We talked about pseuds in a long-necroed thread, but what about authors who have just a little bit of truth but not much else?
Take Michael Parenti for example. There's more worth in most of his citations than anything he's written himself, and most of his fans think they're Neo after reading a middle-school level pamphlet.
Nick Land. His early essays had some good ideas but then he started sipping the crackpipe and did a complete 180 and now he's an alt right shitposter that writes travel guides for the Chinese government. Nick has the dubious distinction of being beloved by both far right schizos and left wing culture vultures, neither of whom can write coherent sentences. Before he became a drug addict and acolyte of Xi Jinping, he had some decent ideas. Like capitalism depends on racism and misogyny for smooth functioning, that humanism sucks, and instead of fighting the system we should just push it to collapse. Then the rest of it is incoherent rambling and filler designed to make him look smart and his more recent writing, if you can call it that, is just vapid /pol/ tier hot takes on twitter.
Haruki Murakami is one of those boring midwit novelists who is only read by white girls so as to look cultured and cosmopolitan.
Yuval Harari is possibly the ultimate midwit intellectual of our times. His books a short on scientific evidence and while most of what he says is just a summary of stuff people have known for years, his own innovations are sensationalist and the primary source is his ass.