It could never just be a slap. When Will Smith walloped Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards on Sunday night, it quickly became less a viral moment and more a litmus test for our collective cultural exhaustion. By Monday lunchtime, every possible angle, reaction, breakdown, hashtag and hot-take had been fed through the social spin cycle: chewed up, spit out and told to check its privilege. Was there anything left to say? 

Plenty, it turns out. Especially if you are of the, urm, conspiracist persuasion. For as the real world was reluctantly tearing itself away from Twitter timelines, cyberspace was just getting booted up. Soon, the Slap Truthers were out in force; the usual forums began to hum, threads unspooled, and the real meaning of that blow seemed tantalisingly close to being unveiled. 

The truth, it transpired, was out there – slap bang in your face, in fact. Here’s a selection from a (depressingly long) list of theories. 

The slap was all Trump’s fault 

You might think the slap was just an encounter between two consenting adults (and maybe one wife). But you’d be wrong. According to a certain liberally-inclined section of the internet, only one man could be responsible for the smack which echoed through Hollywood: Donald Trump. 

Trump, according to some Twitter wags, gave Smith his blessing to hit Rock a decade ago when he praised Smith for hitting an Ukrainian reporter who tried to kiss him at a Men in Black III premiere. At the Moscow showcase, Smith was pictured lashing out at the journalist who tried to peck him on the lips. 

“Will Smith, I congratulate you,” Trump said in a video on Twitter at the time. “I only wish you’d hit him harder.” How does this stack up with Sunday's fisticuffs? Well, apparently emboldened by this 10-year-old endorsement, Smith felt confident squaring up Rock on Sunday night, knowing he had the 45th President at his back. As editor Dan Stewart tweeted: “IT’S ALL CONNECTED.” Indeed it is. 

Trump is also to blame for Hollywood's blasé reaction to the slap:

So did like anyone walk out after that happened??? Or are we getting an independent psychological case study on how Trump got normalized?

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) March 28, 2022

The slap was staged

The Oscars have been in terminal decline. Last year’s ceremony had the lowest figures on record, with only 10.4 million viewers. Once appointment viewing, the pandemic – and a succession of effortfully arthouse winners and dull presenters – had left the film industry’s highest-wattage shindig barely a-gleam.

Cue an impossible-to-predict viral moment. Like, say, one of your star nominees biffing the host before, minutes later, going up to collect the Best Actor gong. Just set it up, share the clip and let the views roll in. This theory at least has (limited) grounding in reality -- both Smith and Rock are actors, actors are trained to take a punch, ergo the "fight" must have been fake. 

There is even a suggestion that Rock was wearing a “cheek pad” to cushion the blow, with “8K” resolution screenshots showing the apparent prosthetics. After all, the initial camera angle on the scene made it difficult to see the moment of connection. And it was clear that many in the audience assumed it was manufactured right up until Will Smith began bellowing, foul-mouthed, at Rock. 

In 8k quality images you can see a pad on chris rocks cheek, yeah conspiracy theorists gonna go crazy with this one

— posting clips that went viral (@viralclipsss) March 28, 2022

Two factors make this idea uncredible, though. First of all, pre-ceremony, the Academy's idea of hot viral content was to finally introduce a fan-voted-for category in 2022, a mere 16 years after the invention of Twitter. And second, the expression on Chris Rock’s says it all: stung, startled and stumbling over his words; he is quite literally gob-smacked. As Mike Tyson had it: "Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth." Rock doesn't look like he has a plan. He looks like a man who has just been hit in the mouth.

The slap was a deep state signal 

But what if the slap wasn't orchestrated by the laggard Academy, but by intelligence operatives trained in the shadowy arts of hybrid warfare? 

Unsurprisingly, this rather more sexy explanation is the one favoured by QAnon devotees. As Marjorie Taylor Greene showed, they may consider the Oscars a nest of vipers – or strictly-speaking, string-pulling lizard men – but that doesn't stop them avidly dissecting the ceremony’s central moment. 

“[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.

As yet, only one man appears to be banging on this particular drum. But he is doing so with monkey-on-an-organ-grinder vigour. Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief of the blog The Greyzone, tweeted that the slap was “just in time for the flood of Azov atrocity videos”, while posting the red dress-girl meme. Look closer, though, and you'll find Blumenthal is far from a squeaky-clean sleuth. 

In fact, he is an energetic Putin apologist, writing articles such as “Was bombing of Mariupol theater staged by Ukrainian Azov extremists to trigger NATO intervention?” To which the answer – as with the question “Did President Zelensky coordinate Will Smith’s slap from deep within his besieged country?” – can only be, well, no.  

The slap was a Scientologist ritual 

The Smiths have always denied they are members of the Church of Scientology. No one really knows whether there is a Scientology practice whereby lower-ranking members are slapped by higher-ups to prove dominance. And Chris Rock is almost certainly not a Scientologist.

But that hasn’t stopped opinion-havers on Twitter from speculating that Will Smith’s apparent loss of control was, in fact, a relapse into his Scientological conditioning. In a long thread, Max Burns, a political commentator, wrote: “The slap is much less interesting when you realize Will Smith almost certainly went through the Scientology courses that teach you to unapologetically use slaps and physical force to let a fellow Scientologist know they've done something wrong.” 

He continued: “It's the fact that, under Scientology, Smith's slap of Rock was the *only* acceptable response to what Rock did. In Scientology, inaction over disrespect is in itself grounds to get yourself slapped by a higher-ranking Scientologist.” 

Burns went on to repeat the rumours that a free school the Smiths opened in 2009, the Leadership Academy in Calabasas, California, was a Scientology training ground with L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics on the curriculum. The $1.235 million campus was established to teach their own children and, some allege, the children of other Scientologists. Jada was adamant it wasn’t a Scientologist institution. “Our school is not, and I repeat, not a Scientology school,” she told National Public Radio. Either way, the facility closed in 2013 when the Smiths children moved on. 

As for speculation that the couple were once involved in Scientology, a blog called The Underground Bunker claimed that, according to “an excellent source”, the couple were done with the Church by 2015. Nonetheless, Burns was still convinced the slap had its roots in Scientology: “It's about making sure other Scientologists *see* that Smith was unafraid to live KSW (Keep Scientology Working) ideology in public.” 

The slap was just… a slap 

Sadly for the internet, Smith’s smacking of Rock was almost certainly what it looked like: one man losing his rag when another man insulted his wife. The end. But where’s the fun in that?