The Will Smith slap was a deep state conspiracy, apparently

Hey, did you hear that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock? Of course you did: The bonkers moment dominated Twitter, gave the Oscars a major boost in viewership, and caused all of the major news outlets to send out push notifications as if it was an international incident. But did you get the full story? Not according to the QAnon conspiracy theorists, who are here to show us how everything is strategically staged and produced to distract us from what’s really happening.

Let’s start with the narrative that they want you to believe. Will Smith — offended by a joke at the expense of his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith — got on stage and slapped Chris Rock. What leads us to believe that the slap was about the joke? Maybe it was Smith twice shouting, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth.”

Perhaps you thought this was all unscripted, based on the fact that the broadcast audio cut out and Rock was clearly startled by it. But that’s just what they want you to believe. That’s right. This wasn’t a singular moment, but actually part of a massive conspiracy. Just ask Max Blumenthal, a Putin apologist and the editor of the conspiratorial blog The Grayzone. Blumenthal theorized on Twitter that the slap was a manufactured distraction to keep everyone from paying attention to alleged atrocities committed by a unit of the National Guard of Ukraine.

But wait, it doesn’t stop there! Not only was the slap an attempt to make us ignore the ongoing war in Ukraine — it was also an attempt to indoctrinate us and force us to get vaccines. The entire show was sponsored by Pfizer and BioNTech, after all. Don’t you see? The slap got your eyes on the screen, and then they hit you with vaccine propaganda, about how the shot is “safe” and “effective” and “successfully keeping people from being hospitalized by a disease that has killed roughly 1 million Americans.”

While the conspiratorial takes are just completely incomprehensible unless your brain is irreparably broken, the Slap Truthers out there aren’t alone in interpreting the moment as being whatever best fits your worldview. It’s about leftist censorship of “unacceptable” ideas, says Ben Shapiro, as his galaxy brain grows larger. It’s about how people of color are more violent, according to alt-right racists like Paul Joseph Watson. It’s about how trans people are destroying gender, according to transphobic ghouls.

Here’s a theory: Will Smith, mad about a joke that he felt was out of line, inappropriately escalated the situation by slapping Chris Rock. And that’s literally all that happened. It is not a massive conspiracy, it is not proof of your bizarro worldview. It’s just a thing that happened, and we can all move on now.