Knowing the enemy

Sites like Republic of Gilead and Right Wing Watch perform a very valuable service in reporting and analyzing what "the other side" in the struggle for America's future is saying and thinking, and I rely on them a good deal for that purpose.  However, I also have a firm belief that to truly understand an ideology and its adherents, one must read them in their own words, unmediated by any paraphrasing or interpretation by one's own side.  Here are some of the sites I regularly read for that purpose.

LifeSite News is a traditionalist and theocratic Catholic news site.  Abortion, gay rights, and porn are the great evils it crusades against, and it also closely follows the struggle between reformist and reactionary tendencies within the Catholic hierarchy (making it a useful resource for countering the adulation of Pope Francis in some leftist circles).  Any hope that the hard-line religious mentality can be reasoned with will find little encouragement here -- anything that doesn't fit into the theological alternate-reality bubble, even something as harmless as efforts to stop bullying of gay kids, is dismissed as gay propaganda.

RedState is, I'm sure, known to most liberals, but it's well worth reading as a reminder of what that "base" we keep hearing about, to which Republican politicians must pander, is actually like.  The Bible is the framework for understanding reality.  Any concern about global warming is "hysteria".  Everyone who opposes the right-wing agenda is acting out of pure malevolence and hates America.  Secularists, gays, and liberals are pretty much the evil trinity which makes up Satan.  There's often actually more venom directed against "moderate" Republicans than against Democrats -- I've seen more attacks on Jeb Bush than on Obama, whose absolute iniquity, after all, can simply be taken for granted.  RedState suffers from a bad case of ad-clog, so be prepared for your browser to slow to a crawl.

Race42016 is a Republican forum for discussing upcoming elections, usually focused on the race for the Republican Presidential nomination.  Most posts are just summaries of polls, with the real life of the site being on the comment threads.  The full range of tendencies within the party is represented, and debates among fundies, libertarians, and moderates often get quite heated and nasty, illustrating why the latter group has tended to drift away from the party.

Popular Liberty represents the Paulist libertarian branch of the right wing (until recently the site was called The Daily Paul).  Occasional flashes of sanity like pro-drug-legalization posts are balanced by lunges into conspiracy theories and tedious blather about currency and the gold standard.  Useful reading for liberals who think the libertarians are an alternative to the frustratingly-centrist Democratic party -- there are some worthwhile strains of thought here, but in practice they can't be disentangled from teh crayzee.

I also occasionally look at National Review (a sadly wingnutized shadow of what it was under Buckley), PJ Media, Breitbart, HotAir (more ad-clog), and PowerLine.  Don't overdo it, though.  Too much of this stuff can get both depressing and monotonous, and excessive exposure to the kind of syntax and spelling found in their comment threads can undermine your ability to write correctly (I'm not joking, I've actually noticed my own intuitive grasp of such things slipping a bit since I started reading those sites regularly).  Spend some time on something light, colorful, fun, and non-political when you get done with them.

Links to posts on such sites sometimes provoke reader comments that they seem alien or unreal, like reports from some bizarre alternate reality.  But there are plenty of people who live and breathe that alternate reality, and they walk among us.  They vote, too.  One of the enemy's key weaknesses is that they don't understand us -- their view of us, as a look at any of these sites will attest, is a ludicrous caricature completely dependent on their own warped frame of reference.  We must not make the same mistake.  If we want to cope with and ultimately defeat the enemy, we'd better understand them the way they really are.