So was JP always this crazy or is this a recent development? I know he was a darling of the "troubled young men"(or may or may not be incels) group and had a weird obsession with lobsters(despite, or maybe because of, the lobster orgies) but I swear he's becomes more unhinged every time I hear from him.
He was always crazy, but the problem is that he's also completely incomprehensible. I don't mean French philosophy incomprehensible, I mean just absolute batshit rambling nonsense. Because of this, I think a lot of people found it easy to ignore a lot of his crazy shit because it would inevitably be hidden in a bunch of hour long anecdotes about childrens films or random experiences he had with his neighbours or inexplicable crying. Unfortunately, he's also kind of a brilliant example of how to manipulate that lecture environment to bore/confuse your audience into submission.
Also, a lot of his "fans" became fans through his self-help books, which were clearly written with much more aggressive editing and publisher direction than his academic writing or public speaking.
The moment he clicked for me was his debate with Zizek where he ended up revealing that he's never read Marx, and suddenly he just became completely transparent to me. He's never read any of the people he supposedly disagrees with. That's why he only speaks about them and their motivations in the vaguest possible terms, because he doesn't know enough to be specific. He is an academic who doesn't read. He is exactly the kind of person who the entire system of academia is
meant to filter out, and his presence is a textbook example of systemic bias in action.
Like, most academics are not as widely or deeply read as they pretend to be, and sometimes people who aren't very deeply read can still be very insightful and have very coherent or interesting thoughts of their own. But I can't think of any other academic who just openly admits they don't even try and gets away with it by being a tall white man who writes popular self-help books for teenage boys.