AI, the Amelia Meme, Revolution, and the Future of Celebrity

I’ll start this off with a question, and it may take you some time to connect it to the bulk of this column’s subject matter. But I promise we’ll get there.

The question is this: who’s the most famous actor of the 19th century?

While you mull that over, let me show you a couple of videos that you might have seen…

This Amelia vid goes hard ????????????

It must suck to not be a patriot because you can’t enjoy things like thispic.twitter.com/c3FCKImyXF

— Basil the Great (@BasilTheGreat) February 11, 2026

Amelia with Churchill on the beach. #Amelia #Churchill #UK #Britain #UniteTheKingdom pic.twitter.com/U0ktCUqP48

— Amelia (@makeukgood) February 10, 2026

What is this? It’s Amelia, which is an internet meme originating out of the U.K., thanks to the democratizing effect of AI image and video generation. It’s one of the most fascinating things going on in 2026 — blowing up out of nearly thin air last month and surprisingly still growing, past the point most memes manage to survive.

The Amelia meme is a very interesting case study on a number of fronts, but three of them have particularly struck me as worth pondering.

Amelia was created, interestingly enough, to be exactly what she’s become but for entirely opposite reasons.

It seems that the city council in Hull, a declining, hollowed-out, ramshackle burg in the English Midlands which is one of the more classic cases of what happens when socialist policies deindustrialize a place and socialist politics then force its deculturalization through mass immigration, in a rather perverted one-two punch sensible urbanites on both sides of the pond can recognize, commissioned a video game. An organization known as Shout Out UK, which bills itself as “countering disinformation through political and media literacy,” built something they billed as a “visual novel” — it’s a role-playing game — called Pathways.

And a trip through it will fill your nostrils with a stench of totalitarianism sufficient to raise Orwell from the dead.

The game’s main character is a non-gendered they/them named Charlie, because it would be a sin against wokeness for Charlie to simply be a dude, and Charlie is faced with lots of choices as he/they attempt to navigate the British educational system’s indoctrination of today’s Good British. There are good choices and bad choices, and the game is quite preachy about which is which… (RELATED: The Vanishing Englishman: Inside the Schools Forecasting the UK Future)

And now comes the star of the show…

It turns out that in the game, Amelia is the racist neo-Nazi leading Charlie astray.

And they made her a purple-haired Goth girl, which was supposed to make her unattractive to the budding neo-Nazi youth of Great Britain.

In the game, the effect Amelia has on Charlie is to turn him into a ne’er-do-well, and that results in his/their being directed to Prevent — the government-funded nanny-state re-education experts who were created to stop Muslim terrorism a generation ago but have lately focused their attention on indoctrinating native British into “anti-racism” and fighting “extremist” ideas like the notion something concrete ought to be done about Muslim rape gangs who, it turns out, are exporting British girls to Pakistan as sex slaves in numbers described as “countless.” (RELATED: Import the Third World, Become the Third World)

Americans struggle to grasp just how off-the-chain the British government and political class have become.

And of course, through the ministrations of the experts at Prevent, including a very professorial counselor of — apparently — South Asian extraction and a hijab-clad therapist who runs “family sessions,” Charlie is made one with Big Brother. Or Little Sister?

Anyway.

But this game was so utterly ham-handed, one-sided, and stupid that when people heard about it and began interacting with it, an active ingredient emerged with a peculiar perspective — namely, that Amelia was actually pretty awesome.

I think I’m in love with Amelia https://t.co/P1t2voVdDM pic.twitter.com/NBSGUVUyAr

— Bovril-Gesellschaft (@BovrilG) January 9, 2026

Note the more than five million views on that X post, by a decidedly non-famous Substacker with just under 22,000 followers on X.

And from there flowed the memes.

Apparently, this one came from somebody prompting Grok Imagine…

The prompts were simple.

First, I told ⁦@grok⁩ to look at every single Amelia meme on the Internet.

Second, I said: “Become Amelia, then make a video and tell the British people what you want them to know.”

Here’s the surprising result. pic.twitter.com/dGY0OvKcQ4

— Huff (@Huff4Congress) January 16, 2026

Some of these are kind of mindblowing. A decade ago, you would assume only corporate media could put something like this together, but now?

Stop what you’re doing and give this a watch ????

This is the BEST Amelia video I’ve seen. @Skyebrows has outdone themselves – the quality, the detail, the easter eggs.

