The Other Pandemic by James Ball review: QAnon as post-truth pathogen
Published By admin with Comments 0
Most people made aware of a plot to kidnap and murder children on an industrial scale would want to do something about it. It is hardly surprising that Edgar Maddison Welch, learning of such a wicked scheme, and outraged that law enforcement agencies were doing nothing, took matters into his own hands.
On 4 December 2016, Welch brought an assault rifle and handgun down to Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington DC, to liberate the children held captive there in the basement. But he found no children and no basement.
That setback didn’t put a stop to “Pizzagate”, a deranged fantasy among online sleuths who had identified Comet Ping Pong as the hub for a satanic paedophile ring based around Hillary Clinton’s presidential election campaign. As with so many conspiracy theories, the absence of supporting evidence could be folded back into the original narrative as proof of a cover-up.
That self-replicating mechanism is deftly unpacked by James Ball in The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World. It is a disturbing study of the origins and resilience of an exceptionally versatile and pernicious network of paranoid digital malcontents.
Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/19/the-other-pandemic-by-james-ball-review-qanon-as-post-truth-pathogen.
