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the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Sep 16

🧵Liberty, Truth and the Question of Absolutism

Q1.
Isn’t this just imposing one group’s ‘truth’ on everyone else?

A:
No. The argument is not that everyone must agree on every opinion or worldview. A republic only requires agreement on those realities without which liberty itself collapses. For example, if contracts no longer bind, commerce cannot function. If sex is treated as infinitely fluid in law, protections for women and children become meaningless. These are not sectarian impositions; they are conditions without which freedom is impossible.

Q2.
But who decides what counts as a ‘non-negotiable’ truth?

A:
The test is not who shouts loudest, but what realities are required for liberty to exist.

Free speech presupposes that words mean what they say.

Due process presupposes that evidence refers to something outside of power.

Parental rights presuppose that family ties are not just paperwork.

These are not inventions but recognitions and without them, rights reduce to permissions from rulers.

Q3.
Isn’t this still a kind of absolutism?

A:
Relativism does not abolish absolutism - it guarantees it!!

If nothing is anchored, then the strongest faction always gets to impose its definitions. That is the most dangerous absolutism of all, because it hides behind the mask of ‘pluralism’.

Protecting non-manufacturable truths is not tyranny;
it is the safeguard against tyranny.

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the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Sep 5

🧵Competing Christian Interpretations of Rights

Catholic Scholasticism:
Rights are grounded in natural law as participation in the eternal law. Inalienable rights flow from objective human nature as rational creatures ordered to God. Catholic political theology, however, often tied rights to hierarchical mediation (Church and State as dispensers). While America retained this ontological grounding of natural law as participation in the eternal law, it explicitly rejected Catholic political theology and hierarchical mediation of rights - for very specific reasons!!

Protestant Puritan / Theonomic Line:
Rights are not inalienable in the strict sense; they are conditional privileges granted or withdrawn based on covenant obedience. Authority rests in the covenant community (civil and ecclesial), not in the people as individuals. This is the foundation of the ‘Principle of Superiority’ whereby rulers mediate God’s will and people obey. There’s a relationship here to note between Pufendorf’s Principle of Superiority in English Law, upheld by Blackstone, which Founder James Wilson outright rejected due to its incompatibility with American Popular Sovereignty and Self Governance. This is why the UK and Europe, under the Legal Principle of (State) Supremacy, can not fight back against their authoritarian governments in the same way that America can defend itself - IF - its Natural Law origins are understood and enacted. Currently there appears to be much opposition to Americans understanding this, from many vested in a Post Constitutional America.

2/ Continental Enlightenment (Pufendorf, Locke, Hobbes):

Rights are redefined as will or consent. They are no longer tied to final cause or natural law but to contractual arrangements. Inalienable becomes pragmatic shorthand for what cannot be ‘safely’ given up. This is not the grounding of the Declaration.

Scottish Common Sense Realism (Witherspoon, Madison, Adams, Wilson):

Rights are self-evident truths discernible by right reason, grounded in human nature as created by God. They are not permissions, not contracts and not church-mediated. Rights are inalienable precisely because they arise from the essence of man as rational, moral, accountable being (as defined ontologically in Genesis and upheld by St Paul) which no ruler or covenant can erase. Founding Father and Supreme Court Justice James Wilson brought this directly into the U.S. founding.

3/ So Which Interpretation is Correct for the Declaration & Constitution?

The Declaration explicitly states:

‘All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…’

This matches only one lineage; the Common Sense Realist grounding. ‘Created equal’ refers to ontological grounding in human nature, not contractual or covenantal. ‘Endowed by their Creator’ means rights come directly from God to man as man, not via rulers, priests, or contracts. ‘Unalienable’ means these rights are inseparable from human essence (what man is, not what man does or what man has) and not subject to revocation. The Constitution then operationalizes this by vesting sovereignty in the People, not the State or the Church. James Wilson made this explicit:

‘Man is the workmanship of his all perfect Creator; and he is formed for a state of society, as well as for a state of individual existence. From his frame, from his faculties and from his affections, he is evidently destined for both.’ (Collected Works of James Wilson, vol. 1, p. 104).

This is not the Puritan/theonomic ‘conditional rights’ model. It is not the Enlightenment contractarian ‘consent-only’ model and it is not the hierarchical Catholic ‘mediated rights’ model.

