IMHO, Ben is too smart for his own good. He greatly suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect. He is an extremely smart person, is a great debater, used to be able to think quite logically and used to stick to his guns.

If you followed him not long after his consulting career on lamestream media, his college touring period was his height.

Unfortunately, near the end of that, a year or few before the daily wire fired up, is when things started to change.

During the tours he was confronted by several liberal wackos who made his intellectual side stop and think. He formed some wrong conclusions about abortion, gun control, and a few other topics, which brought a very small compromise into his ethical foundation. In my mind that is where it all started. Intellectually the conclusions were quite logical, reasonable even.

If you took a step back, however, the concepts failed on their face if confronted with logical ethical arguments. Ben never took those steps back and the compromises were allowed to cure and became part of a rot, a bad foundation for stuff to come.