OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
12hr ago
You'll have to forgive me if there's something a little counter-intuitive in the idea that the best way to decrease the number of rants about the Jews is to have more rants about the Jews.
And the general theory here doesn't seem to hold? If your assertion is that a perspective's popularity on the Motte correlates with that perspective's unpopularity in real life, well, there are far too many counter-examples of that. It's true, anti-semitism is extremely unpopular in real life. Here are some things that are also extremely unpopular in real life: cannibalism, ISIS, police abolition, Satanism, paedophilia. Yet nobody argues for these positions on the Motte.
It's not a simple correlation, where the less popular an idea is, the more likely that idea's adherents are to come here and post long essays about it.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
When was the last time a billionaire white nationalist or Nazi was punched? The infamous 'Nazi punch' was one guy and it set off a whole debate on the left about whether it was acceptable. Meanwhile of course Jews get attacked sometimes - the ADL (I know you may not trust them, but I doubt they're all completely fictional) cites 161 violent assaults in 2023.
But I guess beyond this I'm not particularly sure why you're focusing on white nationalism? Yes, white nationalism is an extremely hated and ostracised position in the US. I agree that white nationalism is more hated as a position than Zionism is. What is that meant to show? The fact that there exists an ideology more hated than Zionism does not mean that Zionism isn't hated.
Is your point just that you'd like for white nationalism to be at least as acceptable to argue for in public as Zionism?
In that case - great, good for you, but I hardly see how that reflects badly on Zionists. You can just advocate for white nationalism. No need to bring Zionism in at all.
(Unless the implication is that the reason white nationalism is widely hated is the Jewish conspiracy to destroy white culture and so on, but at that point we're just right back into the tiresome nonsense that I was sick of seeing in the first place.)
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Yes, I think this is true. 'Catholic' can continue to function as an identity even in the near-total absence of believe. 'Jew' and 'Muslim' both do the same thing to an extent as well, where they come to denote an ethnic or cultural background or upbringing. Protestantism largely does not do this. If you stop believing, you are no longer a Protestant or even a Christian.
Thus anecdotally I do often run into Catholics whose response to anything about doctrine or practice is roughly, "Oh, no one pays attention to that, don't worry." Catholicism can be grounded in something other than genuine, sincere belief. Protestantism cannot be.
(As a Protestant I'm inclined to see this as good, or at least, as not wholly bad. But that's a value judgement that could certainly be argued.)
I wonder how the supreme court looks if you track it, not by formally stated religious identity, but by actual practice? If we trust NCR, Roberts, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and certainly Barrett all seem to be practicing Catholics. Kagan is Jewish but it doesn't sound like like she's practicing? Gorsuch attends an Episcopalian church, and Jackson is very reticent on the subject, so I don't think I can tell how pious she is. At a glance it sounds like maybe a bit over half of the supreme court is meaningfully religious, in terms of personal practice?
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Yes, that's where you'll find the majority of culture war Catholicism. What is the Catholic Church? Is it what Catholics actually do or believe? Is it the doctrine of the church? What is the doctrine of the church, and who defines it, and that way lies a whole debate around tradition, magisterium, the papacy, and more.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Yes, prior to Vatican II and especially prior to 1900 or so, the traditional Catholic position was basically that the state should formally endorse the Catholic Church, obey directives from the Vatican, and tolerate other religious positions either provisionally or not at all. Integralism is, broadly speaking, the traditional Roman position. If you ever get interested in the last two centuries of Spanish, French, or Italian history you will notice this causing a great deal of trouble. It's also responsible for a lot of traditional American (and Anglo in generally) anti-Catholicism. Taken seriously, it is the position that leads to drama like this.
However, Catholics, partly because of how extreme this position seems today, have largely been running away from it in the West, or have been looking for ways to reconcile Catholicism with American liberal values. Some have been more or less successful with this.
But anyway, if you dig into the European history a bit, 'discriminated against' is underselling it. This is/was a position that causes civil wars.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
What surprised me most in the reaction was this amusing line:
Butker’s statement explicitly argues that there’s a correct way to be Catholic, even though in reality, most Catholics are supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Well... yes.
Yes, there's a correct way to be Catholic. It involves believing and acting in accordance with Catholic teaching, which is very clear on some of those subjects.
How is that controversial?