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the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Aug 30

1/
Shows the fruits of not teaching this in Education for the past gazillion generations - that the equality declared by the Founders is not an empirical judgment about the present conduct of mankind, nor a reward for demonstrated virtue. Nor a denial of talents and capabilities. It is a recognition of what man is by nature, not of how far he may fall in practice. To say ‘all men are created equal’ is to affirm that even the criminal and the psychopathic possess a human nature that makes them accountable to moral law, endowed with faculties for reason and conscience; even when those faculties are abused or rejected. The corruption of man does not erase his nature; it reveals what happens when that nature is disordered. The Founders held that because all men are equally capable of discerning, and bound to, (Aristotle/Aquinas) Natural Law (God’s Created Order), no one may be deprived of rights without violating the order of creation itself.

2/
The Founders were never naïve about man’s corruption. They lived in an age well acquainted with crime, cruelty and tyranny, and they did not write ‘all men are created equal’ out of romantic idealism. Rather, they drew a sharp line between the ontological ground of equality and the juridical structures needed to secure it. Ontologically, every human being shares the same nature, rational faculties and accountability to (Aristotle/Aquinas) Natural Law. That is what ‘created equal’ declares; there is no natural caste, no inherent superior, no human born with a divine right to command others. But precisely because the Founders recognized that conscience is fragile, will is often disordered and corruption is common, they designed a constitutional order of checks and balances, divided powers and written limits. They knew men could not be trusted to rule as angels, so they created institutions to restrain vice and safeguard liberty. Without this, the strong and unscrupulous will deploy the Noble Lie and always claim a ‘superior right’ to dominate and society collapses into will-to-power. By grounding equality in rerum natura and binding it to lex aeterna, the Founders gave the people a plumbline (my term) that remains true even when conscience falters. The constitutional architecture was their recognition that fallen men require external guardrails to keep the reality of equality from being obliterated by human corruption.

3/
Founder Justice James Wilson saw with absolute clarity that equality had to be defended on two planes; the metaphysical ground of human nature (rerum natura) and the juridical structures of civic order. In his Lectures on Law he argued that ‘all men are, by nature, equal and free’ because each shares the same rational constitution and the same moral faculties bestowed by the Creator. (The targets for crippling by Fichte/Wundtian/Deweyan State/Governemnt Education and constructivist ideologies deployed through that system). This ‘equality’ is not a claim about uniform talents or virtue, but about the common ontological status of every human being. Equality flows from what man is in rerum natura and it remains true even when individuals refuse to exercise reason or conscience rightly.

@CourtenayTurner

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the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Aug 11

🧵The Customer As King - Passivity Of Consuming Information Without Formation

The present public ‘Market appetite and desire appears to be for certainty without responsibility, for ‘Strong leadership’ promising decisive action without requiring individuals to exercise sustained moral reasoning, with the resulting individual agency. The desire I’m observing is for construct-derived collective belonging - not -individual agency. The majority appetite demonstrated is a preference for aligning with a movement’s identity rather than shouldering the weight of sovereign individual agency. Popular sovereignty is psychologically invisible without experience of self-governance and most people can’t imagine what it looks like. Their only reference points (over generations) are hierarchies and managed systems.

When the public is actively calling for ‘strong leadership’ the market delivers; whether in the form of a political strongman, a charismatic influencer, or (now “freed” from federal corruption - but strangely ok with state, district and municipal corruption) an AI governance interface to save the day. Technocracy can present itself as the strong, incorruptible leader, except it’s not a person, it’s an infrastructure. Algorithmic enforcement is marketed as ‘beyond human corruption’ while being fully Programmable by Those Who control The System. But they know we all like consuming and producing so the illusion of democratic means of participation is baked into our consumer access and choice architecture.

2/ The Structural Irony

The Founder’s design presumed a people who wanted to govern themselves, not to be ruled, even benevolently. Today, most view rule by ‘our’ side as the highest achievable form of freedom. “Democratic Freedom” - the onramp to tyranny - as the Founders warned and established the Republic to defend against. This ‘party’ collectivist mindset makes it irrelevant whether the ruling apparatus is ‘hard’ (authoritarian regime) or ‘soft’ (technocratic governance); the citizen’s role has already been reduced to follower/consumer - a subject of a system which their agency is outsourced to and which ‘manages them’ as a utilitarian resource for the owners and architects of The System.

