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It's an interesting piece. I'll repeat from twitter that a few of the flirting-with-salacious bits detract and distract from the central story, even compared to writing out their long-form version (eg, "hosted LemonParty" might well unspool to something like 'archived a whole bunch of sites from a defunct host, which included some shock sites like lemonparty', though I can't find enough information to confirm that).
I didn't think of Sandifer's ban from Wikipedia as the radicalizing point for him, but it's plausible. On the other hand, I'm not sure the timeline quite works out: Sandifer was banned (and the whole Manning rename snafu happened in) October and November 2013, and Manning was first publicly known as trans in August 2013. Gerard was still posting through it on LessWrong proper into 2014, and while it sometimes touched, he was still engaging (cw: the linked story is deadfic, though it did get to a reasonable End of Book One point) with people with opposing viewpoints (if often smearing them elsewhere) in a way that, say, his later tumblr persona never did.
Compare 2013 twitter to 2016. He definitely hadn't gotten to the point where he'd imply his political opponents would be "legally able to administer roofies to female patients", yet, in 2016, either, as close at PigGate got.
((tl;dr of that: It's quite possible that PigGate never happened, and the only evidence in favor was a second-hand story by a man who pointedly separated from David Cameron's political faction over Cameron's support for gay marriage, and coincidentally did he mention it that Cameron allegedly put his todger onto a boar's head roast. But no one liked David Cameron, so who cares if the allegation is being laundered by a homophobe!))
I know that an alternative explanation of 'it's just everything all together that did it' -- increasing frustration that all the insight in LessWrong couldn't dissuade crypto buyers or 'Roko's Basilisk' or neoreactionaries or Rationalist Dark Arts practitioners, the replacement of Palin-like social conservatives with the Trumpist-populist faction, the Kids-and-Boomers Eternal September of mobile smartphones, the collapse of the twitter ratsphere, trans stuff becoming politically centralized, Eugene_Nier and the broader soccon right's disavowal of whatever free speech interests libertarians might have once had -- is kinda meaninglessly vague and far less interesting of a story. And the "it worked, didn't it" answer, where gay marriage won by punching homophobes and the next fights weren't willing to punch hard enough is... personally tempting for me, but probably no more right to Gerard's internal model. And we might not be able to get the real answer anywhere but straight from his mouth, if then, and I don't seem him willing to give either of us the time of day.
"Hosted LemonParty" comes straight from the horse's mouth:
In fact, him talking about that is where I got the Forrest Gump of the internet line.
I don't personally see that as a smear at all, and he doesn't treat it as one when talking about it. It's just one peculiar, flavorful side point in a long history.
I agree that it's not a smear or technically false, I just think the likely full explanation is probably so much more boring than the summary one -- even going from your summary to his we go from "it meant playing host to one of the internet’s most infamous shock sites" to him being one of the two sysadmins on the box and the only one who bothered logging into it -- that it seems weird or off-theme to throw in.
EDIT: but yeah, that's a nitpick.
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