OliveTapenade
1d ago
There are absolutely places where being a Zionist will get you punched.
No, it's not as radioactive as white nationalism, but so what? There's plenty of room for Zionism to be unpopular and provocative and something that might make Jews afraid without it being exactly as bad as the worst thing in modern politics.
The fact that Zionism is not yet as universally loathed as Nazism (though, again, there are certainly crowds people who think it ought to be) doesn't seem to prove anything, to me. Unless you're asserting that it should be?
You're also equivocating a bit between 'Jews' and 'Zionists', so I suppose I'll ask directly. Do you think that Jews should get punched just for being Jews? Or Zionists just for being Zionists?
(And to pre-empt any attempt to turn it around, no, white nationalists or neo-Nazis should not be punched either.)
It seems to me that by any reasonable standard Zionism is quite widely and publicly hated. I mean, anecdotally I know Jews who have been taking self-defence classes and buying more home security and avoiding wearing any outward signs of Jewishness in public because they're afraid of being harassed or possibly attacked. Some of those fears are exaggerated, in my view, but they're not totally unjustified.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
There are, to be fair, plenty of contexts today where you would be afraid to publicly admit to being a Zionist, even by just a minimal definition of it (i.e. thinking it's good that Israel exists and wanting it to continue existing free of attack).
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I usually try to avoid blocking - in particular, in a case like this, the result would be that the front page would consistently have these large, highly-active threads, with dozens of responses to something I can't see. Realistically I suspect I'd just want to read the blocked content anyway, just to see what's going on!
OliveTapenade
1d ago
That generally makes sense as an explanation - I would take it as related to the collapse of mainline Protestantism, and more generally the end of the WASP class. Historically the supreme court is almost entirely what we would call 'mainline Protestant', but in the last few decades mainline Protestantism has firstly almost entirely collapsed and secondly gone quite liberal in terms of politics. Religious conservatives, bar a small handful of impressively stubborn confessional types, are almost entirely either evangelicals or Catholics. Evangelical Christianity in the US began as a movement against an intellectual establishment that they perceived as having succumbed to heresy. There may be many good things about evangelicalism, but it has inherited a certain anti-intellectual streak, and it has never managed to reconcile with cultural elites. It was and remains low-class.
So as you say, that leaves Catholics. The Republicans have made heavy use of them.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I agree there's an important distinction to make there. Noticing and talking about Jewish overrepresentation is certainly not hateful or problematic in itself. It's an interesting observation, and one that may have positive and negative effects, for both Jew and non-Jew alike. I believe there are actually some meditations on the theme by Jews themselves.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Well, I think it's just a fact to begin with that Jews are very heavily overrepresented in industries like media and finance. There are a number of ways to account for that historically, going back centuries to the only trades Jews were permitted in the Middle Ages, to the effects of Jewish settlement clustered around media centres (most famously New York), or even just the way that, as a culture with strong internal bonds and high in-group trust and a heavy focus on education, Jews were naturally set up to do well in modern society and benefitted from unusually strong patronage networks.
Where I start to get suspicious is where Jews in particular are singled out and other groups, which might be equally disproportionately represented, are not. I suppose an obvious example would be the composition of the US Supreme Court, which has been utterly dominated by Catholics for a while - it's currently six Catholics, two Protestants (one of whom was raised Catholic), and one Jew, and it's not been that long since it was six Catholics and three Jews. How did America get to a point of total Catholic domination? There are some theories I find plausible (in particular I note that Catholicism and Judaism are both religions with a heavy emphasis on law, so it makes sense that their practitioners might more of an affinity for become lawyers; this bodes badly for Protestants on the court in the future, but might imply that Muslims will do well), but what I find more striking is how few people seem to care. It's not as if anti-Catholic conspiracies are foreign to American history; yet there is no discussion of this at all.
Likewise there are other ethnic groups that are noticeably overrepresented in terms of wealth or power in the US. Setting aside the obvious modern ones (Indians are currently the top, I think?), I believe e.g. Scottish-Americans used to do extraordinarily well. Yet there is no particular interest in this today.
I grant, as a starting point, that Jews have done very well in the media in the US and probably in the UK (though I am less familiar with the British context). I think it's probably fair enough to have a frank discussion about that.
