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Not having read your article, and in isolation of whether or not this is actually a "problem", per se, this seems like a bad-faith article. If you go back and read old lesswrong articles and their comments, you will find now-known neoreactionaries like hanson posting on lesswrong, including roko.
Additionally, breitbart in 2016: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/
In your defense, even lesswrong somewhat disagreed
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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I'm not going to mod this because people can have shitty opinions, but "I haven't read your article but I am going to pass judgment on it being bad faith" is really on the border of obnoxiously low effort. On the subject of what the Motte is supposed to be and what it is becoming, we want it to be a place where people issue considered opinions after taking in the available evidence (including, you know, at least reading what you are commenting on), not just a place where people drop hot takes based on vibes and how they feel about the poster or the subject.
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lolwut.
Your evidence is a breitbart article that lumps a bunch of people into a vague category that didn't mean much back in 2016, and that category is not "neoreaction".
Says a lot more about you than it does Hanson, who isn't nearly interesting enough to aspire to neoreaction.
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Hanson isn't a neoreactionary. He's an elderly economist who loves freedom of speech and likes to be a bit trolly at times.
He never wrote a single important nrx post, didn't comment in nrx spaces, is not known for long edgy political posts either. His twitter interactions with Nick Land run to a grand total of cca 20 replies over 9 years.
Roko, no idea what he was up to but if he was nrx then, he was,at best, a lurker. You're free to find counterexamples to this, the entire xenosystems blog is archived. and practically everyone involved in nrx commented there while it was running.
Breitbart simply was never really good, and the article was co-written by Milo, who is an untrustworthy charlatan and that article of their is just plain bad. NRx wasn't really influence on the alt-right, contrary to what lazy journalists thought..
There was little overlap between the two. You can check out how a typical Xenosystems comment section looked like here. Then compare it to lesswrong.
Relevant lesswrong discussion
Compare the tone, informational content and themes and make your own judgement.
This is important. The alt-right is populist - it takes for granted that its core agenda is supported by the silent majority of "real Americans" and that its enemies hold power by some combination of mass media enabled deceit and the votes of imported "fake Americans". (Allegations of actual electoral fraud aren't part of the traditional alt-right playbook - they started with Trump - but are now routine as the difference between the alt-right and the MAGA right collapses).
NRx is unashamedly elitist - its foundational texts explicitly reject "ideal democracy" (rule by the masses) as impossible and real democracy (disputes within the elite settled by elections) and even "demotism" (elites legitimising themselves by claiming mass support whether or not this is actually tested at the ballot box) as undesirable. The rest of the Thielosphere is similarly elitist, but quieter about it.
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You can listen to the article too (the AI text to speech is surprisingly good).
How can you call it bad faith without reading it? Isn't that bad faith?
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classic stuff.
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From the article:
Also note that the claim is "more-or-less fabricating"
Wait, what? That's news to me. Could you share a link, or perhaps a Reliable SourceTM?
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You should read my article! I cover these sources and these individuals in some detail, indicating why I think the term is wholly appropriate.
For example, it seems almost certain that the Breitbart guys (who had no real ties to either neoreaction or LessWrong) just cribbed from Wikipedia, and they didn’t remember their reasoning when I reached out.
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