I've seen several people on Less Wrong recommend Mencius Moldbug's writings, and I've been curious about how he became so popular here. He's certainly an interesting thinker, but he's rather obscure and doesn't have any obvious connection to Less Wrong, so I'm wondering where this overlap in readership came from.
[EDIT by E.Y.: The answer is that he's not popular here. The 2012 LW annual survey showed 2.5% (30 of 1195 responses) identified as 'reactionary' or 'Moldbuggian'. To the extent this is greater than population average, it seems sufficiently explained by Moldbug having commented on the early Overcoming Bias econblog before LW forked from it, bringing with some of his own pre-existing audience. I cannot remember running across anyone talking about Moldbug on LW, at all, besides this post, in the last year or so. Since this page has now risen to the first page of Google results for Mencius Moldbug due to LW's high pagerank, and on at least one occasion sloppy / agenda-promoting journalists such as Klint Finley have found it convenient to pretend to an alternate reality (where Moldbug is popular on LW and Hacker News due to speaking out for angry entitled Silicon Valley elites, or something), a correction in the post seems deserved. See also the Anti-Reactionary FAQ by Scott Alexander (aka Yvain, LW's second-highest-karma user). --EY]
That's a reasonable description of the word's use as a slur -- though I might go further and say that in that context "fascist" means simply "bad" -- but in political science parlance it has a much narrower, though not entirely consistent, meaning. (I've actually heard some dispute over whether the Nazis properly count as fascist or are better given their own weird little category, although this is a somewhat fringey/pedantic distinction.) Right-wing authoritarians have been around as long as "right-wing" was a politically meaningful word, but the post-socialist totalitarian governments that started cropping up in the Great Depression are much more tightly clustered, politically speaking.
Moldbug pretty clearly doesn't fall within that cluster of ideologies. He's probably closest to Franco's, but there are still significant gaps, and in any case Franco was always a bit of an odd duck as far as the European political landscape was concerned.