If you’re curious about the future of American conservatism, a good person to consider might be Ben Shapiro. The thirty-five-year-old conservative author hosts one of the country’s most popular podcasts, and clips from his frequent television appearances and public speeches have racked up millions of views on YouTube.

In debate appearances, which Shapiro doesn’t shy away from, he’s effective and entertaining; in life, with unfailing observance of the Sabbath (Shapiro’s Jewish) and a very public decision not to have sex before marriage, he’s about as steadfast in his beliefs as a public figure can get. Regardless of your politics, it’s easy to understand Shapiro’s appeal—he’s intelligent, collected, and consistent.

His career, however, hasn’t been without controversy. His confrontation with transgender broadcaster Zoey Tur on “The Dr. Drew Show” led to allegations of transphobia, and policing for protests to a 2017 speech he gave at UC Berkeley ended up costing the city $600,000.

Yet Shapiro is not uniformly hated by the left, and his podcast has significant across-the-aisle appeal. Audience members at his talks often profess their admiration for Shapiro before going on to raise points of disagreement.

It would be wrong, however, to overlook just how extreme some of Shapiro’s views are, or how muddled is the thinking on which they are based. His new book, The Right Side of History, was released in mid-March and soon landed on The New York Times best sellers list. It argues that America is undergoing a profound and unprecedented moral crisis due to a continuous drift, centuries in the making, from the Founding Fathers’ values.

These values, according to Shapiro, come from an amalgamation of two belief systems: Judeo-Christian morality and classical Greek philosophy—or, as is reiterated throughout the book, “Jerusalem” and “Athens,” or “revelation” and “reason.” In one of his shortest descriptions of how this philosophical synthesis functions, Shapiro writes, “God orders us to use reason, and reason impels use to discover the natural-laws designed by God.”

Shapiro believes no philosophical system has allowed for a higher degree of human flourishing than that of the Founders, and he spends much of the book demonstrating—through a historical rundown of Western moral and political thinking that begins in 1313 B.C. with God’s revelation to Moses—how Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders arrived at moral-philosophical perfection and how we’ve been deviating from this perfection ever since.

As a podcaster and speaker, Shapiro is concise, engaging, and often convincing. But, as a writer, at least in The Right Side of History, he’s vague, dull, and self-contradictory. The book is loaded with spurious arguments, and from cover to cover Shapiro evades the most difficult—and often most obvious—questions that arise from his theory.

We can begin with the book’s premise. Why does Shapiro think we’re in the midst of a moral crisis? He dedicates all of four pages to the question, giving one statistic after another but, in nearly every instance, neglecting to probe them.

Shapiro warns us that marriage and birth rates are on the decline, evidently assuming the reader will agree this suggests that something’s gravely amiss in society. He writes that 30 percent of Americans don’t trust public schools but doesn’t explain why this is indicative of a moral crisis and not just a wanting education system. We also learn that suicide rates are the highest in decades; but implicit in this is that these rates were once as high as they are now, which undercuts his argument that today’s rate is evidence of something unique in America’s history.

The book is filled with casual cheap shots more befitting a five-minute TV segment than a serious work of history or political philosophy.

It is only deep into the book that Shapiro confronts the uncomfortable fact that the men who brought the United States to his putative philosophical high-water mark also circumscribed the rights of blacks and women. He tells us, “the founding was rife with contradiction,” but then, instead of confronting this idea head on, pointlessly quotes Jefferson, Madison, and Frederick Douglas before closing the chapter.

The book is also filled with casual cheap shots more befitting a five-minute TV segment than a serious work of history or political philosophy. He writes at one point, “Sounding a lot like Bernie Sanders, Lenin wrote in 1917, ‘Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society.’ ” By linking Sanders—who Shapiro sees as a symptom of our ceaseless deviation from the Founder’s values—to an utterly anodyne quote from Lenin, Shapiro seems to hope the reader will draw a moral equivalency between the Senator and the Chairman.

There are hints of an interesting argument scattered throughout The Right Side of History, but they sit in logical isolation. While it’s possible that Shapiro’s more hardcore fans will end up mistaking the book’s shallow philosophical analysis for intellectual profundity, less gullible readers will find its argument crumbling, fragment by half-baked fragment.