To read...

I often say that it is difficult for me to talk about social and political issues with people, mostly because most people are so ignorant.  They prattle off platitudes that are obviously nothing more than propaganda sound bytes and bear little relationship to reality, but because "everyone else" says them too, they are not capable (or willing) of feeling the cognitive dissonance and seeing that something is very wrong with The Narrative™.

Not only are people generally too under-educated (or perhaps maleducated) to have intelligent discussions with, and also not only are they too fraught with not bucking political correctness, but people are also unwilling to challenge things that threaten their sense of identity.  This is why it is almost impossible for me to have intelligent discussions with liberals, for instance: 1) they're usually not as smart and well-educated as they think that they are, but they have not clue or any sense of humility to suggest to themselves that they need to keep an open mind about things that they literally aren't aware of, 2) their argument usually boil down to the genetic fallacy, appeals to authority and finally simply name-calling, passive aggressive smoke-blowing, and emotional tantrums, because they don't know any other way of communicating about these issues, and 3) they get so histrionic because their very sense of identity is wrapped up in their political affiliation (something that is easy to see actually by their projection; they always assume that everyone who argues with them is a Team-R jersey-wearing NPC who reads from a simple script of "conservative" talking points.  Because that's what they do.)

And honestly, debating with "conservatives" isn't much better, most of the time.  I tend to agree with them on more issues, of course, but I make as little headway on the others, and for many of the same reasons.  So I've mostly, except for close friends and when my kids ask me questions (which they do kinda often) recuse myself from any political or social discussions these days, and if someone wants to engage me, I suggest that in order to have enough common context to have a meaningful discussion, they need to catch up on a relatively decent backlog of reading material.

In theory, of course, I could maybe try and teach them the material that's present in those sources myself, but other than the case with my kids, few are interested in having me do that anyway, nor am I particularly good at it.  Nor, for that matter, am I very inclined to do so, because it requires more patience and empathy for where their state of knowledge is than I tend to have.  Naturally, people don't go out and read for days or weeks just so that they can come back and have a discussion with me either, so it's more of a defensive blow-off than a serious suggestion that they go out and get up to speed to be able to talk to me.  But for the sake of argument with myself, as blog posts tend to be, what do I recommend that people need to read in order to talk to me about political and social issues?

Well, first off, a lot of my political and social thought is to a great degree a product of my religious background.  I make a lot of allusions, at least, to narratives, figures and doctrines in both the Bible and the Book of Mormon, so both should be read (KJV, preferably, although I admit that that's as much an aesthetic thing as anything else.  My church does use the KJV, but it's a point of doctrine that all translations of the Bible are flawed.  I suppose if there were ever a case where something like the NIV or whatever seemed to be in opposition to an interpretation of the KJV, I'd favor the KJV, but I'd interpret the question with reference to other context as much as possible anyway. That would happen extremely rarely anyway.) I also refer to a lot of quotes from latter-day prophets and other leaders of the church, but it's harder to suggest a corpus of material to read there.  I'd refer you to the lessons of the Latter-day Conservative, since he's done a great job of collating relevant quotes as appropriate for the topics that he's specifically covering.  Start by reading the 12 lessons at that specific page listed, and then you can feel free to browse other stuff on the site while you're at it.  He's also got a big list of talks and articles organized by subject, so he's a good index source, albeit naturally secondary.  From the Book of Mormon, I most especially recommend (at least with regards to social and political questions) the last third of Alma through the end of the book, with an eye towards seeing political ramifications in the text.

To a great degree, my views on morality are very traditionally Christian in most regards, but the idea of agency vs. the Luciferian plan of top-down Central Planning you'll be moral whether you like it or not is a very specific LDS theological point.  (Although it has clear parallels for those who can recognize globalism as a continuation or regrown hydra head, if you will, of the heresy of Babel, which I've seen mostly outside of the Church rather than within it.)  Now, of course, there are many members of my Church who do not recognize the doctrine applied to political and social thought the way that I do.  That said, we've been warned over and over again of wolves in sheep's clothing and the separation of the wheat from the tares.  The only way that they can embrace social and political thought that is blatantly anti-Christian and anti-freedom is by cherry-picking stuff out of context in order to prop up their belief, so they are clearly wrong.  Some of them may be well-meaning but wrong, but I suspect that fewer of them are as well-meaning as they pretend to be in reality.  Entryism of SJWism is a problem for any traditional organization, including the Church, of course.

