Most Americans see overt racism as offensive and as are as likely to swallow it as they are to eat a shit cookie. But like parasites the alt right aims to reproduce by infecting healthy hosts. One way it does this is by tricking the unwary into consuming their infected shit. So how is this done?
The alt right uses many effective strategies, but my focus here is on what I am calling “chocolate chipping” because I am going to use the shit cookie analogy. Let us begin with the anatomy of the shit cookie.
The alt right relies on lies (the shit) and morally awful ideas (the infection) to reproduce. Since normal people will not eat a shit cookie, the alt right needs to find a way to get them to eat shit and eventually get infected. One way they do this is by the rhetorical strategy of chocolate chipping.
Most people like chocolate chips and it is easy to get them to eat chocolate chip cookies. So, continuing the analogy, if the alt right can convince normal people that their cookie is a chocolate chip cookie, they can often get people to eat it. But if they hand them a shit cookie right away, they will taste the shit and spit it out. So, they need to get a normal person accustomed to the taste of shit. So, the tactic is to gradually blend a little more shit into the chocolate chips and serve up chocolate chip cookies.
For example, if an alt right tried to win over a normal person by immediately saying “the inferior races are swarming across our border to rape away the purity of the white race”, then few would eat that shit cookie. But if the shit is blended into the chocolate in the form of a claim about migrants coming here to commit crimes, steal jobs, and take away housing, then normal people are more likely to bite that cookie and get used to a little bit of shit. Some people will taste even a small amount of shit and spit out the cookie. Others will not notice it or even think that the chocolate chip has some extra zest. Some of them will start baking their own shit cookies and serve them to others, perhaps unaware that the secret ingredient is shit. These chocolate chip and shit cookies provide cover for the alt right: they can claim that they are just giving away cookies and not distributing shit. Those that eat them can become the most ardent public defenders of shit cookies, insisting the chips are all chocolate and no shit.
The alt right then offers cookies that have ever increasing amounts of shit, leading those who find they like the taste of shit to chips that are almost all shit. Once the former normal person is willing to eat shit cookies, then the alt right can start really infecting them with the ideology of the alt right. This infection consumes the person’s moral decency, replacing it with racism. The person can then become a true baker of shit cookies, thus propagating the alt right. So, do not eat the shit cookies.