OTHER PANDEMIC: How QAnon Contaminated the World

It all began with an anonymous online platform called 4chan, which Pulitzer prize-winning journalist James Ball subscribed to as a teenager. Essentially it was a message board in the early days, quickly developing its own vocabulary, with in-groups and out-groups, and often with pornographic, homophobic or racist slurs. As he entered the world of work and life's realities Ball began to realise 4chan's negative aspects, which coincided with a dark political turn among its global anonymous users. The warning signs appeared with "doxing", victimising a person or organisation by doing something like sending hundreds of pizzas to them, closing a public facility such as a swimming pool, or voting an unsuitable candidate into public office. The Church of Scientology fought back and made everything a lot worse. Pizzagate in 2016 saw a man entering the pizza shop Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 rifle and demanding access to the secrets in the basement. There was no basement. Hillary Clinton became a target in 2017 with a conspiracy theory linking her to a satanic paedophile ring, and the QAnon conspiracy theory developed from this, with Clinton and Obama cast as high-ranking officials whom Trump was fighting to expose. The author compares the QAnon theory with a medical pathogen, spreading virally in seconds, coinciding and becoming intimately linked with the Covid-19 outbreak. At one point 44 percent of the Republican party believed that anti-Covid vaccinations were used by Bill Gates to implant a microchip. This fascinating exposé covers many false claims, some of which arose from the best intentions, and finishes with Q's disappearance following the 6 January storming of the Capitol. An alarming read. 279pp, paperback.