But what I am frankly not comfortable with is when that discussion seems to be, in my judgement, motivated by a hatred of Jews as such that appears prior to any evidence, or even prior to any attempt to treat Jews as ordinary people or fellow citizens. I think my starting point for talking about the particular history of the Jews is that no one's coming into the dialogue massively prejudiced. And unfortunately that is not a bar that everyone meets.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Oh, I have no doubt that it's true that wealthy individuals pressured Columbia in this way, and the fact that the individuals in question were disproportionately Jewish is unsurprising, since for very obvious reasons Jewish people are disproportionately likely to support Israel and to oppose the Palestine protests.
But I'm not blind. I can see the way that coffee_enjoyer specifically framed this around Jewish billionaires, and given that he is one of the small group of people on the Motte obsessed with Jews, the implication is not exactly subtle. In the top-level post he quite explicitly presents this as support for alt-right theories about secret Jewish power manipulating Western civilisation and so on.
I'd just like to maybe go a week without a bunch of people blaming everything on the Elders of Zion, you know?
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Mainly at the level where I think, boy, it'd be really nice to read the Motte without the same two or three people every time yelling about the Jews.
Could we maybe have a few days' break from people repeating their theory that everything bad that has ever happened is due to the Jews? Oh no, I stubbed my toe, those damn Jewish elites! It's worse than incorrect - it's boring.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Haven't you noticed by now?
Anything done by anyone Jewish, or any cause that might be interpreted as positive for Israel, is inherently sinister and evil.
It really is quite tiresome.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I guess part of my point is that it seems to be that the traits we assign to each group are heavily influenced by the location wer'e starting from and the particular questions we want answered. The top-level comment here is interested in black-white relations, so the dynamic he zeroes in on is mature/neotenous, with wild/domesticated as a secondary factor. Lu Jiamin is interested in Chinese/European relations, so he focuses on a different dynamic - wild/tame, or steppe/agrarian, or something else entirely. It's also, I think, very noticeable which qualities of different groups he thinks are revealing. Diet appears to be important to Lu, but I don't notice any of the Western HBD types mentioning diet. Presumably diet comes into it because his binary is to do with agrarians (eating grains, weaving clothes from plant fibers, etc.) with nomads, hunters, and pastoralists (eating meat and dairy, wearing clothes made from fur and wool, etc.), but it also seems like for him diet is one facet of a broader lifestyle that also involves political and cultural practices (e.g. women's rights, parliamentary democracy), and for that matter economics. He thinks that a free market and a competition of equals is paradigmatic of the Wolf peoples, whereas Chinese communism, implicitly, is another form of the 'Dragon King' to which the Chinese people bow. The stereotypically Chinese/Dragon way is to have a tremendously powerful central authority that coordinates all economic and social activity, on a strict hierarchical lines, and to which the people meekly submit - the CCP is structurally the same as the emperor.
This seems especially interesting to me because Lu doesn't try to reduce it to a single factor, like genetics or descent. I notice in the top-level comment here (and in the usual comments of our local racialists) a very reductive approach, trying to find the one controlling factor. For Lu, it seems to be a complex - genetics play a role, but so does culture, education, political structure, economic structure, and so on. Thus Lu maintains some hope that it might be possible to teach the Chinese to understand or respect wolves (indeed one of the central themes of the novel is a lament for the dying grassland), to teach them to preserve the grasslands they are destroying, to discover the secret of the West, and form a kind of hybrid. There is a kind of fusion. By the end of the story, the wolf cub that Chen Zhen has raised dies, and they skin the wolf's pelt and tie it to a pole, like a flag:
A fierce northwestern wind sent the cub’s pelt soaring, combing through his battle garb and making him appear to be dressed formally for a banquet in heaven. Pale smoke rising from the yurt’s chimney wafted under the pelt, making it seem as if the cub were riding the clouds, roiling and dancing freely and happily in the misty smoke. At that moment, there was no chain around his neck and no narrow, confining prison under his feet.
Chen’s vacant gaze followed the impish, lifelike figure of the cub’s pelt as it danced in the wind; it was the undying outer shell the cub had left behind, but the beautiful and commanding figure seemed to still contain his free and unyielding spirit. Suddenly, the long, tubular body and bushy tail rolled a few times like a flying dragon, soaring in the swirling snow and drifting clouds. The wind howled and the white hair flew. The cub, like a golden flying dragon, rode the clouds and mist, traveling on snow and wind, soaring happily toward Tengger, to the star Sirius, to the free universe in space, to the place where all the souls of Mongolian wolves that had died in battles over the millennia congregated.
