R.I.P. Adam Parfrey from David Cole

David Cole, author of Republican Party Animal, remembers Adam Parfrey, founder of Feral House, editor and publisher of Apocalypse Culture:

But something about him changed after the 2016 election. He became obsessively, humorlessly anti-Trump… Adam always loved the idea of anarchy, of mixing things up, of overturning the old order… surely he could appreciate the absurdity, the surrealism, of the current situation. Surely he could embrace the chaos… It kills me that I’ll never have that conversation.

Surely that was why he was anti-Trump: so long as this culture war rages, Parfrey had made a living from it. A restoration of the old American modus vivendi would return the old bourgeois ascendancy to power, end the chaos, and knock the weirdos down from cult leaders to individual eccentrics. The Democrats simply did not threaten Parfrey the way a Trump or the insurgent Right does (though a few decades under under the Socialist pillow might have changed his mind).

But Apocalypse Culture is a fascinating book, and you should read it. (A fun game: look over the political landscape and try to determine who would ban it if they could.)

Spengler (AKA David P. Goldman) reviews Frederick Crews’s Making of an Illusion:

Crews has here misread both Nietzsche and Freud… Nietzsche did not say that Christianity was the revenge of the weak against the strong; he wrote (in 1887’s The Genealogy of Morals) that Christianity was Jewish revenge on the pagan world… Freud read Nietzsche more carefully than Crews… Freud’s argument that “hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatred for Christianity” in my view is on the mark.

Mollie Hemingway lists “Ten takeaways from the New York Times’ defense of FBI spying on Trump”:

The New York Times writes, “Crossfire Hurricane began exactly 100 days before the presidential election, but if agents were eager to investigate Mr. Trump’s campaign, as the president has suggested, the messages do not reveal it. ‘I cannot believe we are seriously looking at these allegations and the pervasive connections,’ Mr. Strzok wrote soon after returning from London.”

There are multiple problems with this claim. For one, Strzok wrote that text in all caps with obvious eagerness. As the Wall Street Journal noted months ago, “Mr. Strzok emphasized the seriousness with which he viewed the allegations in a message to Ms. Page on Aug. 11, just a few days before the ‘insurance’ text. ‘OMG I CANNOT BELIEVE WE ARE SERIOUSLY LOOKING AT THESE ALLEGATIONS AND THE PERVASIVE CONNECTIONS,’ he texted.”

Slightly different. And the Ace of Spades asks, “Was it all a set up, from the very start?”

Via Instapundit:

• A collection of tweets from the people leaking their source about the dangers of leaking their source.
• The piece is tailored to Bowles’ message: Peterson is a horrifying misogynist. Her evidence of this is that lots of young men listen to Peterson, and that Peterson believes in innate differences between men and women. She then proceeds to snip his comments, surround them with her suggestive perspective, and roll the whole ball of wax into an anti-Peterson grenade.
• Man ‘firing gun and ranting about Trump’ shot by police at Trump National Doral, gunman ID’d.
• Wolfe was flummoxed, Grass silent as their co-panelists described the nightmares and injustices taking place outside the hall. "Suddenly," Wolfe recollected, "I heard myself blurting out over my microphone: ‘My God, what are you talking about? We're in the middle of a … Happiness Explosion!"

The Federalist: “For instance, to write Back to Blood Tom Wolfe spent five years traveling to and from Miami, living for months there and interviewing everybody in sight, going to every neighborhood.”

More from the Fed: “New Data Show California Kids’ Math Achievement Took A Nosedive After Common Core.” Because redefining “college-ready” down is a risk-free strategy.