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This strikes me as the opening blows in a conflict that EA will be unable to deal with. The activist community has seen a lot of money flowing to the Wrong kind of people, and now they are moving in to deal with a potential threat to their status and position. How exactly is the EA movement going to protect itself against an avalanche of bad-faith actors like the one you have identified, while also dealing with an equally withering barrage of negative stories from legacy media? They can't just attack the media without painting themselves as members of the Trump tribe, which would cause lots of people and donators to leave. Long-winded rationalist essays might be able to convince the core members of the group, but they are worse than useless when it comes to defending oneself against spurious accusations in the court of public opinion.
I really don't see how the movement survives if this continues - people like David Thorstad would (at least, in my reading of his statements and actions) prefer that the movement sink into irrelevancy and fail to have any noticeable positive impact on the world, instead becoming a den of comfortable sinecures that people like him and his friends can occupy without having to actually do any real work... and they have existing institutions (Oxford, the mainstream media, etc) putting a thumb on their end of the scale.
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