There’s something genuinely funny going on in the United Kingdom right now.
The British government’s Prevent office, housed under the Home Office (think Department of the Interior, but allergic to dissent), partnered with a media nonprofit called Shout Out UK (like a PBS focused on preventing “radicalism”) to come up with a clever new way to re-educate British youth.
The concern, as always, was “radicalization.” They thought the solution was inspired: a choice-based video game. Kids like games. Games involve decisions. Decisions shape values. What could possibly go wrong?
Thus Pathways was born, a government-funded interactive morality play designed to gently shepherd British children toward being properly antiracist, properly accepting, and properly enthusiastic about the ever-increasing number of migrants reshaping their country. Civics class, but fun. And digital. And corrective.
As part of this effort, the designers introduced a character named Amelia, a cute, purple-haired, vaguely goth girl who carries a Union Jack and talks about Britain being for the British. She was meant to function as a warning, a living illustration of how nationalism can look attractive, even charming, and yet be dangerous to the impressionable youths of Britain who may not have fully internalized the idea that Brexit is bad and they are to obey their elitist overlords.
What they did not anticipate was that the public would take one look at adorable, charming Amelia and decide she was the good guy.
What Prevent Was Supposed to Be
To understand how Pathways ended up here, you have to rewind to what Prevent was originally meant to do. The program emerged from the post-9/11 security logic that shaped Western counter-terror policy across the board. The target was not opinions or aesthetics. It was violence, and specifically Islamist terrorism and the recruitment pipelines that fed it. “Radicalization” meant movement toward planning or committing acts of terror.
The rationale was simple and, frankly, understandable. Governments have a duty to stop people from blowing up buses and concert halls. Identifying grooming networks, interrupting recruitment, and diverting individuals away from violent ideologies was the job. That’s why Prevent sat under the Home Office in the first place. Bombs and bodies are not abstract problems.
Over time, however, the definition of “radicalization” began to stretch. Then it stretched again. Eventually it stopped describing a trajectory toward violence at all and started describing a trajectory away from approved social and political consensus. The concern shifted from what someone might do to what someone might think, or worse, what they might feel attached to.
This is where Prevent quietly stopped being about prevention and started becoming about management, and specifically the management of populations rather than threats. Cultural signals like flags, language, and other symbols of national belonging were reclassified as early warning indicators. Discomfort with mass migration was treated less as a political opinion than as a diagnostic symptom. Belonging itself became something to be solved.
Once the mission changed, the tools followed.
Hellbound and Down 
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