At that instant, Chen Zhen believed he saw his very own wolf totem.
By the end, the wolf has become a dragon, soaring through the air towards heaven, and Chen, one of the dragon people, has found his own wolf's soul.
(And then the grasslands are destroyed, because the Chinese government is terrible, and both the wild wolves of the region and the last nomadic herders die out. Boo!)
So there's something more to it than just under-resourced speculations about population genetics. (Indeed, the genetic part is one of the weakest parts of Wolf Totem, and can feel like a self-hating Chinese person's recapitulation of some kind of Aryan thesis.) There's more than one factor here - there are chances to learn.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
This is an area where I think it's also useful to start reading thoughts from other perspectives entirely?
Have you ever read Wolf Totem? It's a novel by a Chinese author, Lu Jiamin, who spent some time in Inner Mongolia, and he has a theory that Han Chinese people are 'domesticated' - he calls them Dragon Totem people - and as a result have been outcompeted and brutalised by wild steppe people and their descendants, which he calls Wolf Totem people. Notably he sees Europeans as Wolf people, and as the descendants of the steppe.
Here are a few passages to give you the impression:
“In world history,” Chen continued the thought, “nomads have been the only Easterners capable of taking the fight to the Europeans, and the three peoples that really shook the West to its foundations were the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols. The Westerners who fought their way back to the East were all descendants of nomads. The builders of ancient Rome were a pair of brothers raised by a wolf. Images of the wolf and her two wolf-children appear on the city’s emblem even today. The later Teutons, Germans, and Anglo-Saxons grew increasingly powerful, and the blood of wolves ran in their veins. The Chinese, with their weak dispositions, are in desperate need of a transfusion of that vigorous, unrestrained blood. Had there been no wolves, the history of the world would have been written much differently. If you don’t know wolves, you can’t understand the spirit and character of the nomads, and you’ll certainly never be able to appreciate the differences between nomads and farmers or the inherent qualities of each.”
[...]
Chen, mesmerized by the sight, was deep in thought. “We’ll have to study him closely,” he said finally. “There’s a lot we can learn from this. Our dog pen is a microcosm of world history. I’m reminded of something Lu Xun once wrote. He said that Westerners are brutish, while we Chinese are domesticated.”
Chen pointed to the cub. “There’s your brute.” Then he pointed to the pups. “And there’s your domestication. For the most part, Westerners are descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons. They burst out of the primeval forest like wild animals after a couple of thousand years of Greek and Roman civilization, and sacked ancient Rome. They eat steak, cheese, and butter with knives and forks, which is how they’ve retained more primitive wildness than the traditional farming races. Over the past hundred years, domesticated China has been bullied by the brutish West. It’s not surprising that for thousands of years the Chinese colossus has been spectacularly pummeled by tiny nomadic peoples.”
Chen rubbed the cub’s head and continued. “Temperament not only determines the fate of a man but also determines the fate of an entire race. Farming people are domesticated, and faintheartedness has sealed their fate. The world’s four great civilizations were agrarian nations, and three of them died out. The fourth, China, escaped that fate only because two of the greatest rivers—the Yellow and the Yangtze—run through her territory. She also boasts the world’s largest population, making it hard for other nations to nibble away at her or absorb her, but maybe also because of the contributions of the nomadic peoples of the grassland... I haven’t satisfactorily thought out this relationship, but the more time I spend on the grassland—and it’s already been two years—the more complex I think it is.”
[...]
Chen sighed. “The way I see it, the most advanced people today are descendants of nomadic races. They drink milk, eat cheese and steak, weave clothing from wool, lay sod, raise dogs, fight bulls, race horses, and compete in athletics. They cherish freedom and popular elections, and they have respect for their women, all traditions and habits passed down by their nomadic ancestors. Not only did they inherit their courage, their militancy, their tenacity, and their need to forge ahead from their nomadic forebears, but they continue to improve on those characteristics. People say you can tell what a person will grow up to be at the age of three and what he’ll look like in old age at seven. The same holds true for a race of people. In the West, primitive nomadic life was their childhood, and if we look at primitive nomads now, we are given access to Westerners at three and at seven, their childhood, and if we take this further, we get a clear understanding of why they occupy a high position. Learning their progressive skills isn’t hard. China launched its own satellite, didn’t it? What’s hard to learn are the militancy and aggressiveness, the courage and willingness to take risks that flow in nomadic veins.”
