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Anton Savage: ‘Make the bastard deny it’, and other attacks on democracy

We may find it funny when crackpot rumours cross over from social media to the mainstream, but we may not be laughing for long

Anton Savage. ‘And that’s the real threat, the plague on everyone’s house: nothing can be trusted, no reporting is true. It’s the authoritarian’s utopia’

Hunter S Thompson regularly quoted an anecdote, possibly apocryphal, about the former US president Lyndon Johnson. The story goes thus.

Johnson is struggling in his 1948 Senate campaign. His campaign manager comes to him, downcast, and starts a discussion about how they can outdo their main opponent, a pig farmer. Johnson suggests they tell people the man has carnal relations with his herd (he puts it in much, much more florid terms).

The campaign manager ...