It really strikes me as an attempt to stem the bleeding. I became a neo-Catholic when I was a teenager. In college I studied theology and Church history and began to realize that something was very off about how things were going and grew more and more "conservative" (orthodox). My orthodoxy grew as I became more serious about my faith, especially after I underwent Marian consecration (de Montfort's formula) and became an RCIA catechist. That was when I started to really pay attention to traditionalist arguments. It took the COVID lockdowns and the discovery that the SSPX weren't a bunch of whack jobs to finally push me over the line into traditionalism.

More and more orthodox-leaning neo-Catholics are coming to the same conclusion I did, probably even faster than I did, since it took me about 20 years to get to this point. I think that's freaking out the American hierarchy.

So.... just looking at this first clip, you do realize that the quotation they give from Josephus is from a defense of Judaism, right? If you read that full paragraph, he's refuting the various claims Greeks made against Jews, that being one of them. It's Book II, Paragraph 8 of Against Apion. He literally cites Apion as the propagator, if not the inventor, of the claim. They don't even cite the work properly, wrong paragraph and they really chopped up the passage.

I'm in favor of questioning the narrative. But great claims need great evidence. Preferably cited properly and not easily refuted by 10 minutes of research.

Well, I take that for granted now, @Tom Morelli. We haven't had a real choice... well, probably ever in my lifetime.

Let's just say I recently saw the new movie Civil War, and it freaked me out a little.