I was  “rage-baiting,” a peer, as the kids say, a week before school started, when I offhandedly mentioned that my sister was born the same year Michael Jackson died. Following that, I declared that my sister was “Michael Jackson reincarnated.” When she looked at me strangely, I said, “Y’know, like the Trisha Paytas baby thing?” She proceeded to state confidently, “Reincarnation isn’t real,” in a tone that said, “Are you seriously that stupid?” I could go on about how demoralizing that interaction was, but all that to say there’s a portion of the population that knows nothing about the “Trisha Paytas Baby Theory”—which is a tragedy. So, I’ve set out to educate society of the going-ons in the world of the chronically online, starting with what I would argue was one of the biggest pop-culture moments of this summer. 

Now, those that are employed and still remember what grass feels like may be asking, “Who even is Trisha Paytas?” Trisha Paytas is an infamous media personality and a self-proclaimed  “troll.” She’s spent most of her career cycling through appearances on reality television and daytime TV segments. However, she’s most known for her primary YouTube channel, “blndsundoll4mj.” She’s known to don a persona reminiscent of the “Dumb Blonde” trope that was pervasive in 90s to early 2000s media, then make videos considered distasteful at best by most. To this day, her most viewed video is titled, “[Stuff] Fat Girls Who Think They’re Hot Say.” The worst of her controversies include her rapping the n-word, performing a stereotypical “Asian” accent to debut her new J-Pop star persona, and allegedly pretending to have Dissociative Identity Disorder. That’s not even touching on the outlandish claims she’s made for views, my favorite of which being, “I’m also not racist because I eat rice.”

Now, that’s Trisha Paytas, but what’s the “Trisha Paytas baby thing”? Well, something I neglected to mention earlier was that Paytas has three children: Malibu Barbie Paytas-Hacmon, Elvis Paytas-Hacmon, and Aquaman Moses Paytas-Hacmon. Much could be said about Paytas’ name choices, but I digress. What’s important about these babies is that the circumstances surrounding Malibu Barbie and Aquaman’s births have caused many a Twitter user to theorize that they are public figures reincarnate, which brings me back to my opening anecdote. Now, unlike my humorless friend, I’m not here to preach about whether or not reincarnation is real, much less if heavy metal icon Ozzy Osborne has actually been reincarnated as a child named after Aquaman, the objectively lamest superhero. What I will say is that mere days after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the world was introduced to Malibu Barbie Paytas-Hacmon. Similarly, the day Paytas announced the name of her most recent child, Aquaman, Ozzy Osborne’s death was front-page news. There were also jokes about Aquaman being the reincarnation of Pope Francis, as he died when Paytas was pregnant with her third child. The earliest known mention of the conspiracy theory is a tiktok by @smurphy_murphy with the caption, “Queen Elizabeth holding on for dear life so she doesn't get reincarnated as Trisha Paytas' baby.” Since then, through contagion via the internet, it’s spread to the point that major news outlets have written multi-page articles dedicated to it. Like this one. Paytas has expressed her discomfort with the meme, telling the Rolling Stone that while the Queen Elizabeth II jokes were “kind of funny”, the Ozzy Osborne jokes made her much more uncomfortable, saying that “it’s more real.” 

It’s statistically impossible that there wasn’t a baby anywhere in the world that would’ve fit the “reincarnation” theory better; a hundred babies would’ve been born within a minute of Osborne’s death, and there would’ve been thousands more by the time it was announced to the public. But they weren’t Trisha Paytas’ baby, so it would’ve been significantly less funny. I’d argue that it was a combination of Paytas’ infamy and these remarkably convenient circumstances that made a perfect storm for conspiracy theories that even Paytas, internet menace extraordinaire, couldn’t have engineered.