This is the tale of two gangs and their literary henchmen who pen history to sway the hearts and minds of the public, building their careers along the way. When a budding journalist named Hunter S, Thompson discovered the Hell’s Angels had been falsely accused of criminal activity in 1964, he decided to use the press just as the government had done, this time flipping the script and championing the notorious outlaws in a 1965 essay titled “The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders” for The Nation.
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Thompson went full throttle, embracing the spirit of New Journalism filling the air, painting a vivid scene of the reviled scourge as iconoclastic American anti-heroes for a modern world. “Like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter’s leg with no quarter asked and non given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they’ll never know…Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on,” Thompson wrote with aplomb.
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The story took the world by storm. Within a month, book offers were rolling in and Thompson seized the day, spending the following year embedded in the San Francisco and Oakland chapters. Birney Jarvis, a former member, made the introduction, giving Thompson credibility no other reporter ever had — and the Angels opened up to him, sincere in their desire to be understood and known.
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Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage
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