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More from @thepalmerworm

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Mar 30

🧵Why Classical Education Is Not Enough:
Jefferson’s Vision, Containment & the
Forgotten Foundation of Constitutional Liberty ©️

The American Founders, especially Thomas Jefferson, understood that public education was not a luxury, nor a neutral civic service. It was the metaphysical infrastructure of a free Republic. It was designed to form the kind of person capable of self-government: morally anchored, intellectually disciplined, and able to perceive truth as something real, knowable, and binding. Jefferson called for the cultivation of “enlightened citizens” not to celebrate vague liberty or license, but to prepare individuals to discern, uphold and defend the moral and constitutional order of a principled, self-governing society.

Liberty was not a feeling. It was a responsibility and education was the instrument of forming the soul capable of carrying that responsibility.

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The American Founders, especially Thomas Jefferson, understood that public education was not a luxury, nor a neutral civic service. It was the metaphysical infrastructure of a free Republic. It was designed to form the kind of person capable of self-government: morally anchored, intellectually disciplined, and able to perceive truth as something real, knowable, and binding. Jefferson called for the cultivation of “enlightened citizens” not to celebrate vague liberty or license, but to prepare individuals to discern, uphold and defend the moral and constitutional order of a principled, self-governing society.

Liberty was not a feeling. It was a responsibility and education was the instrument of forming the soul capable of carrying that responsibility.

3/ State Education Was Designed to Dismantle This Vision

The rise of State-controlled education; beginning in the mid-19th century, was not a corruption of a neutral system, but a deliberate inversion of the Founders’ metaphysical intent. Civic formation was replaced with bureaucratic socialization. Moral realism was replaced with behavioral conditioning. Self-governance was replaced with managed compliance. State education took the external form of civic schooling but reoriented its telos; from forming conscience to engineering obedience. It functioned not to secure liberty, but to neutralize its preconditions.

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the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Mar 30

🧵What Academia Refused to Teach:
A Confession and a Call (text & image©️)

To our professors of law, civics, history and political philosophy:

You have taught many things. You have lectured on Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Rawls. You have assigned The Federalist Papers, taught Aristotle, debated Kant. You have published, peer-reviewed and promoted “civic literacy.”

And yet you have never taught the People this:

That there are two entirely incompatible foundations of law;
one grounded in obligation enforced by sovereign will,
the other grounded in being discerned by sovereign reason.

2/
That Pufendorf and Blackstone gave us law as a structure of control, while Reid and Wilson gave us law as participation in truth.

You did not teach the people that these foundations are not merely theoretical but operational. That one leads to administrative simulation; the other to popular sovereignty grounded in Natural Law. That one creates compliant subjects; the other forms self-governing citizens.

3/ A Generational Failure

You failed to teach this distinction to the generations who came after. And so they entered civic life; good, willing, intelligent, but utterly unequipped to discern the foundation of the Republic they were told to preserve. You gave them theories, but not judgment. You gave them history, but not truth. You gave them language, but not participation.
You gave them the Constitution, but not the soul it depends on. Those generations are owed an apology for what was withheld from them.

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the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Mar 21

🧵The Sound of Logos:
Musical Counterpoint as Metaphysical Contemplation

Well this evening’s research had me dipping back into ‘The Vipers Of Venice’ (Farrell) regarding Descartes & Leibniz. While there I spent far longer in the sections on musical counterpoint than I really had time for and it reminded me just how much I miss conducting and directing ensembles and also how the practise of music as anything other than self expression is anathema to most - even (and this was alien to my experience) in Church music. I grew up singing liturgical settings of Renaissance & Baroque composers; Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria, Bach etc. As a music student I learned to write in their style, according to the laws of counterpoint. The music teachers/lecturers would occasionally reference vague notions of ‘Harmony Of The Spheres’ or music composed ‘To The Glory Of God’, but not one single teacher ever taught the precise correspondence between the formal musical structure; its laws of motion and the metaphysics being mapped in sound. We were taught the compositional laws as ‘just historical rules’ with no reference at all to their profound meaning. This was the entire telos of that music disregarded! So here’s a brief outline of why that lost understanding is so important:

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In the modern mind, music is nearly always equated with expression; a personal, emotional outpouring, a form of self-communication. This assumption is so deeply ingrained that few pause to ask whether music might once have served a radically different purpose. And yet, in the world of sacred polyphony and early counterpoint, music was not about the self at all. It was not self-referential, not emotive in the modern sense and not a vehicle for personality. Instead, it was a structured, formalized, deeply reverent act; a sonic reflection of the created order.

3/
Musical counterpoint, especially as it developed in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, was not merely a compositional technique. It was metaphysics in sound. The composers who mastered it; figures like Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, were not crafting emotional performances; they were engaging in theological architecture. They built sonic cathedrals out of tone, time and harmony. And those cathedrals were designed not for entertainment, but for contemplation, submission to God’s created order and contemplative reflection on the Biblical text being set.

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the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Mar 9

🧵💡
A people cannot rule themselves unless they first understand reality. Without formation in truth, every attempt at self-governance will collapse into the very system it seeks to replace:
‘Once, in a valley surrounded by great mountains, there stood a village called Hollowstead. The people of Hollowstead lived as they always had; planting, harvesting, trading, and speaking in words they had inherited without ever questioning their meaning. They did not wonder why their customs were as they were, nor did they ask who had first shaped their laws. Life simply was, and that was enough.’

