaking tour featuring a number of speakers with ties to the far right including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and the Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor Doug Mastriano.
On Saturday, Ms Hopkins made a splash when she told the assembled audience that she had entered the US illegally through its southern border.
“Right now, I am not allowed to be in this fine country of yours, because the ridiculous administration says that the unvaccinated are not allowed in this country right now,” Ms Hopkins said. “Well I am pureblood, I am proud, and I am sick and tired of being told what to do.”
The use of the term “pureblood” has connections to white nationalism, as does Ms Hopkins, who was permenantly banned from Twitter two years ago for hateful conduct on the platform.
Ms Hopkins, formerly a columnist for The Sun and the Daily Mail, once compared immigrants to cockroaches in a column. She left her role as a presenter with the London-based talk radio station LBC after making hateful comments about Muslims in 2017.
During her speech over the weekend, Ms Hopkins then called Mr Biden “an irrational old man who was installed in the White House and is not the rightful president country.”
“I did what any rational individual would do under the Biden administration, and ladies and gentlemen, I promise you this is a true story: I decided to break my ass into this country via Mexico,” Ms Hopkins said to cheers from the crowd. “Come at me! Lock me up! Do it!”
The veracity of Ms Hopkins’ story is difficult to prove. Non-US citizens and non-immigrants do have to show proof of vaccination against Covid-19 before travelling by air to the country.
Before launching into her speech at the event, Ms Hopkins led the crowd in a dance number. According to reporting from HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias, Ms Hopkins also asserted during her address that Muslims are reproducing at a faster rate than non-Muslims in the UK and that Black South Africans are attacking white farmers — white nationalist tropes designed to promote the conspiracy theory that white people are in danger of being replaced by non-white people.
Ms Hopkins has been a fervent supporter of former President Donald Trump, who at times retweeted her before they were both banned from Twitter, and called her “respected” in 2015.