“Since I’ve been herding horses,” Zhang said, “I’ve felt the differences in temperament between the Chinese and the Mongols. Back in school I was at the top in just about everything, but out here I’m weak as a kitten. I did everything I could think of to make myself strong, and now I find that there’s something lacking in us...”
Chen sighed again. “That’s it exactly!” he said. “China’s small-scale peasant economy cannot tolerate competitive peaceful labor. Our Confucian guiding principle is emperor to minister, father to son, a top-down philosophy, stressing seniority, unconditional obedience, eradicating competition through autocratic power, all in the name of preserving imperial authority and peaceful agriculture. In both an existential and an awareness sense, China’s small-scale peasant economy and Confucian culture have weakened the people’s nature, and even though the Chinese created a brilliant ancient civilization, it came about at the cost of the race’s character and has led to the sacrifice of our ability to develop. When world history moved beyond the rudimentary stage of agrarian civilization, China was fated to fall behind. But we’re lucky, we’ve been given the opportunity to witness the last stages of nomadic existence on the Mongolian grassland, and, who knows, we might even discover the secret that has led to the rise in prominence of Western races.”
Now as a historical theory, there's a lot here that's doubtful - the proposed genetic link seems weak, Han are genetically closer to Mongols than Europeans are, at times he can't seem to decide on the racial associations (are the Romans weak decadents sacked by the Wolf people, or were the Romans Wolf people themselves?), and some reckoning with the fact that the Chinese have spent centuries kicking steppe peoples around seems necessary - but I think it's at least interesting as a window into how this sort of thing looks from another angle.
That is, here we have people immediately concluding that whites and Asians are both in the 'domesticated', Dragon category, but here's a Chinese voice utterly convinced that whites in the wild barbarian Wolf category.
I think it's also worth looking at theories in this in the context of trying to answer particular questions. Lu is writing in the context of the long Chinese tradition of wondering how the West outpaced them and how the Century of Humiliation happened. As late as the 18th century, there was still a case to be made that China was the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet, and then in barely a century the Europeans comprehensively embarrassed, defeated, and exploited them, and even today the Chinese still struggle to understand how that happened and what to do about it. Lu's Dragon/Wolf, Farmer/Nomad distinction is an attempt to explain what's different about Europe and China on the macrohistorical level (and consequently places like Africa just don't rate a mention at all).
By contrast, when Westerners come up with theories about race and domestication and so on, they are trying to answer different questions. They perceive a different problem in front of them, which requires explanation. What's the mystery that is supposed to be solved?
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I guess just using myself as an ancdote, that explanation has not helped me. Pick up? Huh? Getting yards?
You throw the ball forward and if you can do that without the other team interfering, you get to move the starting line forward ten yards, and then repeat?
I remember finding it helpful to hear that American football is basically a turn-based strategy, unlike soccer or my native AFL, which are real-time strategy, so to speak. American football is a stop-start game, divided into clear, turn-like 'plays'. Maybe I should look up an explainer video with some diagrams of the game in play?
OliveTapenade
7d ago
For this question, the evidence consists in thinking: do you want your leftist political agitators engaging in something that is actually problematic to state security (see anything from Italian anarchists, the IRA, the weather underground, to that one highly effective anti-meat org in the UK), or do you want them to instead embarrass themselves in a couple city blocks where agencies can collect identifiable data and where you always have the option to arrest them? “CHAZ” never had any chance of getting out of hand because what they were doing was clearly illegal. Rather than immediately arresting them, you can lure potential rebels into doing nothing serious while collecting data on everyone who showed up.
Isn't this premised on the idea that the people who were involved in CHAZ would have, had they not been involved in CHAZ, become real security threats?
Is that plausible?
At least two alternative possibilities spring to mind. Firstly, the kind of people who engage in street circus nonsense like CHAZ are not in fact the same sort of people who are likely to become real threats, like the early Bolsheviks. They're both radicals, in a sense, but they have very different strategies and interests. If these groups are different, then CHAZ might actually decrease overall security by making governments and security agencies devote time to CHAZ, rather than serious threats. Secondly, it's also perfectly possible that the kind of people who engage in CHAZ would go on to become serious threats - CHAZ itself is a clown show, but the experience of engaging in radical action, even the ineffective sort, might prepare people for more effective action later.
