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Around the same time that Amelia was being born, images of Persian women lighting their cigarettes with the Ayatollah’s photograph went viral.




Inspired by the courageous and beautiful Persians, I made my own first contribution to Amelia, depicting her lighting her cigarette with a burning picture of Keir Starmer, or with a burning progress pride flag.







Whether in imitation, or inspired directly by the Persians, similar images soon appeared.

So I guess in addition to purple hair, Britishness, and racism, another of Amelia’s canonical characteristics is that she’s a smoker, which honestly fits the archetype of a rebellious alt girl. ...

Amelia’s explosive popularity seems out of step with the image of the right as conservative and traditionalist. This may be what led to Shout Out UK’s fortuitous misstep in the first place (assuming that Amelia wasn’t just the creative director’s shadow persona self-insert, which is distinctly possible). Rightists, they may have reasoned, are generally hostile to the aposematic fashions beloved of the left’s gender-ambiguous hall monitors. Reactionary Christian conservatives prefer their girls to be demure, submissive, and modest; they dislike tattoos, piercings, and brightly coloured hair. By associating nativist extremism with a purple-haired alt girl, they’ll drive the chuds away from racism! It’s brilliant!




... I’ve thought for a while that this conservative presentation is a gross strategic error. The right should instead embrace the ready-made aesthetics of the antihero: leather jackets, sunglasses, leather boots, and so on. it should take its aesthetic cues from heavy metal, punk rock, jazz, industrial, and techno, not country and western or easy listening Christian contemporary. It should dress with a bit of edge.




Amelia’s resonance is a function of her subversion of contemporary sartorial norms, which code Manic Panic hair as visual shorthand for insufferable shitlibbery. ... Amelia as chudette, as sweet-natured Nietzschean e-girl, as rabid remigrationist with a fag in one hand and a burning fag flag in the other, this is something unexpected, novel, and therefore interesting. The right-wing is not supposed to be visually striking, it is not supposed to grab eyeballs with loud colours, it is expected to be aesthetically dull and uninspired, it is supposed to behave and obey the rules (which were written so that it will always lose). Amelia presents possibilities that haven’t been explored yet ... if the authoritarian den mothers of the longhouse can appropriate punk rock fashions and wear them like a skinsuit ... could not a cyberpunk right do the same?

Amelia poses a question. Can we hyperstition manic pixie dream radicals into existence? This is almost the same question as: can we psyop the existing supply of art hos into adopting right-wing opinions? Can they be seduced to the dark side, which is to say to the forces of the good, the true, and the beautiful? At the individual level it’s a known phenomenon that women will tend to adjust their beliefs to match those of their boyfriends and husbands; can we do this at the collective level, as well? Can we hold frame, letting them know that gay race communism might offer them a ‘career’ but at the price of romantic loneliness ... that they have to choose between being ‘good’, and being loved? Women love nothing more than male attention. By projecting the political imperative of remigration and reconquista onto a whimsical avatar, perhaps a signal can be transmitted into the collective mind ... ‘Men want this ... you can be this ... doesn’t it look like more fun than whatever you’re doing right now?’

The purest and most powerful form of modern mythology, however, is not to be found in comic books, fantasy novels, or conspiracy theories, but in the humble and unserious meme, which has grown to encompass, supersede, and transcend the other forms with its ubiquity.

Before Trump was elected, Pepe had been deified via his connection with the primordial Egyptian god of cosmogonic chaos, Kek...

This fueled the half-serious, half-ironic belief in meme magic on the forum – the notion that memes could be used to prophecy, or perhaps even to change reality. Proliferation of a meme could establish a sort of resonance between the consciousness of human beings and the universal mind, leading to the manifestation of the meme in reality.