LW always had a bit of a toxic PUA problem, if you are a bit familiar with hbomberguys youtube (and if you are not, you can just stop reading now and save yourself the time), you might have heard of his ‘what is it with you guys and skulls’ joke, starting from him mocking the weird Davis Aurini guy he actually had a LW account for a while. Sure he was not active for long, but he was active at the start, the rot goes quote deep in LW (seems a lot of the Aurini LW stuff has not been scrubbed), but they always had a weird fascination for PUA stuff, that is also why Scott wrote published the anti-heartiste faq (the who? just a neo-nazi pickup artist, well known enough in the LW community to need an anti-FAQ (and yes he stole his name from the bdsm book Story of O. Very clever, he read a book).

Just like neo-reaction, pua stuff is an amazing rabbithole of toxicity to go down which has had quite the influence on our culture. Without heartiste (who if I understood everything correctly was the main intellectual (lol) driving force in that community after the game was released) there would be no Andrew Tate for example (and this also shows the neo-nazi and ephebophilic roots of the modern movement (There was a period most of them pointed back to heartiste as their thought leader, which is why the anti-faq was made, he was the steelman position to attack)).

What makes this heartiste thing worse is the fact (looked it up) that him being a raging racist was already well knowin in 2013, and the FAQ was written in 2014, but Scott still posted it and talked about heartiste “in a spirit of sincere collaborative truth-seeking”. Introducing many more people to this toxicity.