The Guardian is Seething Over Amelia Memes

The Amelia meme has got the Guardian and LBC both coping and seething this week, so we immediately know it must be a good thing.

But what is it? Allow me to explain for those less chronically online than I.

Recently Prevent decided to take a break from the tricky work of nipping Islamic terrorism in the bud, and dedicated some time to funding and promoting a video game called Pathways, aimed at young people who may find themselves having naughty thoughts about controlling our borders.

I’m calling it a video game, the makers call it a “youth-centred interactive learning package for education on extremism, radicalisation and Prevent”. Not to be confused with a ‘learing’ package, which is something one only finds in parts of Minnesota.

The player takes on the role of Charlie, who is referred to as “they” throughout, and is confronted with such presumably common scenarios as what to say when a black colleague outperforms you. If Charlie blames “immigrants taking our jobs”, we are informed: “The teacher let Charlie know that the school has a zero tolerance on hate speech [sic].” Though apparently not “a zero tolerance” on bad syntax.

In another example, Charlie is confronted by a video claiming Muslim men are taking emergency accommodation from veterans. “They” (Charlie) are (is?) given a choice whether to scroll past or engage. If “they” foolishly pick the latter, “they” receive the message: “Unfortunately, Charlie didn’t realise that some of the groups they were engaging in were actually illegal.”

So not only are you stuck being a grammatically incomprehensible plural, you must now go directly to the Starmer gulag.

One of my favourite parts of the game is the caption: “They also started receiving extra support at college to ensure they had someone to talk to openly about ideological thoughts.” The picture shows Charlie with a friendly (i.e., non-white) counsellor presumably purging ‘their’ mind of bad ideology. Of course, making a deeply dystopian video game for young people to cure them of concerns about immigration is not ideological in any way.

But what of our heroine? Well, one of the characters “they” encounter in the game is the permanently angry (i.e., white) Amelia. She does various evil things, such as roping Charlie into a protest about “the erosion of British values”, a wicked concern shared by the majority of the country.

With reassuring inevitability, the ‘online Right’ have taken the angry, purple haired ‘goth girl’ Amelia and turned her into a charming advocate of remigration, with the manner of an Enid Blyton character and the technological advantages of Grok.

She throws tomatoes at Keir Starmer, time-travels to the tranquility of 1960s London, and, in a Street Fighter 2 style game, defeats a ‘Bradford Man’ in hand-to-hand combat.

The memes and videos vary in quality, but on the whole it’s edgy, funny and very British in the way it mocks the petty tyrants who, in lieu of fixing any of the country’s actual problems, can only find novel ways to ‘prevent’ you from noticing.

Naturally, this has not gone down well with the Guardian, which stated “The avatar, created to deter young people from extremism, has been subverted and is breaking out of niche online silos.” It would take a heart of stone not to enjoy the thwarted cartoon villain nature of this complaint. Here we were, simply trying to brainwash the youth into accepting the decline of their country, and you naughty people have only gone and “subverted” it with your vile ‘banter’. Will these pesky Brits never learn?

The Guardian also laments that: “The volume of ‘Ameliaposting’ has since gone from an average of 500 a day when that account first introduced it to the world to roughly 10,000, starting on January 15th as it hit international audiences. On Wednesday, it hit 11,137 posts on X alone.”

Sounds like we’re going to need a bigger gulag.

An Amelia cryptocurrency has also launched, leading the makers of the Pathways game to solemnly declare: “What we’re seeing is the monetisation of hate.” Readers of this publication will know that the term “hate” occurs frequently in such matters, and seems to scupper the Guardian types wherever they go. Not since the War on Terror have we faced such a dangerously amorphous foe.

The above quotes comes from Matteo Bergamini, founder and CEO of Shout Out UK, a “political and media literacy training company” that came up with the game. Odd that an expert in media literacy didn’t see this deadly ‘subversion’ coming, but then as the Guardian notes, “the speed and sophistication surrounding the creation of supposedly subversive Amelia memes online has taken him by surprise”.

Truly, he could never have been expected to predict a level of asymmetrical warfare that would have stumped Sun Tzu himself. Even Trump’s ‘Discombobulator’ is nothing compared to some funny memes made by bored teenagers.

But if you think any of this has dulled the totally non-ideological zeal of our glorious social conditioners, then think again. Bergamini goes on to say: “This experience has shown us why this work is so immensely important.”

If you disagree, be careful: you’re probably having an ideological thought.

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