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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of

The Spectator and my guest this week is the investigative journalist and writer James Ball,

whose new book is The Other Pandemic, How Cuenon Contaminated the World.

James, welcome.

Hi there.

Now, Q and on, for both people, will be sort of aware of it as just being this kind of collection of

complete mentalists who believe that Jewish lizard people are running the deep state and that they're trafficking children and

eating children and, you know, storing these bodies of abused children in the basements of

pizza parlors in Washington. It sounds completely fringe and completely crackers. Can you give a sense

of why something as extreme

is something you think needs not dismissal, but are serious attention? I think essentially because

so many people believe at least some aspects of it and believing some aspects of it is a

very sort of strong indicator that you'll get pulled deeper into the

conspiracy rabbit hole. A lot of this is as completely bonkers as you suggest. You know,

this started as an idea that Hillary Clinton was running a kind of global cabal of satanic

child abuses and Donald Trump was trying to stop it.

But you now have Trump almost openly embracing QAnon. He walks on stage to their theme

tune at rallies. What's their theme tune? They've someone composed something that they all sort of

quite liked and goes behind a lot of the videos.

...