He was less insane in the early days, but it was mostly generic self-help stuff other than the occasional outburst against the liberal menace. "Clean your room, value yourself" sort of thing.

at the beginning what he was saying kinda made sense?

He had to ease people in and build a following before he got to the really crazy and/or chauvinist and bigoted stuff.

If he'd come right out and said what he REALLY meant immediately, his theories would never have been taken seriously by anyone.

Which they of course still shouldn't be.

Abuse of prescription drugs and an experimental detox and recovery seriously fucked up his brain.

Like, on some level I feel bad for him. His wife was dying of cancer so he got a script from his doctor and then lost control and broke his brain.

On the other hand though... Fuck him. His actions have caused and are still causing harm to people. He should have retired when he had the chance.

Broken clocks are right twice a day too.

Like a lot of his stuff about sucking it up, cleaning your room, getting small victories, and preaching to an ignored male demographic landed well. But if you dig deeper he's not really selling anything a self help book wouldn't, and a lot of his other points veer off into standard Conservative Christianity.

And that's before he started getting really weird with the carnivore, culture war, drug use, etc. nonsense

depends what you mean by “beginning”

early in his career? sure he was pretty normal back then

when he first started popping off about that one law in canada by which no one has actually gotten in trouble for misgendering someone, despite his claims and really started his internet presence? yeah he was already fucking insane then and has only gotten worse

Same man. Very much same.