He also repeats all of the bible thumper talking points around this subject, as if it’s a mystery nobody can explain and couldn’t have come to be without some kind of intelligent design at the helm.

He literally does not say that though, he says there’s a lot of research into it and encourages people to read it.

This whole flagella thing was an exercise of goal post moving in the first place. The ID people kept pointing out weird things and missing links. Then when science explained exactly how that thing came to be, without ID involved, they just pointed to the next thing at one point ending up at flagella.

Yeah I agree, but I also think that you can’t exactly blame someone else who was uninvolved with the initial argument for arguing a different thing at a different time. If one person criticizes a politician for not providing enough social services and another separate person complains about taxes that’s not moving goal posts, those are just two different people.

There is a whole Wikipedia page talking about how flagella evolved and how it came to be.

Yes, but, did you read it? Its not exactly too resoundingly confident in any one theory.

And keep in mind all of this was thoroughly debunked back 20 years ago.

All of what? It is true that the flagella isn’t unique if that’s what you mean.

I’m not even sure there is research still being done on this, the research was done decades before, there is no mystery.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mmi.14658

Here’s a relatively recent study that says basically what the wikipedia says:

Homing in on the T3SS, the exact evolutionary relation between injectisomes and flagella1 is debated. Phylogenetic analyses and functional arguments led to two models: (a) The evolution of modern flagella and injectisomes from a common ancestral protein export machinery (Gophna et al., 2003; Pallen and Gophna, 2007), or (b) The evolution of injectisomes from a flagellum-like ancestor (Abby and Rocha, 2012; Denise et al., 2020; Nguyen et al., 2000).

But it also says:

The T3SS is one of the most complex bacterial molecular machines, incorporating one to over a hundred copies of more than 15 different proteins into a multi-MDa transmembrane complex (Table 1). The system, especially the flagellum, has, therefore often been quoted as an example for “irreducible complexity,” based on the argument that the evolution of such a complex system with no beneficial intermediates would be exceedingly unlikely. However, it is now clear that, far from having evolved as independent entities, many secretion systems share components between each other and with other cellular machineries (Egelman, 2010; Pallen and Gophna, 2007).

I ofc am just a layman reading this, I agree it seems better understood that how I interpreted what he was saying, but it also doesn’t seem nearly as well understood as you’re saying.