Arguing something only tangentially related to the debate topic is a decades-old strategy, at a minimum. We called them squirrel plans, or something like that.

Arguing something only tangentially related to the debate topic is a decades-old strategy, at a minimum. We called them squirrel plans, or something like that. When I was in high school in the late eighties, one semester the tournament topic was something like, “Resolved, that the USA should decrease the non-military consumption of fossil fuels”. A fairly straightforward topic. In one tournament we ran into a team whose affirmative plan was, “ban oil-eating microbes”. Basically they ran with “evidence” from some articles written by crackpots who postulated that these microbes used to clean up oil spills could mutate into something that would essentially eat all life on the earth. You had to be ready to handle things like this so you would have a number of generic negatives that you would try to tie in. In this case, we ran with our “humans are bad, so killing them off is a net good” negative. We called that one Malthus.