I've been trying to figure out how to concisely explain my issues with JP, so let me give it a try:
1. He wants to be seen as a centrist thinker, first and foremost, somebody who is driven by science and facts. But it's just not true. The structure of his arguments generally goes like this: talk about a scientific or mathematical "law of nature", extrapolate that concept to relate to whatever he's talking about (pick any of his favorite topics), makes the topic seem incredibly complex when it generally isn't, reach a conclusion in a way that suggests that this thing (gender pay gap, wealth inequality, climate change, etc) is inevitable and there's nothing we can do about it. The problem is that step one of his argument, the foundation, is generally flawed in some way...sometimes made up, sometimes already debunked, or it's a concept that he doesn't seem to actually understand. He has said on podcasts and in interviews that he's a psychiatrist and that he doesn't do math and that their are topics that he doesn't really understand. Which is funny that he rails about the problems with climate models (and gets it wrong), talks endlessly about the Pareto Principle (and gets it wrong), his whole lobster thing with the serotonin (it's been debunked), and loves to cite and quote articles/books from questionable sources from problematic authors. It all sounds smart to people sitting in a crowd or reading a book, but his arguments are generally based on bad science from the start. His "laws of nature" are never that, but they sound good!
2. He gives a really good lecture, he's great in front of a crowd, and he likes to think of himself as a teacher. But given the above issues, he's not. I've heard him described as more of a preacher than a teacher, and that feels right to me. It's not a problem to be a preacher, but he's always saying that he's not that.
3. Again, he wants to be seen as a centrist and he's said many times that he doesn't consider himself to be "right wing", but that's kinda silly right on its face. Here is the Wikipedia definition of right-wing politics: "
Right-wing politics is the range of
political ideologies that view certain
social orders and
hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position based on
natural law,
economics,
authority,
property,
religion,
biology or
tradition." That's basically his whole ideology in a nutshell, for any of you who aren't familiar with it. And also, by the way, that's fine if he's right-wing! Many many people share those beliefs! But what JP does is, with bad faith arguments and sketchy/incorrect "laws of nature", acts like he's coming to his belief system naturally in some inevitable way. And it's just coincidence that he's always coming to conclusions that line up with a right-wing belief system. It's disingenuous.
4. I think #3 above might be why many people say "he used to be great but now he's off the deep end" because I think he might have originally believed his own lies that he reached his right-wing belief system naturally based on thought and "math" and "science", instead of simply HAVING a belief system and then using his intellect to back into justification for it (i.e. what basically every one does, including me!). But at this point he has become a useful tool for the right-wing crowd and has grown to become almost a caricature of his earlier self, and is now clearly shilling for a paycheck. He gets hired at The Daily Wire, founded by a guy who makes his money fracking, and all of a sudden he thinks fracking is great? Again, it's disingenuous.
5. Lastly, many of the conclusions he ends up reaching are dangerous and start straying into fascist (or worse) belief systems...and his defense, whenever people call him out on it, is that he never suggests anything like that. But what he does is he drives the car toward the cliff, his audience in the back seat, and then at the last minute takes his hands off the wheel so that he can say "I didn't drive us over the cliff". AGAIN, disingenuous.
Let me close by giving an example of what I'm talking about. One of my favorite examples of the way he structures an argument is also maybe the most horrifying. JP likes to say that years ago the army had done tons of IQ studies and had put a policy in place that they would not take recruits with an IQ less than 83. He said that the army came to the conclusion, again based on rigorous studies, that there was nothing anyone with an IQ less than 83 could do in the army that wouldn't make things worse. He then shocks the crowd by saying that 1 in 10 people in the US have an IQ of less than 83. He then says that, if the US economy is reasonably as complex as the US army, that means that 1 in 10 people living in the US can't do anything of value. Then he says something like "this is a huge problem and it's very complex and nobody knows what to do about it...it's just a natural hierarchy and nobody knows what to do". When pressed for a solution, he throws up his hands. BUT HERE IS THE PROBLEM WITH THE ARGUMENT: That whole army 83 IQ policy thing he based this argument on is made up. There was never a policy, the army never came to the conclusion that the couldn't take people based on IQ, and there is no evidence that somebody with an IQ of 83 or lower "can't contribute meaningfully" to the army or the economy. His whole argument, which leads his audience to an unspoken (always unspoken) conclusion that the bottom 10% of our population is worthless, is based on something he just made up or maybe heard somewhere and didn't fact check or something. At best, his audience learns that they should loath the bottom 10% of the US population...at worst, you can see where the eugenics ideas start to creep in.
Sorry, this went way long but wanted to get those thoughts on paper!
