Forgive me for dipping back into reddit, but I remember having this saved. Credit to /u/Exis007.
So, let's take JP really seriously for a hot second.
He's doing something really interesting in his writing that I think a lot of people miss. And so if you want to find the appeal, I think you have to take half the appeal of Ben Shapiro and Louder With Crowder and cross it with the power of an academic coming up with a philosophical viewpoint that basically validates what you want, kind of irrespective of what you want, in your heart. It's pretty irresistable.
He plays a game. He gives you a long anecdote and in that anecdote, he's very clearly making an argument. It's not a complicated argument, you can follow it, it's pretty explicit. Then, next to the anecdote, he includes a conclusion. So it looks like [Long story about how hierarchies are found in nature via birds and lobsters] / [conclusion: hierarchies are naturally occurring and we can't get rid of them]. Now, any logical person makes a leap and says, "Okay, but humans aren't birds and lobsters, so....why does that apply?". He comes back and says, "I never said that we're exactly like birds and lobsters, you cannot read, you didn't understand, you're stupid". Obviously not in that language. So he's constantly constructing what he's saying in this very slippery way that anyone engaging with his ideas on his terms is going to naturally draw conclusions about how he's getting to his ideas, but the way he constructs them isn't an argument with evidence, it's very loosey-goosey and so he can constantly call you out on misrepresenting his point and claim he never said the thing you are attributing to him, etc.
So what results are these "debates" or confrontations where people try to talk to him or engage him about his ideas in a critical way and he can shut them all down, which is fun for some people. It's a display of intellectual superiority for some, and a frustrating and puzzling experience for his opponents because he'll immediately backtrack on anything you try to pin him down on. So it produces....great content! It produces a lot of videos where some fumbling liberal/leftist is trying to engage with what he said and he stomps all over them by claiming they don't get it and that's some gooooood youtube. Ben Shapiro and Crowder do the same schitck, and if you don't know that you're going into that scenario when you talk to them, you'll lose just based on the rhetorical stratgies. They look smart and cool without even really talking about the ideas, because the POINT is not to talk about the ideas.
Secondly, his larger point--his thesis--is pretty attractive to conservatives. It boils down to a couple of things, but I think the highlights are that there's a way the world is, the western world (whatever that means) and we all know it in our heart. There are natural orders and hierarchies and ways of being and those are intrinsic to human nature so man v. woman and rich v. poor and all of these social critiques you might make against them are basically fighting the inevitable. Nevermind the specifics of how you get to that conclusion, you can just feel it from the long tradition of the western, Christian world and it's good, actually and natural and we should quit fighting about it. He also makes an argument that we shouldn't try to change the world, but change ourselves. Don't fight poverty, learn to get along with your girlfriend. Don't agitate for change, figure out how to not overdraw your checking account. There's no benchmark for when you've sufficiently got your shit together that you can go and try to change the world, but he's largely making an argument for political and social apathy. Let the grownups worry about the world; go clean your room. This fits very neatly into conservative doctrine, obviously. The way things are is how they are meant to be; stop trying to make things better, focus on your tiny square of the planet and tidy it up.
Even the enemy is kind of vague to the point of being everyone you don't like. What is a "Postmodern Neo-Marxist"? Fuck if I know. Obviously, it involves jewish people because it's really leaning hard on anti-semitic propaganda in the coined language, but it also means two oppositional things too. Postmodernism is the intellectual cliff face that starts to erase meaning (which he's not down with, because meaning is intrinsic and natural and just the way humans are). Marxism is an organized, philosophical point of view against capitalism. The two aren't really related or even very compatible. But they are both the tips of the speers in terms of progressive politics, the idea that hierarchies and meaning are junk we created and we can create something better, or an idea that we can reorganize society to make it something we can all thrive under, so it doesn't matter that they aren't cohesive. That's better. We might call it, "People who don't agree that the way things are is great, and who might want to change it in ways that are unnatural (provided by the definition of natural)".
And so, we're left with a calming message. Everything you know and understand about the world is right, it is intrinsic and natural, and you don't need to feel bad about it. You can and will keep on being the way you are because that's how humans are meant to be. Don't worry about change or politics, just focus on yourself. People who try to argue with you about it are stupid and evil, so they can be humiliated on youtube for fun and you don't have to think about what they are really trying to say. What's more attractive than that?
