If you had read the article, you would have noticed that he addresses the very Breitbart article you linked.
He added a citation to a Breitbart article by Milo Yiannopolous and Allum Bokhari after they claimed neoreaction grew out of comments on LessWrong, and another citation to an article in German-language newspaper FAZ that cited the same connection. When I asked Yiannopolous and Bokhari for comment, Yiannopolous did not recall the context, and Bokhari has not returned my request for comment at this time. Since the claim has no basis in history and reads like a loose cribbing from RationalWiki, and since neither Yiannopolous or Bokhari was ever part of neoreaction or LessWrong, my honest guess is that Gerard aptly demonstrated the reason to treat Breitbart as unreliable by using a poorly sourced and false claim from it.
Given David Gerard's history of constructing his own reality and then force-fitting Reliable Sources into that narrative, it does not seem bad faith at all to assume that fabrication is precisely what he's doing here. He's clearly not a man who spends a lot of time on Breitbart.com looking to uncover the Truth. Something motivated a man who likely despises Breitbart in general and Milo Yiannopolous in specific to cite their website as a source. You can quibble about the semantics of the word "fabricate" in this context, but to be clear, he is deciding that This Thing must be true without reliable evidence, and then going out to find that evidence, even when it does not exist or is worthless by his own standards.
Whether or not you think the word "fabricating" is sufficiently accurate in this context, it's a huge leap to then claim that an obsessively sourced document in excess of 12,000 words is "bad faith." The article bends over backwards to be charitable to a man whose every action makes him look like, at best, a vandal of history with outsized influence on a website that constitutes the only source of information many people will ever consume on a given subject. In fact, I think a good faith reading of the article would reveal that Tracingwoodgrains was abundantly charitable and writing entirely in good faith, even if you disagreed with his interpretation of the facts. There is a massive canyon between "disagreeing with the precise word chosen to describe David Gerard's behavior in a comment summarizing a 12,000 word article" and "bad faith."
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If you had read the article, you would have noticed that he addresses the very Breitbart article you linked.
Given David Gerard's history of constructing his own reality and then force-fitting Reliable Sources into that narrative, it does not seem bad faith at all to assume that fabrication is precisely what he's doing here. He's clearly not a man who spends a lot of time on Breitbart.com looking to uncover the Truth. Something motivated a man who likely despises Breitbart in general and Milo Yiannopolous in specific to cite their website as a source. You can quibble about the semantics of the word "fabricate" in this context, but to be clear, he is deciding that This Thing must be true without reliable evidence, and then going out to find that evidence, even when it does not exist or is worthless by his own standards.
Whether or not you think the word "fabricating" is sufficiently accurate in this context, it's a huge leap to then claim that an obsessively sourced document in excess of 12,000 words is "bad faith." The article bends over backwards to be charitable to a man whose every action makes him look like, at best, a vandal of history with outsized influence on a website that constitutes the only source of information many people will ever consume on a given subject. In fact, I think a good faith reading of the article would reveal that Tracingwoodgrains was abundantly charitable and writing entirely in good faith, even if you disagreed with his interpretation of the facts. There is a massive canyon between "disagreeing with the precise word chosen to describe David Gerard's behavior in a comment summarizing a 12,000 word article" and "bad faith."
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