2/‘One day, a traveler arrived, a man who had studied the ways of the ancients. He had spent years searching for a people who still knew the old ways of self-rule, those who had not forgotten how to govern themselves by truth rather than whim. Seeing the village’s disorder; their dependence on rulers who neither understood nor cared for them; he resolved to teach them self-governance. He stood in the village square and spoke:
“You are not ruled by necessity, nor by fate. Your laws should not be dictated by distant lords. You can rule yourselves, if only you remember how.”

3/‘The people listened politely, for they were a kind people, but when the traveler finished, they looked at each other in confusion.

“Who would make our laws if not the rulers?” one asked.
“How would we know right from wrong?” said another.
“But we have always done things this way,” muttered an elder.
“If the rulers did not govern, would not chaos follow?”

The traveler saw their faces clouded with uncertainty. They did not reject his words with malice; they simply could not comprehend them. Their entire way of thinking had been shaped within a world where self-rule was unimaginable. The idea of truth existing beyond their customs was foreign to them, and so, unable to recognize it, they let it pass through their minds like mist through trees.’

open.substack.com/pub/thepalmerw…

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the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Mar 4

🧵James Wilson🔥🫡🇺🇸🔥
Thank you Roberta Bayer - pleased to have found your work!Roberta sets out here what I have been repeatedly sharing on this platform for over a year - and she’s a proper faculty scholar, a real academic - so there!😜

2/ The function of anti-realist philosophy in the academy was purposed for epistemic containment, serving Mercantile & Statist power consolidation which needed to ensure the eradication, thereafter, prevention of The People attaining or even desiring Self Governance. The fact that to this day (and with increasing zeal) we have academics and ‘thought leaders’ defending and lauding the philosophies predicated on skepticism (& its many derivations) which actively undermine and subvert popular sovereignty and self governance is not a mere intellectual curio or ideological difference of ‘opinion’. It is the destruction of the fabric of society in the American Constitutional Republic. It is tactical warfare of the deepest kind - as Founder and Framer; Supreme Court Justice James Wilson well understood. I have repeatedly presented this analysis and I can only hope that like a message in a bottle, the analysis I’ve posted on here through the past year and its implications and consequences I’ve dedicated my Fable Series to illustrating do, by some miracle, make it onto the desk of someone with the agency at National Level to assist with counter measures for Education at large and at scale.

3/ ‘The practical outcome of assuming that there are no first principles of natural law and reason leads to tyranny, where the “Leaders” of the State determine truth and falsehood for themselves’

This theft of metaphysical & philosophical realism in the educational formation of The West’s young men & women is bearing its full rotten fruit. It was not a mistake, it was an Operation, a multi generational campaign to weaken and subjugate domestic population. If you saw the recent posts of @ConceptualJames on the necessity of young men to act on sound principles and resist ideological collectivist identitarian radicalization - you’ll appreciate the resonance of this excerpt:

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the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Feb 28

🧵I won’t be winning friends with this thread but here goes:

Grassroots community-driven education movements, even when opting out of mainstream public schools, are already primed to reproduce the very ideological subversion they are trying to escape. Why? Because in the main (yes I’m generalizing) the parents, educators, and local leaders behind these efforts have already been intellectually formed by the same Neoplatonic and Nominalist paradigms that corrupted public education in the first place, irrespective of whether they are Faith affiliated or not.

They do not recognize the nature of epistemic war.

They cannot perceive how their own worldview remains captive to the enemy’s metaphysical assumptions.

They believe they are “choosing liberty” when in reality, they are re-enacting the same ideological capture in a different framework.

Even when they “opt out,” they remain prisoners of the very system they are resisting; because they are still using its methods, its content, and its assumptions about reality.

2/ WHY LOCALIZED “ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION”
WILL REMAIN TRAPPED IN ELITE CAPTURE

Parents & Local Leaders Have Already Been Formed
by the Enemy’s Intellectual System:

The majority of parents and grassroots education leaders do not recognize the epistemic war they are inside of. Even when rejecting “wokeness” and “progressivism,” they still fundamentally accept the deeper structures of Nominalism, Constructivism, and Neoplatonic mysticism that inform modern education. They assume that “Classical Education” or “Christian Homeschooling” is an escape, when they too, have in varying degrees, been built upon the same foundational errors that led to modern ideological corruption. Even “conservative” and “traditional” education movements will continue producing epistemically compromised citizens who may be able to uphold “tradition/heritage” yet are unable to sustain self-governance.

Currently there is much within the cant of both Tradition & Heritage which is being subtly and deceptively co-opted to Technocratic State Power consolidation by stealth. This is working fast to corral the demoralized population, desperate for anti woke and anti communist solutions in addition to fellowship with others desiring a renewal of hope & optimism in the face of so much hostility and destruction. Yes, I’ve been listening carefully to the ARC sessions posted online so far. It’s quite something listening to words that I so long to hear, then all of a sudden a quick “wait…..what…??!!” as the speaker/interviewee drops a call to action which utterly negates self governance and popular sovereignty under natural law.

3/ Laypeople Rely on Institutional Approval;
Even When Creating Alternatives

Many parents understandably do not have the philosophical or analytical framework to evaluate whether a given curriculum, methodology, or text is truly aligned with Realitas. They instinctively seek pre-approved curricular materials, choosing content that appears “classical” or “patriotic” but is still infused with the same epistemological distortions that led to the collapse of public education. This means elite ideological capture remains in place, but now under a different brand. Education remains contained within managed ideological boundaries, even as parents believe they have achieved educational sovereignty.

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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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