“[It’s a] distraction… something big is about to drop,” argued one Telegram user in a popular QAnon channel. Another wrote that it was “staged… to boost ratings and to make everybody talk about Will Smith and Chris Rock in Hollywood and stop talking about President Trump.”

An altogether more intriguing proposal was that the altercation was a coded message of some sort. “They also use the live shows as comms,” one dialled-in user of the QAnon message board Great Awakenings wrote. “It could have been a message to some operatives to go to Plan B.” It’s a delicious thought: Rock and Smith’s pas de deux was an elaborate performance, a tuxedo-clad Noh play whose significance had national security implications.

Or perhaps, like Elvis and an ex-Soviet premier Leonid Brehnez, Will Smith was never there at all. “It’s not a fake incident but definitely clone cuz Will Smith is dead [sic],” one member of a Telegram group linked to the JFK-QAnon cult in Dallas wrote. Which is one explanation of how he came to produce the awful Fresh Prince remake.

The slap was a Neo-Nazi false flag 

Putin’s war on Ukraine has been played out in multiple settings: by air, on land, at sea and, crucially, over cyberspace. Is it too much to suspect that he is now using a new theatre too – Hollywood award ceremonies? Well, probably, but let’s roll with it for the moment. 

The slap, so the theory goes, was a ruse. But rather than to boost TV ratings, or to pull the carpet over the powerful’s indiscretion, it was part of President Zelensky’s information fight-back against the Russian invasion. In particular, it was a smoke screen to distract from the atrocities being carried out by the Azov Battalion, part of the National Guard of Ukraine. The Azov Regiment are known for their fierce fighting skills – and, some allege, their National Socialist affiliations.