The world of conspiracy theories has been rocked by a bitter feud between leading conspiracists. The brutal battle kicked off last month with leading UK conspiracy theorist and self-styled ‘citizen journalist Kevin Spline aiming a blistering broadside at the Q Anon movement in an editorial for the West Berkshire Conspiracy Review. “This bunch of crackpots just don’t know when to lie down and stay dead,” wrote the Thatcham hair dresser in the publication of which he is editor. “Just look at how many times they have been proven wrong – they keep making these ludicrous predictions which never come true and idolise some fat lying bigot as their Messiah! Really, they are just an embarrassment to the entire conspiracy community. Utter amateurs!” Unsurprisingly, this outburst was met with a swift response from top US Q Anon populariser Leonard Lumper on his self-titled vlog. “Damn it, at least we achieved something – we convinced enough good American citizens that the election had been rigged that we had an insurrection on our hands,” he declared in his distinctive New Jersey twang, from what appeared to be his front room, complete with flying ducks on the wall behind him. “When was the last time that any of your Limey kooks managed to storm your parliament, eh? David Icke and the rest of you faggots are more interested in spinning tired fairy tales about giant lizards or Jewish bankers than toppling the deep state!”

On the face of it, this animosity between rival conspiracy theories might seem surprising. After all, the basis of their theories don’t seem too far apart: Q Anon believes that Donald Trump was leading a battle against a massive liberal, state-endorsed, conspiracy of child molesters, while Spline and his acolytes contend that there has been a high level conspiracy to cover up the fact that the Nazis were actually the good guys in World War Two and that the Holocaust was an attempt to destroy a global Jewish-led peadophile conspiracy. Spline, nevertheless, believes that there are fundamental differences between the two belief systems. “This Q Anon nonsense is just so vague and non-specific,” he wrote, scathingly, in his editorial. “I mean, who is behind their so-called conspiracy of kiddie fiddlers? ‘Liberals’? What do they mean by that? Just about anybody the ultra conservatives don’t like – there’s just no underlying thread connecting them all. What kind of conspiracy is that? It isn’t even a theory – just a collection of unfounded, utterly insane, accusations,” By contrast, contends Spline, his theory is quite clear who the culprits are: the Jews. “Sure, we also believe that the ‘liberal’ state has been behind the campaign of misinformation against the Nazis, but we also show that every one of the main actors has some kind of Jewish or Zionist connection,” he proudly declared. “It gives the whole thing a unity, a basis in provable fact that elevates it to the status of being a proper ‘theory’!”

Leading academic Professor Bob Mincer, however, believes that the bad blood between the two conspiracy camps has little to do with ideologies. “The eruption of this feud really shouldn’t be surprising as the Q Anon movement represents a rival strand of US-based conspiracy theory, (actually, let’s stop calling them ‘theories’, it implies some kind of parity with actual scientific theories, which are evidence-based and testable – ‘fantasies’ is a better description), with a massive fan base, from which this character Spline was effectively excluded,” opines the Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Political Violence at the Banbury Online University of Arts and Crafts. “He wasn’t and never would be part of their pantheon of ‘gurus’. So, obviously, he had to move to dismiss and discredit them as being simply a ‘bunch of nutters’, especially as, with the defeat of Trump and the failure of attempts to overturn the 2020 election result, the movement appeared to have failed and rendered itself irrelevant.” By launching his attack on Q Anon, Spline was able to re-establish himself and his particular brand of conspiracy in the world of conspiracy theorists. “There’s no doubt that the Covid pandemic hit many of these conspiracies hard – they suddenly found themselves being supplanted by a whole new slew of pandemic-related conspiracies,” speculates the academic. “That’s all that the cranks and crackpots were talking about online – vaccine conspiracies, whether the virus was real or a ‘Deep State’ plot to normalise dictatorship and so on. Nazi anti-child molester Holocausts and Pizza parlour peados just weren’t on anyone’s agenda!”

While his motivations might have been entirely self-serving, Mincer does believe that Spline has made some valid criticisms of Q Anon aspart of his attempts to wrest back control of the conspiracy agenda. “Their biggest problem was to keep making promises of revelations and events that never happened,” he muses. “They were too specific – the key to a lasting conspiracy fantasy is to always be vague about these things, especially when they are meant to occur. That way, you can build up expectation – the further away in time the event is meant to occur, the more you can ramp up all the speculation that fuels this sort of nonsense.” He also noted that Spline was currently attempting to tie his own conspiracy in with the Covid conspiracies by embracing the ‘Anti-Vaxxer’ movement. “It makes sense if he and his people want to re-establish themselves in the public consciousness,” says Mincer. “They have to expand their base of support and win back those who changed their allegiance to the Covid conspiracy cause. That’s something the Q Anon mob will find difficult, as their hero, Donald Trump, has been at pains to try and take credit for the vaccines.”

Indeed, Spline has seized upon this last point as further evidence that Q Anon followers have been led astray by false conspiracy prophets. “I have no doubt that they the people behind the whole Q Anon debacle are actually operatives of the ‘Deep State’, trying to undermine Trump by associating him with crackpot theories and discredit conspiracy theories generally with their lunacy,” he says. “I mean, the people who disseminate it are so obviously fake – that Leonard guy, for instance, with his fake New Jersey accent: according to my sources he’s never been near the US and broadcasts his vlog from his council house in Brighton!” As for his embrace of the anti-vaxxer movement, Spline argues that it is inextricably intertwined with his existing theories. “Well, it is obvious that this so-called vaccine is designed to inject the ‘Jewish’ gene into us gentiles, to make us more sympathetic toward those hook-nosed, baby buggering banker bastards,” he asserts. “The whole Covid thing was just fake news designed to get us off the streets while they molested the kids in those schools they refused to close! We all know that teachers are a bunch of Zionist sympathisers! It’s bloody obvious!”