Robert Skylight

Retired City Attorney. The light of wisdom.

[Robert Skylight @robert_skylight]

@MarcoFoster_ There’s gotta be some very sad country song about these smooth brained musicians.

[Slimfit @iSlimfit]

She didn’t lie at all 😂

[Robert Skylight @robert_skylight]

@SwipeWright Pretty sure Candace Owens knows.

[Robert Skylight @robert_skylight]

@PeteButtigieg And yet your party hands out, at the expense of hard workers, billions of free stuff to illegals for votes.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

Next time you deal with the hassle of TSA in an airport, remember that we have it because of a unique innovation in human history developed within the wholly unique Palestinian Culture, which invented politically motivated jet hijacking as its most enduring contribution.

[Robert Skylight @robert_skylight]

@GuyTalksFinance Low mortgage payment with opportunity to expand. This is not a problem.

[jay plemons @jayplemons]

I’m going to blow your mind. Are you ready? Hold on tight!

Dr. Oz and Nick Shirley just walked a single block in NYC and found double-digit pharmacies.

Dr. Oz: “I don’t think you could go anywhere in America and think this was normal unless there was a cash cow business feeding it.”

Nick Shirley: “All these people need is a medical beneficiary number, and that is worth more than any credit card that a senior can give anybody.”

Dr. Oz: “Some of the drugs in these pharmacies cost more than a car. Think about that.”

What the hell is actually going on here?

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Alexis de Tocqueville – Redeeming the French:)
The Frenchman who understood America better than most Americans, and Europe better than it has ever understood itself.

1. In 1831, a young French aristocrat sails to America ostensibly to study the prison system. What he actually does is cross the civilizational divide – and spends nine months trying to understand why America works. Democracy in America is the result: the most penetrating analysis of the Anglo-Saxon tradition ever written, by someone who grew up in the other one.

2. What he sees in America is Locke and Smith and Burke implemented in practice. A society that built freedom from the bottom up — townships, voluntary associations, local institutions — rather than from the top down by enlightened decree. Americans, he observes, join together constantly, spontaneously, without waiting to be organized: to build a road, start a church, solve a local problem. This horizontal self-organization is the immune system of a free society. It is precisely what the French Enlightenment systematically destroyed by concentrating everything in the state.

3. But Tocqueville sees the danger from inside the success. Democracy has its own pathology – not the guillotine this time, something quieter and harder to resist: the tyranny of the majority, the slow flattening of excellence into mediocrity, the pressure to conform that needs no secret police because it operates through social disapproval alone, without a single revolutionary. This is the diagnosis nobody wanted to hear in 1835. It is an accurate description of 2026.

4. France keeps producing the individuals who see clearly. Montesquieu looked at England and understood what France was missing. Bastiat understood markets better than most Englishmen. Tocqueville understood America better than most Americans. Raymond Aron understood the Soviet threat while Sartre was still praising it. All of them largely ignored at home. All of them vindicated everywhere else.

5. The pattern is consistent: France produces the diagnostic genius, then ignores the diagnosis in favor of the next beautiful abstraction. Great individuals. Wrong civilizational operating system. The Platonic gravitational pull is too strong – the addiction to the elegant idea overrides the evidence of the actual result. Which is why the tradition that saved the world kept being built in Edinburgh and London and Philadelphia, not in Paris.

6. Tocqueville’s concept of civil society is his most practical contribution: the network of voluntary associations — churches, clubs, local governments, independent institutions — that stand between the individual and the state. This is the buffer that prevents soft despotism. Destroy it — by making people dependent on the state for everything, by atomizing individuals until they have no horizontal relationships left — and the citizen becomes what the state always wanted: alone, dependent, and grateful.

7. Soft despotism is Tocqueville’s most prophetic concept – and the most precise description of where the West currently stands. Not the guillotine. Something quieter: a power that doesn’t tyrannize but infantilizes, that covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, that reduces citizens to a herd of timid animals of which the government is the shepherd. It doesn’t break your will. It renders it unnecessary. He wrote this in 1835. He was describing the European Union, the administrative state, the therapeutic culture, the regulatory apparatus that decides what you eat, say, heat your home with, and think about your children’s education.
Soft despotism is what Rousseau looks like when he wins slowly – not through revolution but through form-filling. And Tocqueville’s warning, the one nobody wanted to hear, was this: it gets less soft with time. The infantilized citizen, stripped of civil society, dependent on the state, no longer knows how to resist. At that point the softness is no longer necessary…

[Robert Skylight @robert_skylight]

@Jason @StephenM Give us the full scoop. Are they activist judges?

[Sunny @sunnyright]

Ben Sasse's tumors have shrunk by 80% thanks to a new cancer drug.

[Amy Reichert @amyforsandiego]

Whomp. Whomp.

[FBI Director Kash Patel @FBIDirectorKash]

The only thing worse than MS NOW’s garbage rebrand is their reporting - all false except one thing - I was at the White House, true, and the fake news will find out why soon

[Scott Jennings @ScottJenningsKY]

The difference between the two parties: Governor Tim Walz used his political power to keep an illegal alien who abused a 10 year old girl in Minnesota. @SecRubio used his to deport him.

[Robert Skylight @robert_skylight]

@RealJamesWoods He’s very thin skinned. Told too many lies to remember them all.

[Robert Skylight @robert_skylight]

@AngelaBelcamino Too many psycho Dems. Can’t overcome their filibuster. He’ll probably let it pass without signature.

[Robert Skylight @robert_skylight]

@HPluckrose It can be annoying but much worse if have to constantly wait for a server to come by.

[Robert Skylight @robert_skylight]

@ScottPresler No problem if they bring their own electricity generation and reuse/recycle water to max extent.

[Robert Skylight @robert_skylight]

@GavinNewsom Governor Gaslight Newsom

[Robert Skylight @robert_skylight]

@ThePhysicsMemes Me when I’m really hungry.

[Robert Skylight @robert_skylight]

@SenecaSpeaks21 Simply redefine the crime and stop reporting, and then pretend crime is down.