"I hear you. If Phelps were, in fact, a "plant" or operative, what would he do differently?"
This is an excellent question. The main enemy of a Free America is the Hard Left. They began with the Soviet Communists. There has been some evolution in the Hard Left, especially the Long Term Strategy worked out in 1957-1960, as explained by Golitsyn, who was a ranking KGB officer at the time and observed the strategy being worked out, before he defected to the US in 1961.
We all know the Hard Left has proved unable to compete with the US in economic development or technology.
In many areas, however, the Hard Left excels, including deception, subversion, and terror. The operating principles of the Soviet Communists, explained so well in Anton Suvorov's books, Inside the GRU and Inside Spetsnaz, have become incorporated into the Hard Left over time, including terrorists.
I was born and raised a Liberal Democrat. Though I had a genetic predisposition to see things sensibly (ie, less like a Liberal than those around me), my political turning point came in the mid-1980s, when I became friends with a guy i worked with in Silicon Valley who grew up in the Soviet Union. A frequent line of his to me (in reference to politics) was, "Don't be naiive."
I was raised the same way. My mom was one of the Naders' Raiders, and she taught me to hug trees-- literally. But she loved to hear Governor Reagan on the radio. That led her out of it, eventually. But she still hates to see cut roses. "They're dead."
I remember in high school: my first brush with a liberal lie was a convoluted circle: facism was at the bottom and communism was at the top. Both right and left supposedly interested with both in a circle.
And the teacher, flaming leftist though he was, he was honest enough to admit that facism, while 'driven by the right', blended with socialism. I asked, "Then why is it a circle? If facism is socialism, it's on the left too, right?" "No," he said, "it's driven by the right." That later re-surfaced from forgotten things when someone brought up the fact here on the FR that Nazis are left wing.
The second encounter with a left wing lie was hearing the head honcho of education talk about how we should passively resist war, like Ghandi. I was fortunate enough to have had experiences with bullies. [They're trying to take that off the ciriculum in schools now, I hear.] Keeping bullies in mind, I realized that you can't resist passively in totalitarian regimes-- only in a free country.
My third encounter was the Congressional Bank scandal. At the time, I concluded that both parties were hopelessly corrupt [note that that Bush's father saying "Read my lips"].
And then came the information age. I got in it early, listening to Weyrich on NET. For some reason, I needed to see it on TV at first, not trusting radio yet. When I heard about partial birth abortion, that was the last straw.
Then I entered the FR prior to registration. What a time that was. Foul mouth leftists were all over the place, trying to disrupt it. I was having fun. But a lot of people were run off.
Still awake? Hehehe!