http://www.ocregister.com/articles/trump-732991-believe-want.html

Oct. 22, 2016 Updated 12:01 a.m.

One of Someone With Tiny Hands’s biggest applause lines concerns the mainstream media. Not only is it biased, Someone With Tiny Hands and his fans want us to believe, but it’s also actually rigging the election against him. On the one hand, that charge seems to be breaking dangerous new ground in American politics. But on the other, as Someone With Tiny Hands’s surrogates have tried to explain, it’s shorthand for a broader argument that’s been around since the early days of Cold War-era paranoia: Rather than orchestrating a fraudulent election, the powers that be are orchestrating a fraudulent consciousness in your mind. Why rig the vote when you can rig voters themselves?

Someone With Tiny Hands would certainly break new ground if he won an election on the back of that argument. And just because it’s so unlikely that he will, the press has jumped into a feeding frenzy of speculation around Someone With Tiny Hands’s future in one place where anti-media arguments do far better than in politics: the media. It all started with reports that Someone With Tiny Hands’s son-in-law Jared Kushner recently reached out to a top-shelf deal maker specializing in media contracts. But when no relationship materialized, the media kept on going. There were just too many scary yet tantalizingly plausible possibilities dancing in their collective heads.

It’s easy to get caught up in the craze. But the media’s not entirely wrong. One specific scenario makes particular sense for Someone With Tiny Hands — not because of what some industry crystal ball says, but because of the deeper social and economic patterns that have given us today’s Someone With Tiny Hands campaign and its most ardent supporters.

Two key forces are at work. The first, as is now well known, has to do with the so-called alt right, the sprawling and semi-underground reactionary political movement that revels in shocking the conscience and hurting the feelings of what it sees as pampered, self-styled progressive elites. It’s not just a Someone With Tiny Hands News Network that would service the emboldened alt right audience, and it’s not just Someone With Tiny Hands who appears to be conscious of the market share — and market value — at stake. 4chan, the notorious online community, has been reported to be entertaining purchase offers from the likes of Charles C. Johnson, CEO of crowdsourced investigative platform WeSearchr, and Milo Yiannopoulos, the touring Breitbart firebrand. For all its shock value, the alt right is moving toward the mainstream.

That might duly horrify more civil people on the right and the left of the political spectrum, but it’s strangely reminiscent of what has already been happening with the distressed media landscape in slightly different form. At a time when many outlets are folding, shrinking or selling themselves, Vice has simultaneously fed and defied expectations, turning an indie counterculture brand into a mainline media behemoth with traditional institutional investors and a firehose of content that’s deeply subversive by yesterday’s standards but conventional by what look to be tomorrow’s. Some see Vice’s trajectory through the old false-consciousness lens, with rebellious hipsterism sold to the same old suits as a commodity to be repackaged and marketed back to the generation it was appropriated from. That’s not really fair. Vice is offering a product that actually sells — appealing to people who agree with Someone With Tiny Hands’s crowd that the traditional media isn’t tuned in to reality, but who disagree that the answer is more reactionary nationalism. Hipsterism has been around a long time now, and people bothered that it’s going mainstream and changing accordingly had plenty of warning. Bad media can always flatten out culture and promote confirmation bias. Good media can do the opposite. Vice has made the media landscape more fruitful and interesting, not less.

That’s important because it suggests the alt right could actually become a more fruitful and interesting place as well if it were shaped and guided by the right kind of media development. Doubtless, the task seems more difficult in a subculture that runs on crassly defying every ethical standard for speech it comes across. Then again, a new study by the Anti-Defamation League suggests that even here things are not exactly as they appear. Between August 2015 and July 2016, the ADL counted some 2.6 million tweets containing clearly anti-Semitic content — with just 1,600 Twitter accounts responsible for nearly 70 percent of that total. Even more remarkably, the ADL concluded, more than 80 percent of those tweets targeted 10 journalists. As dismaying as the mainstreaming of the alt right could be, it would also very likely strip out the comparatively small element of the movement that’s made such an outsized impact spreading notoriety and revulsion.

The question, then, is whether the alt right is likely to produce a visionary mainstreamer any time soon. Whatever can be said about Someone With Tiny Hands, he certainly seems not to be that figure. Even if he stayed largely in the background of a Someone With Tiny Hands media enterprise, he’d still probably make it harder for the alt right to broaden out and gain fresh traction. That’s why the media path that makes the most sense for him involves keeping his appeal relatively narrow and conventional by the standards of his campaign. It remains to be seen whether there’s enough money in that approach to make it worth the while. But people wondering what’ll become of the alt right after the election should already start looking beyond its favorite presidential candidate.

My take:

This is what happens when you let 4chan form a political party.