Five short years ago, I was no less a permanent resident of the Internet than I am now, and I was no stranger to the unsavory dark corners. Yet I had either never, or very rarely encountered so many of the inflammatory topics that i see now on a daily basis.

There were no regular references to nazis (godwin'd threads aside) and white supremacy. You don't even hear about godwin's law anymore, because it applies much too often now. I'd never heard of antifa. I didn't daily encounter people accusing people and things of being racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and so on. I didn't know the names of any white supremacists other than David Duke, and I rarely saw anything about him. (Ironically, I still have never seen any white supremacist material or figures in any organic context. I only see them being promoted by their opponents due to the Streisand Effect).

My perception of all of this has changed drastically in the last 5 years. I encounter all of the above daily to the point where it's never far from my thoughts. That was never the case before. I'm not an activist. I don't take an interest in politics. I only subscribe to graphics programmers on Twitter, and I only visit subreddits that interest me. But it's only in the past 3-4 years that I can't even be on the web without seeing all of the above.

Now all of this hasn't found its way into IRL, yet. But it has begun to. People I've known for many years have recently started posting about what I consider fairly extreme political ideas. Certain distinctive vocabulary, and the associated thinking, is seeping into their lexicons.

I'm sure there's a lot of truth to what you're saying too. But culture spreads. If those outraged voices are "just" being heard more, there is no "just" about it. They're drawing people in, the ideas are spreading, and the mobs are growing too.