For several years now–about fifteen, I guess–there's been this group of guys, almost entirely online, self-described 'philosophers' who have been generating 'ideas' which are, really, pretty old fashioned ones about racism, sexism, homophobia, and dictatorship, but are wrapped up in a lot of pseudo-intellectual language about technology and AI and the long-term future of humanity. It's basically a kind of cult; and it's been exchanging DNA with the alt-right for years.
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These are people like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and ultimately ending up (in an even more dumbed-down form) with Jadie Vance. These are people who really believe that they're better than everyone else, and that the entirety of the human species is a toy for them to play with, via money, propaganda, and government power. One thing they hate is democracy, because it always yields results they think are 'wrong.'
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These people inhabit a bubble in which no outside critique ever penetrates their increasingly bizarre ideas, and where their ability to buy publicity for their ideas convinces them, in a self-sustaining loop, that they must be right.
As a result, they've lost sight of the fact that most of the world thinks that their ideas and their plans to reshape the world in a way that rolls back a century of progress are unpalatable, incoherent, and weirdly disconnected from the present.
They think it's completely obvious that there are superior and inferior races, that women are only useful to breed genetically superior children, that the long-run plan is to fuse advanced humanity with cyberintelligence and produce a technological god.
Most people would say that's a lot of bullsh*t. But to them it's completely reasonable stuff for smart people (they mean themselves) to talk about.
And so much of the weirdness that we're seeing now in right-wing discourse comes from these fringe ideas seeping in and getting mainstreamed, though usually not in their original and pure form. They can be repurposed and modified to fit, for instance, a Christian fundamentalist worldview (to which they are originally alien). That's because, regardless of the mode of reasoning, they end up promoting a certain group as a superior caste that can profit from the suffering of others.
Sometimes I feel a twinge of sympathy for the fundamentalist Christians when I seem them getting taken in by these alt-right technobros, who have started to spout "Jesus Jesus Jesus" in spite of the fact that they know nothing about Christianity and do not believe any of it.
But then I remember how much these same fundamentalists have prostituted and corrupted their own religion in the name of power, and my sympathy evaporates.
@DavidSalo Musk was heavily influenced by Thiel's ultra libertarian/Randian philosophy but the protege has far surpassed his master and is much more dangerous.