3/ Cognitive Capture - Terraforming Generations

Obviously we’re not dealing with a recent drift or a fixable misunderstanding, - 2020 Convid was not the cause - but just one of the operational enablers of a multi-generational, fully (now) normalized inversion of sovereignty. Bezmenov warned the public - but others who held the line against the cognitive terraforming were warning in prior centuries too and public servants who don’t know the what/how/who/why of that can not uphold and defend their constitution. In the UK, Canada, the other Five Eyes nations and Europe, Popular Sovereignty is not simply rejected it is unknown and worse; inconceivable. It doesn’t appear in civic language, political discourse, or institutional education. It has no living cultural memory except in rare archival form. Authoritarian mediation is assumed to be governance itself. People presume ‘governing’ means electing a party, deferring to leadership, or complying with policy - never exercising sovereign agency directly. Generational continuity has locked it in. Each generation inherits an even more managed public sphere, so outsourcing agency is passed down as normal. What in former generations used to be a wariness of ‘too much government’ is now replaced by fear of ‘not enough government’. The only visible political ‘choice’ being which hierarchy to serve. Left/Right, secular/religious, nationalist/globalist; the model is always a mediated hierarchy. Even (especially) protest movements™️ are structured as leader-led brands (Common Purpose cells) rather than bottom-up governance.

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the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Aug 10

🧵
The Doug Wilson / Moscow, Idaho ‘militarized ecclesial capture’ (MEC) model functions as a form of religious-communitarian authoritarianism that appears hyper-local and biblically grounded, but in its structure and operational logic it is entirely compatible with (and in some respects ideal for) the emerging totalitarian technocracy/networked state paradigm.

In this thread I’ll break this down in a little detail.

2/ The Structural Premise of Militarized Ecclesial Capture

Wilson’s model is not simply ‘church leadership’, it’s a tightly integrated religious authority network that consolidates theological authority, civil authority and economic control in a unified leadership hierarchy. It demands total allegiance to the governing church body, including political and civic obedience framed as spiritual duty. It exercises in-group preference in business, education, housing and local governance; making access to resources contingent on membership loyalty. ‘Militarized’ in this context means disciplined chain of command and strong gatekeeping against ideological dissent.
Intentional strategy to expand territorial and institutional influence - this is not ‘just’ spiritual care.

3/ How It Serves a Networked State Agenda

Pre-Built Social Operating System

The technocratic ‘networked state’ needs pre-organized blocs of compliant citizens who can be mobilized rapidly around centralized commands. Wilson’s model already conditions members to subordinate individual conscience to leadership’s interpretation of God’s will. This reduces friction when external policy directives align with (or can be framed as) ecclesial directives. So if a technocratic directive (e.g., biometric ID enrollment, resource rationing) can be reframed by leadership as a biblical duty, short-circuiting independent moral evaluation, this is potentially just one way in which the MEC model serves technocratic directives.

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the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Aug 6

🧵Ideology as Deployment System🐍

Ideology is not primarily about belief (architecturally it never was), it is about behavioural engineering. It functions not as a truth claim to be evaluated, but as a delivery mechanism for reprogramming how individuals perceive reality, authority and themselves. Ideologies serve as deployment systems; they install conceptual frameworks that override inherited metaphysical assumptions and gradually recondition populations into new ontological operating modes. ‘Unburdening from what has been’. They’re demolition systems - the mechanisms of Solve et Coagula for The Great Work requiring both Chaos and the calculated Order to be installed in its wake.

2/
Every dominant ideology in modern discourse; whether political, cultural, spiritual, or technological, performs this function. Its goal is not to persuade through reasoned argument, but to embed a new structure of perception. It does this by saturating language, media, institutions and interpersonal dynamics with a vocabulary of crisis, grievance, liberation, or innovation. The target is not just opinion, but orientation; disabling orientation and navigation in order to reshape what the individual considers real, good and possible. Population control at scale and management of the masses by the few.

3/
Once the ideological frame is accepted (even, perhaps especially, passively) the individual becomes governable through it. The new framework redefines moral obligation, reassigns social roles and reinterprets‼️causality. Most importantly, it redefines man himself as e.g. a victim, a threat, a project, or a product - roles assumed within narratives. This prepares the public to embrace increasingly managed systems of control; governance not based on fixed principles, but on engineered consequences.

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More from @thepalmerworm

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

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