I think most likely it's a multi-pronged effort. Think about these distinct and influential groups that have substantial but not complete overlap:
-
The Conservative Treehouse crowd
-
The_Donald crowd
-
The Gateway Pundit/True Pundit crowd
-
The American Thinker/American Greatness crowd
-
Twitter/Facebook pro-Trump combatants
-
Halfchan /pol/ ptg, etc
With the notable exception of halfchan, the above groups are really consumers of autism and memes. Since they are mostly in the normiesphere, but maybe on the edges, they kind of reappropriate the essential truths and repackage them in a normiesphere-compatible way, or act as a filter to identify memes that could possibly go viral in a much wider way.
Places like this produce amazing OC but are shit at understanding what has traction in a wider sense. For example, I think T_D has super cringe, shit taste in memes, but 99% of the ones that they do circlejerk over come from the chans, or from chan/T_D key overlap people. For journalism or opinion, all it takes is for some "reporter" to get some thought provoking and well-sourced infographic and bang, you have the seeds for a piece without much work, except for sanding off the rough edges and finding alternate sourcing so that it doesn't look like your piece came from a infographic that also contains
|
|>
|x
|
or whatever. So to me it makes perfect sense if you think about information and influence flow. Whatever the deal is, and I really have no idea, I'm just here for the lulz, it has been amazing to watch.