Moving beyond that influence, you can't get very far in understanding the context behind what I'm saying and what I believe without reading Reassessing the Presidency.  It's not necessarily the be-all end all, in spite of it's very long length, but rather an introduction to various topics, especially with regards to my views on Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson and most of the presidents since then, of course.  The very, very high level takeaway is that all of the "great" Presidents (as assessed by most historians and general public acclaim because those same historians have written the textbooks most of us grew up with) with the possible exception of Washington and Jefferson were tyrants abusing their power who fundamentally shifted the direction of the country away from freedom and more towards dependence on an increasingly powerful and dictatorial federal government.

The hardest lesson for conservatives to swallow is HBD, or human biodiversity (it causes liberals to screech and their heads to explode, needless to say).  This is actually the number one reason why I don't want to debate anything with anybody, because most people just cannot or will not allow themselves to think these ideas (even though everybody would have taken them for granted a generation or so ago, they are now so foreign as to cause apoplexy in today's broken generations.)  I've collected a fair number of sources to prove beyond any doubt that I'm right about what I believe about HBD, though, and that it's well-accepted and thoroughly proven scientific knowledge that I'm right.  For those few who are capable of swallowing this particular red-pill, here it is.  Even if you disagree with this stuff, if you haven't read some of this material, most especially the r/K-selection theory articles, the Hajnal line article, and Government Is Us.  After that, the Jayman articles are pretty good (the Clannishness and the American Nations ones) and while I don't necessarily recommend reading all of the articles in the Diversity + Proximity = War reference list, knowing that they're there is an important Awakening to our Awful Situation moment, because it directly contradicts that facile and obviously untrue Diversity Is Our Strength cult.

Finally, and this is another one that lots of people will struggle with, you'll need to read Ron Unz's series American Pravda.  I recommend reading them chronological order.  It's the equivalent of a decent sized book, but the material is top notch.  It's... extremely controversial, though.  Ron Unz, more than anyone else I've read, has opened my eyes to be open minded about what I used to just dismiss as whacko conspiracy theory stuff.  Many of those so-called whacko conspiracy theories are much more solid than we're led to believe.  Because this ties in nicely with my first point, and the fact that secret combinations were foretold thousands of years ago, that also helped break down some of my reluctance to take this seriously.  But Unz's research is pretty thorough and impressive, and I tend to believe that he's right about most of what he's written, at least in that particular series.

I also recommend the Z-man and Vox Day, although I don't consider them required reading and they are more of a slightly acquired taste.  The Z-man is a bit more light-weight; he doesn't necessarily say things that are new or ground-breaking, but what he does say is well-said and well-organized, and he's pretty good reading for those who still aren't super familiar or grounded in "Dissident Right" thought as he calls it.  Vox Day is the opposite; very on-point, but if you don't have sufficient context, you may not get what he's talking about, or you may think that he's way out in left field (or right field, really, although obviously that's not the expression.)  He's not, but his style is to not wait on those who can't follow him.  My 8th grade algebra teacher used to say flippantly that step-skippers were going to hell, but for most, reading Vox Day feels like reading math problems where he's simply not showing his work.  I'd maybe recommend starting with his older World Net Daily columns, and then coming back to his blog after you feel like your grounding in Dissident Right topics is sufficient that you can actually follow him.

Of course, the godfathers of dissident right political thought are John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer.  Both of them have such a large body of work that I'm not sure where to recommend that you start, though.  I actually became more familiar with them after reading people who followed in their wake, honestly, so clearly they're not essential since their pioneering stuff has permeated and in many ways been the foundation of what actually passes for Real Right wing thought.

Anyway, after all that, we can talk political and social topics and be sufficiently on the same page as to what the landscape looks like that we can actually have a shot at a decent discussion.