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The UK government is working hard to indoctrinate young kids and teach them just how racist it is to not accept their entire culture being erased and replaced. But  lately, their propaganda backfired so badly that it's hilarious on so many levels.

A few months ago, the UK Home Office funded this program called Prevent, which was aiming to educate children aged 11 up to 18 on extremism and radicalization. In other words, let us tell you what is good think.

And if you hear people say the kind of stuff that we tell you is inappropriate, you should know that that is wrong think because we are the government and because we say so. Here's how the game works.

It's called Pathways and players guide white teenage characters through scenarios where they must avoid being flagged for extreme right-wing ideology after discussing migration online. An in-game meter tracks how extreme the character's behavior becomes. Players who lose may receive counseling for ideological thoughts or face referral to an anti-terrorism expert.

[...] The character can also attend a protest against the changes that Britain has been through in the last few years and the erosion of British values. attending the protest nearly results in arrest with a character discovering it focuses more on racism and anti-immigration than British values.

[...] It minimizes the entire topic down to a binary choice where you're either fully open to unchecked immigration or you're just a bigot. It completely ignores legitimate concerns like social cohesion, resource allocation, the pace of change within communities by slapping the racism label on any amount of skepticism shuts down any chance for debate whatsoever.

And the fact that this is the position of the people in charge, institutions with actual power over people, it feels incredibly authoritarian. [...] The game is designed by Shout Out UK, which claims to provide impartial political and media literacy training...

[..] What's hilarious here is that the game backfired in a major way. You see, the game's antagonist is a purple-haired goth girl named Amelia. In the story, Amelia is deliberately designed as a bad influence for the protagonist. She tries to radicalize the player by talking about anti-immigration views, protecting British culture and tradition, opposing mass migration, and inviting the player to join protests. If you agree with her and follow along, the game flags you with a warning that you're on a dangerous path.

The creators intended Amelia to be an obvious caricature of a far-right activist, someone that players are supposed to reject. But instead, the exact opposite happened online. It was the Strand effect on steroids. People found her attractive, fitting the classic e-girl archetype that's already popular in meme culture, and they reclaimed her as a symbol of their own actual real life views.

Because of course they did. People are not caricatures. A lot of people worry about mass migration, British culture erosion, everything that the game creators present as wrong. These are actual things that British people care about. So, the propaganda backfired so hard that the Pathways game got disabled and taken offline the moment the Amelia meme took off. If this isn't all just glorious, I don't know what is...