Beware the blizzard of lies: US advice on how to handle Farage’s Trump tactics

Pro-democracy campaigners suggest pre-buttal' is more powerful than factchecking in fighting falsehoods

Truth, the progressive California politician Hiram Johnson once said, is the first casualty of war. His oft-cited remark was supposedly made in 1918 in reference to the first world war, which had by then caused millions of human casualties.

More than a century later, truth is again caught in the crossfire, this time as a casualty of 21st-century culture wars.