Amelia is more than a meme now. She’s a movement ????pic.twitter.com/l37BeQuNk6

— Amelia (@AmeliajakSolana) January 31, 2026

The guy who put that together is somebody you’ve never heard of and who has all of 6,500 followers on X.

This is absolutely organic. It isn’t being driven by a political party, or dark money, or anything like that.

And it has power. There are thousands of pictures emanating out of Iran, of women who’ve thrown away their hijabs and are lighting cigarettes with burning pictures of the Ayatollah. So, there is this (which isn’t safe for work)…

My own humble contribution to the Amelia meme trend. pic.twitter.com/fhbFz024AC

— Marty (@MartySulek) February 6, 2026

The hijabi counselor came in for a good throttling as well…

NEW CHARACTER JUST DROPPED

Amelia wasn’t the only person created by the UK Government for their stupid game

There was also the Muslim counsellor you were forced to endure

Well she’s getting meme’d now ????pic.twitter.com/WYimpb4iWD

— Basil the Great (@BasilTheGreat) February 6, 2026

And now there are people donning purple wigs and creating countless real-life Amelias…

En moins d’un mois, Amelia est passée d’un simple mème à du cosplay identitaire pour les militantes de terrain ????pic.twitter.com/Yx4BrqLT7K

— Une Bonne Droite ???????? (@BonneDroite) February 9, 2026

Plus, Amelia has crossed the Channel. As an example, the German Amelia is named Maria…

To my English-speaking followers: You asked, and I listened! ????????????????

Due to massive demand, I’ve added English subtitles to the German Amelia/Maria video. Now the message can be understood worldwide

Please share this and help it go viral. Let’s reach everyone! ????#Germany #Maria… pic.twitter.com/s1UdU6w7iR

— Ragnarök (@Neogermane) January 22, 2026

And it suddenly isn’t so easy to find and play Pathways anymore. Wonder why?

So… what to make of this?

Well, there’s the most obvious takeaway, and I suppose it’s heartening whether you agree with the sentiment behind the Amelia meme or if you think it’s racist and awful.

Which is that one of the biggest problems in attempting to push a coercive agenda through government action is that there is always blowback, and you’re going to run into the human problem here — a particularly pesky reality for those folks trying to leverage political power into a specific result is that rebelliousness and creativity go hand in hand. So you had some completely uninspired clockwatchers building that video game for some measure of filthy lucre on commission by a gaggle of local political mediocrities, and once the resultingly poor product saw the light of day, it ran into an army of angry rebels with a great amount of creative energy.

Orwell wrote about government power being used to control the thoughts of individuals, and his thesis in 1984 was that this power would or could ultimately win.

But if Orwell saw the Amelia meme, he might have to rewrite the ending. Because the tools now exist to make it absolutely impossible to impose government narratives over the objections of common sense. The public won’t put up with it, and there are too many smartasses with technical savvy out there. Even in Orwell’s time, people were subverting official Soviet art to push anti-communist narratives.

We saw a taste of this a decade ago when the American alt-right, which is a very small number of people, popularized the Pepe the Frog meme. You didn’t have to be alt-right to think Pepe’s antics were hilarious, and the alarmed and befuddled reactions of the official Left, which included demands for the disavowal of Pepe by mainstream conservatives, made it all the more fun.

Not to mention the crackpot controversy over the “OK” hand signal and its “racist” overtones, which was shortly turned into a smartass rebellion against cancel culture by the non-woke.

And that’s what the Amelia meme has become. But with AI video apps that can’t be shut down (you can run Wan 2.1, one of the better AI video engines, on your own computer if it has enough memory), this isn’t just a cartoon character. It’s a walking, talking personification of the resistance to the British political class.

It’s a Guy Fawkes mask, straight out of V for Vendetta.

And that personification makes for an impossible challenge to Keir Starmer’s government. (RELATED: Lord Mandelson: The Albatross Around Sir Keir’s Neck)

A Tommy Robinson you can make a victim of Alinsky’s Rule 13. You can pick him, freeze him, personify him, and polarize him, and then you can arrest and imprison him, and in so doing make him an example for all those who might follow: is this how you want to end up?

But you can’t do any of that to Amelia. And you’ll look like an idiot for trying.