In fact both those possibilities might be the case. If I were a genuine radical - if I were part of a modern Weather Underground or something - I might look closely at CHAZ, identify the most competent or most radical people involved in it, and then aim to recruit them. Even if only the top 5% of CHAZ participants have real revolutionary potential, that's not nothing. A real radical might benefit from the existence of a large number of shallow, ineffective protests in order to skim off the top level of participants. For any organisation whose primary business is illegal, recruiting is a real challenge. Test beds like these protests seem useful.
Is that theory true? Is that what's actually happening?
No idea!
My point is that being able to imagine a situation in which X event benefits Y people does not constitute evidence that Y did X. It's not that easy to transmute theory into fact.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
This doesn't pass any kind of parsimony, does it?
Do you need to posit a benevolent(?) conspiracy to explain hyper-polarisation in American life? Surely not.
And surely where we would expect to see evidence of any such covert action, we don't. A deliberate act of social engineering on the scale of the entire US would require large numbers of people and large, coordinated programmes that we don't see. Meanwhile, if we do look for causes of progressive attitudes to race, it seems to me like we see large efforts put forth by non-state actors, for reasons that are plausible on their own independent of any 'defense-in-depth' plan.
I think it's plausible that American polarisation over unimportant or superficial issues might function to obstruct deeper polarisation, and that through this process real or successful revolt becomes less likely. But if so, it seems more likely that this is a happy accident, rather than something planned for an implemented by an agency.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
What's more American than inventing a bizarre new identity for yourself, especially a sexual identity, and proclaiming that to the world? I would have thought America's at the forefront of that.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
I wonder if it's partly because something like Eurovision requires a level of whimsy or self-deprecation that Americans can't manage?
I have a lot of fondness for Americans, but they do undoubtedly take themselves very seriously - perhaps too seriously for something like Eurovision. If I imagine an American Eurovision, America can do the excess and the glamour and the high-budget-yet-low-taste glitter of it all, but there has to be this subtle element of self-mockery in it, of realising that the whole thing is silly and yet embracing it anyway.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
The strength of Eurovision is that you can know absolutely nothing about it, watch it, and still be thoroughly entertained. Eurovision has such wide appeal that people far outside Europe tune into it and watch it, sometimes fanatically.
American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it. American football even by football standards is an unusually unintuitive game. It doesn't spread beyond America, at all, and even in America there are wide swathes of the population who don't understand it.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
I don't have a graph over time or anything, but we do have, what, four prominent Neo-Nazis? Three? That's a pretty high number by internet standards, and plenty of people around them who are sympathetic in a soft way to them. We don't seem to have many actual left-wingers, though.
I'm not tarring everyone here - I'm here, after all. But I feel like we have more capital-R Racists here than we do lefties.
It's true, I think, that the Motte is mostly blue tribe. Even the racists and Neo-Nazis here are in fact blue tribe. (Per the original formulation, there are Republican-voting right-wing blue-tribers, and Democrat-voting left-wing red-tribers. The tribes aren't just voting groups.) Indeed, I suspect that their position is actually more appealing for a young, clever, right-wing-attracted blue triber. Being a Neo-Nazi is special - being a (pseudo?) intellectual far-righter obsessed with genetics and population IQ and ethnostates makes you just as anathema to the left as being a MAGA barstool type, but it at least makes you different to the MAGA type. You can still position yourself separately from the poorly-educated populist blue-collar beer-and-guns-and-Jesus type of right-wing, because I really doubt anyone in the far-right wants to be confused with them.
The extent to which Catholicism requires agreeing with the pope is regularly contested along partisan lines.
Usually one side argues, "The pope is the vicar of Christ and visible leader of the church, from whom we learn and to whom we have an obligation to listen, and his words should be taken to heart by all Catholics", and the other side argues, "The pope is a human being and capable of error in ordinary circumstances, and there have been shockingly bad popes in the past. Respect for the papal office does not entail unthinking obedience to every off-the-cuff statement a pope makes, and good Catholics can and should, in obedience to sacred tradition, disagree with him where necessary".
And the two sides switch depending on whether or not they like the current pope or not. There is very little consistency.
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