The claim isn’t that Vassar is some kind of supervillain. It’s that Vassar clearly reads a lot and part of his grift is having read information like the links above (and probably lots more) as an instruction manual. He’s a conspiratorial fellow who wants to spread his way of thinking and is willing to break a few eggs to do it.
A secondary point is that if you take the “arms race” framing seriously then we should expect intelligence services to have operations going on in our vicinity, probably to varying degrees. One tactic from the COINTEL program is to find crazy people adjacent to a target, give them enough funding to be a nuisance, and let them loose. My reason for bringing this up isn’t because the truth value is important in this case, but because it’s worth thinking though these issues as tensions around AI rise in order to be prepared.
It’s worse than that, plenty of abusers will straight up coerce one victim into abusing another. This also serves to break people for other purposes, because once you’ve gotten someone to violate their morals in an extreme way, you have evidence to use against their very self-conceptions as a moral person the next time.