Gay People Come From China

(Conspiracy Theory II)
You heard me last time! I’m in the mood to pretend to be pissy! Let’s create our own conspiracy theory!

Making conspiracy theories from scratch is surprisingly easy. All you need is four simple ingredients.

1) A group of people whom you hate for some reason.
2) Something in the world that is either changing or has changed.
3) Some path through the “common knowledge” folklore connecting the first two items.
4) A feeling of group pride for your followers.

You can do this for practically anything. Let’s start easy by proving that homosexuality is a vicious plot engineered by the Chinese.

We’ve already taken care of the first ingredient: “Those damned Chinese peoples and their booming industry have slighted us for too long! How dare the Chinese people give us loans to cover our rapidly-expanding deficit! It’s like saying we owe them! We will not be oppressed! Their slanty-eyes and rice paddy sandals will never be able to spot us or hold us down!”

See?! It’s easy! Just like that, I’ve decided to hate Chinese people on the grounds that all of them are rice farmers, which I object to because… Well, let’s not get bogged down in the details.

As a second ingredient, we need to find something about the world that’s changing. We decided that too, in the title: “Have you looked around lately! It seems like you can’t hock your chewing tobacco at the spittoon anymore without hitting a homosexual spitting something else into a tissue! And that doesn’t even count the three others who think tissues ‘aren’t intimate.’” Clearly, based on the fact that we’ve decided to dislike both the Chinese and booming homosexuality, there must be some connection.

The third ingredient is simply to add stream of consciousness writing until we make that connection. This is the fun part. Stream of consciousness writing is notoriously difficult to read on account of the fact that it sounds exactly like conspiracy theories. That’s not a coincidence! Allow me to forget rules of grammar and cause and effect while I pinch out a steaming mound of ingredient number three:

“Damned Chinese bastards and their rice paddies all turning a profit and taking jobs from tax paying Americans need to stop walking on those rickety platform shoe things they have and stop making babies what with freaking five trillion Chinese people already or whatever you’d think the bastards don’t know how to do anything but hump like the bunnies in the noodles I heard about that the chop suey place on state and Madison used and also had dogs in their food when they ran out of bunnies and no one could tell the difference cuz of all the MSG they use with all that chemical in their food next they’ll be stir-frying babies if they’re not already because I heard that Chinese people can’t have more than one baby without paying a huge tax so I bet that’s what they do cuz I also heard that the Chinese or Indians or whatever (savages) only like boy babies because women are too whiney so they sometimes kill girl babies and put them in the food so as not to waste still all that whining has to go somewhere since God made whiney women on the sixth day so you gotta realize all that extra whining must be going into some men since there aren’t enough women to hold it all but men can’t be whiney like that without becoming girls so the extra whining from the dead Chinese girl babies must be making some boy babies really gay.”

See how easy that was! We’ve managed to blame the Chinese people for making gay babies around the world without once stopping to waste time on punctuation. The resulting mess has enough stereotypes and bigotry in it to have a huge appeal for racists, misogynists, homophobes, and religious nuts alike. That’s pretty much something for everyone, so we know we’ve done a good job. Plus, that “paragraph” will give pretty much any intellectual a headache, ensuring that it won’t be targeted for too many scholarly rebuttals. What’s best, though, is that our premise can’t be argued without some attempt to rephrase or quote sections for clarity. That means we can conclude ahead of time that any and all debate we do encounter will be “taken out of context.” Since it’s additionally almost impossible to separate the thoughts in our premise, we can be confident that even if someone manages to disprove some assumed premise, it will be possible to reply that having done so was to “miss our point.”

Step four is really just for bookkeeping. As I’ve said, anyone can create their own conspiracy theory. But it takes real talent to make one that will stand the test of time. Our fourth ingredient is just to make sure that the theory collects enough followers to “keep it real.” If you did your stream of consciousness writing properly, this step is easy. All you have to do is read over what you wrote and highlight all the things that you hated on accident. The people who also hate those things will be your followers. Looking above, we see that this conspiracy theory will appeal to blue-collar conservative workers, women-haters, steak-and-potatoes lovers, and manly men. That’s a pretty solid group, so we’ve got ourselves a winner!

There you have it folks! Gay babies are a Chinese plot!