He has a lot of wild defense arguments; one of my favorites is: at some point in his life he lost the ability to speak; to recover his voice he trained it by reading aloud some books over and over, so much so that the content of these books became part of his own brain / of himself.

(Another one, unrelated, but also wild, argues that people who attack him are in fact against science itself, that they want to go back to the Middle Ages, etc.)

It's very obvious he pieced together interesting ideas from others to pass them as his own. And it worked very well, he has radio shows and TV shows and whatnot. And he still has a lot of supporters!