This is why we say they act like conspiracy theorists about this. This is what conspiracy theories do to relationships, they destroy them, the conspiracy theory is non-negotiable, and must be accepted, and no amount of evidence against it can ever disprove it, and it becomes a larger and larger part of the conspiracy theorist’s life, consuming and destroying who they were before they adopted the conspiracy.

We often poke fun at Zenz here for his complete incompetence in proving his claims, but this was never actually about scholarly investigation, this was always framed as a conspiracy theory, it was always designed to weasel its way into the impulsive and emotional part of the brain, to shut down the ability to actually think about this. The “evidence” may be completely non-existent, but that’s not the point, the point is that it makes people feel scared and upset and brave for fighting the evil enemy. They tie their sense of self-worth to this and it becomes their identity, and getting them to admit it is wrong would make them the “bad guy” that they’ve been hating all this time, so it’s an awful uphill battle to get someone out of this mindset. And even if you can convince someone that China isn’t committing genocide, they’ve still internalised the important part: the dehumanisation of Chinese people and the othering of China as some evil enemy out to destroy everything.