The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World – James Ball
Written by Elisa Garbil – 04.04.2025
Our first Book review & a vital one for risk professionals and concerned citizens alike!
If you know me, you know I love books, and not just for the pleasure of reading, but for their power to expose threats, shift perspectives, and sharpen our understanding of risk. While I believe there’s a book out there for everyone, some books are so urgent, so relevant to our current moment, that I feel compelled to recommend them widely. That’s why we’re launching Book Reviews on the International Risk Podcast! We are starting with a title that cuts to the core of one of the greatest socio-political threats of the digital age.
QAnon demonstrates the ability of online culture to repurpose old ideas, old conspiracies, old plots, to new audiences and new times.
James Ball – The Other Pandemic
The Other Pandemic by James Ball
James Ball ‘s The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World is not just a book, it is a risk assessment in narrative form. It explores the origins, mutations, and global contagion of QAnon, revealing how a once-fringe conspiracy movement has rewired public discourse, destabilised democratic norms, and fueled real-world violence.
This is not a matter of fringe internet culture. QAnon has infiltrated mainstream language, narratives, and even policy debates. Take the term “snowflake”, a once-niche insult now ubiquitous on social media and in political rhetoric. That vocabulary was incubated within QAnon ecosystems and exported globally. That’s not just cultural drift; it is ideological contagion.
QAnon is not a cult in the classical sense, though it shares many characteristics with cults. It doesn’t have set beliefs or a set leader it is not just a conspiracy theory – it is something that consumes and combines conspiracy theories, joining ever more dots into an ever-larger plot.
James Ball – The Other Pandemic
QAnon operates more like a viral memetic threat than a single ideology. It lacks formal structure, which makes it harder to trace, regulate, or deprogram. Its power lies in distributed radicalisation, encouraging people to “do their own research”, which often leads them deeper into self-reinforcing rabbit holes of paranoia and misinformation. This model is strategically dangerous: it adapts, spreads, and survives disruption.
In our previous podcast episodes, we’ve examined the escalating risks from the far-right, the alt-right, and the neo-reactionary (NRx) movement. We’ve spoken with Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware about Far Right Terrorism in the US, Roger Burrows on NRx and the ALT-Right in relation to the US Elections as well as Neo-Reactionalism (NRx), the Alt-Right and Emerging Technology, and Julia Ebner on modern extremism. The Other Pandemic ties many of these threads together, showing how QAnon bridges digital and real-world extremism, and why that matters now more than ever.
The tiny core Q-community, the die-hards who would spend their time on 8chan – and follow a conspiracy obsessed with uncovering mass child abuse while spending their time on a forum that hosted it, seeing no contradiction between those two things.
James Ball – The Other Pandemic
This book doesn’t just inform, it exposes the internal contradictions, the moral decay, and the psychological traps of QAnon. It shows how the movement preys on disillusionment, trauma, and uncertainty, offering simple answers to complex problems, and in doing so, radicalises individuals who might never have engaged with traditional extremist movements.
QAnon was rapidly becoming something of a choose-your-own adventure. By encouraging people to come to their own conclusions and to do their own research, Q was already suggesting that people picked the parts of the conspiracy that most appealed to their initial beliefs.
James Ball – The Other Pandemic
That’s what makes QAnon so hard to counter. It’s not a top-down ideology – it is a networked threat model that adapts to fit the user’s fears and biases. And in doing so, it turns citizens into amplifiers of disinformation, eroding trust in institutions and weakening social cohesion, both of which are foundational to democratic resilience.
One critical thing to remember is that what happens online is greatly affected by what happens offline, and vice versa.
James Ball – The Other Pandemic
In an age where digital manipulation can incite real-world violence, The Other Pandemic is essential reading for anyone working in national security, journalism, education, tech, or public health. Understanding QAnon isn’t just about understanding a conspiracy, it is about recognising and mitigating one of the most adaptive ideological risks of our time.
Feel free to catch-up on those episodes if you haven’t listened to them yet!