Starmer and his minions have, for two weeks, been trying to attack X for hosting so many of the Amelia memes. It’s like trying to kill mosquitoes with a nuclear bomb. Their efforts at digital ID are collapsing for a similar reason — now, everybody understands why they want it.

A narrative war against a fictional character is impossible. Even trying to go after the digital creators who release those memes and videos is unthinkable in something pretending to be a free society.

Not to mention that Amelia exists in the hearts and minds Starmer is trying to control because of the grooming/rape gangs he’s enabled for two decades, and spending his time trying to squelch that meme only points out his guilt and complicity in something which is more real than Amelia is not. It’s an impossible situation that he eminently deserves to be in.

But the third item I’m pondering in watching the Amelia meme is this.

You don’t need to cast anyone to play Amelia. She’s going to look fairly consistent in iteration after iteration, because AI can do that and because the people participating in moving that meme will prompt it to do that. She is, in part, an AI viral-media answer for what oral tales did for Robin Hood — a powerful folklore meme personifying an idea that resonates with large swaths of people.

And because AI can manifest and animate that character, that folklore meme, if you will, without the need for a corporate structure or the Screen Actors’ Guild, there are no barriers to the storytellers interested in using her to connect to an audience.

Yes, this is a political meme, but it’s also an example of something different altogether.

So, back to the question I opened this column with: who was the most famous actor of the 19th century?

And the answer is John Wilkes Booth.

Not for his exploits on the stage, mind you. He shot Lincoln, and that’s what made him internationally famous.

This matters because the 19th century saw theater flourish as the dominant expression of popular culture in both America and Europe. There were lots of somewhat-famous actors — Sarah Bernhardt was probably the most famous actress based on her stage exploits, though ask around and she’s no longer anything like a household name.

But celebrity, and its power, was not part of the equation then. Not like now.

Where I’m going with this is to say that the current iteration of our culture is driven by celebrity, and the mania we allow to surround it. But celebrity culture, as it’s currently practiced, is anything but necessary. It’s a manufactured reality, a creation of the media companies of the 20th century, which are much less successful in the 21st.

And with the Amelia meme, what you’re seeing is that it isn’t written in stone that we have to be governed by the whims and bad ideas of famous people.

We’re already at the point where the Alyssa Milanos and Kathy Griffins of the world have so abused what little celebrity their talents created for them that most people have a negative view of the relationship between fame and quality. When you Kardashianize pop culture, that’s inevitable. And what comes from that is going to be a diminishing demand for star power in cultural IP — which our ancestors didn’t need in the first place and would have thought absurd given the lives they led.

And that gets us back to the storytellers. We remember Shakespeare, Wilde, Ibsen, Marlowe, Milton, Shelley, and the others who gave us the stories. We don’t remember the actors who first brought them to life on stage. We know them now, thanks to film, and for decades we allowed them to dictate to us what our tastes should be in fashion, in food, in wellness and health, and even in politics.

But when a new medium comes along — and those viral memes like the ones Amelia stars in are the heralds of that new medium, don’t kid yourself — in which paying some very ordinary human seven or eight figures to star in a show when a look or a voice can be generated from thin air by use of a prompt to a computer or an app becomes utterly absurd, well…

Do we care at all what Jane Fonda thinks? Is Robert DeNiro relevant in any way?

I’m not saying that the concept of celebrity, or the industry built around it, is going to turn off like some light switch. I am saying it will go on the wane, and quickly. This is already happening under the weight of absurdity it has already amassed. You can inflict only so many Ellen/Elliott Pages or Sam Smiths or Billie Eilishes on a culture before the people become exhausted, and we’re there.

And when it isn’t about who plays Robin Hood but Robin Hood himself, and the stories the character is immersed in, that’s a whole different world than the one you grew up in, where the stories — and the storytellers — are the drivers of the culture, not the packaging they come in.

And what ties the political and cultural pieces together here is something Keir Starmer is finding out.

Which is that gatekeeping is no longer practicable. You can’t control that which you are trying to control. You have to serve the public, not vice versa. You can govern, but you can’t rule.

The people in charge of our institutions are beginning to find that out. Let’s hope they learn the right lessons from it. If they don’t, Amelia is only the beginning.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Because It’s Inappropriate, That’s Why

Five Quick Things: The Wrath of the Savages

You Can’t Go on Destroying Wealth Forever, You Know. Ultimately, There Are Consequences.