Tag: hunter s thompson

Hunter S. Thompson on fear…

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting downsized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a terrorist sympathizer.

Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson once spread a rumor of a presidential candidate’s drug addiction and it was taken seriously

After spending a few tedious months on the 1972 campaign trail, Ed Muskie—the Democrat favored to win the party’s nomination—had been putting his entire press corps to sleep with hopelessly repetitive stump speeches.

“I didn’t get a quote worth filing out of the whole goddamn trip,” a New York reporter told Hunter S Thompson about the senator’s tour of Florida.

So on May 11, 1972, Thompson gave the campaign a jolt, filing a speculative story through a primitive version of a fax machine he called the Mojo Wire. Describing Muskie as a competitive political animal who would never back away from a challenge, Thompson couldn’t understand why the senator had suddenly become rigid and unresponsive—seeming to read directly from a script—but he took one hilarious shot at figuring it out.

“Not much has been written about the Ibogaine Effect as a serious factor in the presidential campaign,” Thompson wrote in an article he later claimed was never meant to be taken at face value. In it, he declares, “word leaked out that some of Muskie’s top advisers called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with ‘some kind of strange drug.”

Keep reading