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The guy is a pseudo-intellectual who became famous with your usual right wing stuff (society is collapsing, the wokes are destroying everything, we need to fight the neocultural marxists), and providing self-help tips for people to take responsibility for themselves etc.

That second part is important because when sufficiently pushed, a lot of his fans will say that they just like his self-help stuff because it helped them go through some periods, become better etc. But it's rarely just that, most of his fans go on to watch his talks and take his words seriously since he earned some credance with them with the self-help tips.

And then this supposedly highly intelligent professor goes on to provide some stability to this insane world by saying things like (off the top of my head): Bill C-16 will make the state send people to prison for using the wrong pronouns, but he will resist and go on a hunger strike when that happens! Women and men cannot work together in the same teams! Women are hypocrites if they complain about sexual harassment while wearing makeup! Hitler's views were guided by the crowds attending his speeches, he just adapted to what they wanted to hear! Climate change models are faulty apriori because you cannot model everything, etc etc.

Then, as others already mentioned, he went to Russia to get into an induced coma to break his addiction.

He's presenting himself and being presented as a good father figure, an accomplished academic, a voice of reason in a world gone insane, whereas he is just plain nuts. And his base is primarily vulnerable young people who have nobody to turn to, and he uses that to make them into your everyday incels, misogynists and other right wing wierdos.

So you can see that when someone like that goes onto camera to cry for the 10th time, the initial reaction of others might not be sympathy.