In their defense, a judge probably would try and answer basic legal questions to support a defendant who for some reason didn’t have a lawyer to ask, unless that defendant had already gone out of their way to antagonise the judge.

Sadly, I suspect there’s a lot of overlap between people who are representing themselves and people who have annoyed the judge

You can’t use reason to argue someone out of a position they didn’t use reason to get into.

The basic premise is that they are itching so bad to be persecuted, but are lower middle class white people. They look at their lives and see that the thing oppressing them the most is the state, but since they’re law-abiding citizens who believe fully that if you act lawfully you can get what you want, there must be a lawful way to get out of state oppression.

The next step is to construct an arbitrary system of belief that magically explains your view of the world is correct, and Christianity has already done the work of frying their brain into thinking this is reasonable.

Note that at no point do they even consider that there should be no reason the oppressive state (whether that is true or not is irrelevant) doesn’t simply continue to opress them during their attempt at liberation, because the state oppressing someone is something that happens to people who do unlawful things, and they’re not doing anything unlawful, according to their belief system.