Q&A Friday #6: Answering Reader Questions

Prosecuting liberals for political reasons and can America survive without God?

Back in the day, when I ran Right Wing News, I did over 100 Q&A Fridays. Those consisted of me giving the audience a chance to ask me just about anything they wanted to know and since people seemed to love asking questions back then, I thought I’d see if people enjoyed doing the same thing on Culturcidal. After giving the audience a chance to ask questions yesterday, here are the ones I answered.

“Should Republicans retaliate in the courts for the unfair criminalization of Donald Trump?” – Ann H

On the one hand, no one should be “above the law,” even the president. So, if Donald Trump or any POTUS, Biden included (and yes, I think he deserves to at least be investigated with an eye toward prosecution on bribery charges over his entanglement with his son’s sketchy activities) breaks the law, they should have to face justice for it.

On the other hand, some of what’s going on with Trump is clearly driven by pure politics. For example, in my opinion, not a single charge that’s been brought against him in New York would have ever been brought against a prominent Democrat. When you see a state controlled by Trump’s political enemies changing the law, coming up with novel legal theories, and applying the law in new ways to go after him, it’s unquestionably a political effort.

It would be the equivalent of Texas trying to put Obama in jail for 5 years for jaywalking. It’s ridiculous and those cases, at a minimum, should be universally condemned. Of course, instead, Democrats have all embraced them and Harris is partially running on them in her presidential campaign.

Additionally, it’s not just Trump. Unlike some other people on the Right, I found the January 6 riots to be an appalling disgrace, and I absolutely want the people involved punished, but it hasn’t escaped my notice that liberal rioters all over America were allowed to do the same kind of thing with minimal punishment.

Similarly, we can’t forget how rioters were being given a free pass in many cases by liberal DAs while some of the same rotten prosecutors were trying to put people like Kyle Rittenhouse and the McCloskeys in jail for defending themselves in extremely threatening situations:

So, this is a problem that goes beyond Trump, and it definitely needs to be addressed because a highly politicized, two-tier justice will DESERVEDLY destroy respect for the law.

The best way to address that would be for liberals to show some human decency and make it clear this is unacceptable. That is highly unlikely to happen. The next thing to do ideally would be to address it with new laws or by removing bad actors.

If neither of those work, the next step is to start playing the same game. Unfortunately, often the only thing liberals understand is, “It can happen to me, too,” and that might be the way we have to go. That’s a dangerous road to go down, but the reality is we’re already on a dangerous road and if liberals refuse to get off of it, we may have no other option.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this John Adams quote vis á vis attempts to resolve political corruption via the ballot box or enforcement of laws.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” – Keith Cook

If anyone questions whether Adams was right, look around you today and you’ll see what he was driving at.

We can have a constitution, but if judges ignore it or deliberately misinterpret it, it loses much of its value.

We can have laws, but if the government refuses to enforce them or selectively enforces them, it limits their use.

We can elect politicians, but if their priority is getting rich and catering to powerful interests, not looking out for their constituents, nothing will change for the better.

When you’re dealing with an honest man, you can legitimately seal a deal with a handshake. When you’re dealing with a crook, even an ironclad contract may not be enough.

There are 1,000 ways for people to cheat, put their thumb on the scale or deliberately harm their countrymen while pretending that they’re not responsible for it. The cure for that ultimately isn’t a new law or making the government more powerful, it’s having moral and religious people who are genuinely trying to do the right thing.

Question via email: “…The “woke” world is full of categories. In God’s world, there are two categories. Believers and non-believers.

Division can be good if it leads to wisdom. The prevailing philosophy of the enemy in the world is “might makes right!”

How do we achieve love for one another in a world that believes in evolution without God? How does a godless evolution - the survival of the fittest – promote the first principles, edicts, and precepts for the wisdom we need? --- No matter the movement or evolution they or we seek?

Even the church has suffered from this. I believe it was Voltaire who said, “Ever since God created man in his own image, man has tried to return the favor.” – Ron

Back in the late 1800s, Friedrich Nietzsche rather famously said, “God is dead.” There’s much controversy over Nietzsche’s actual religious views, although the general consensus seems to be that he was an atheist. Yet and still, Nietzsche feared what would happen to humanity if we gave up a belief in God:

Nietzsche worried that people would become nihilists or apply religious zeal to lesser matters (cough, cough… liberalism, global warming, gender issues, etc., etc.)

While I doubt Nietzsche would have liked this comparison, his take on things reminds me a bit of this quote from Blaise Pascal:

If the question is, “How do we pull together in a world where religion is dying off,” I don’t think we do short of a dictatorship where we’re forced to at gunpoint.

Religion isn’t the only unifying force in society, but it is one of the more powerful ones and worse yet, when religion recedes, almost every form of radicalism, nonsense, lunacy, and degeneracy gets a boost. People who don’t share morals and don’t look at the world the same way are much more likely to splinter than pull together.

Question: “Where do you stand on the subject of (Jungian) synchronicity?” – Richard Beyer

Admittedly, this is an extremely niche question, but as a psych major who thinks Jung had a lot of interesting ideas, indulge me on this one.

First of all, you’re probably wondering what synchronicity is:  

A key signature concept in Jung’s vision of the world, synchronicity was defined by Jung as an acausal connecting principle, whereby internal, psychological events are linked to external world events by meaningful coincidences rather than causal chains. While of profound theoretical significance, anecdotal clinical evidence served as primary descriptive examples in Jung’s writing. Perhaps the most well-known case involved a patient’s dream of being given a piece of gold jewelry in the shape of a scarab beetle being told as a knocking on Jung’s consulting room window drew his attention to a scarabaeoid beetle (a rose-chafer) seeking entry. Jung caught the beetle, handed it to the patient which had a positive, transformative impact on the case, as it broke through her defensive rationalism according to Jung.

Although this is connected to Jungian archetypes and Jung’s belief in a collective unconscious, both of which I think may have validity, the concept of synchronicity seems very shaky to me.

Setting aside the fact that coincidences do just happen; expectations, associations, and where people are focusing their attention have a great deal of impact on what people see. In other words, if you’re thinking about buying a Tesla, is it a coincidence that you noticed three of them on the way to work today or do you usually pass Tesla’s on the road, but just don’t notice them?

I fully believe that there are many things happening in the world that we cannot fully see, understand, or comprehend, but I’m dubious that this is one of them.

“Is there a favorite website that you visit every day?” – Ann H

Let’s see, setting aside the Substack newsletters I follow, my most visited websites (not just politics) would include:

Bongino Report: Strong news site.

ChatGPT: I do ask the AI there a lot of questions.

Daily Wire: Great news site.

Drudge Report: Apparently, Drudge hates Trump’s guts so much it has turned the site to the left-of-center, but I still reflexively check it because it has some interesting links.

Facebook: I generally dislike them, and it feels like the site is slowly dying, but I still have friends on there.

Hot Air: I have friends there; I’ve written there before and I like their news.

Instagram: I mostly check out different fitness influencers.

BJ Penn: Mixed martial arts news.

X: It’s so much better since Elon took over.

YouTube: There are a few favorite creators I like to check.

Zero Hedge: I enjoy the economic news.

Question (I cheated on this a bit. It was something I ran across on an acquaintance’s Facebook page, it was asking a question and I thought the response would be interesting.)

Okay, I will explain it like you're in kindergarten. Their business is their responsibility and your rent is your responsibility. They can run their business as they see fit just like you can run your life as you see fit. If you can't pay your rent, they don't have a problem, you have a problem and you need to fix it. Even a kindergartener could understand that.

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