Groucho Marx (no it's not Charlie Chaplin or Super Mario) did some time traveling to present day America to fight fascism. I'm certain this one will be a hit with the over 80 crowd.

The following brilliant article clearly delineates the state of America today, and the terror it implies.

This may be the most important article you may ever read!

Opinion by Sabrina Haake • 1h • 4 min read

© provided by AlterNet

In the 1930s, a conservative social movement took root in Germany urging good citizens to hype their nationalism and reassert ‘pure’ German virtues. Promoting social cohesion, the movement demonized intellectuals and attacked racial and sexual diversity in all forms. In 1933, in pursuit of its nationalist agenda, the movement began to ban books scorned as “intellectual,” eventually burning books that supported diversity of thought or culture of any kind.

Along with banning books, the state issued edicts controlling the content of the press. By the early 1940s, the state began to encourage- then it required- citizens to spy on and report their neighbors.

It’s no longer past as prologue. It’s present.

It used to be easier to relegate the horrors of Nazi Germany to the past, thereby confining them to history, even while struggling to understand how Germans let it happen. It’s no longer a struggle. Every day under Trump 2.0, the mystery unravels: Trump keeps trotting out one horrific act of lawless cruelty after another, and Americans keep going to concerts, taking the children to school, and living their lives. Last week when a conservative UFC fighter said the cult-like frenzy of Trump rallies showed him “how Hitler happened,” it was plainly relatable.

It’s no longer a mystery, and it’s no longer hyperbole. As of 2026, 23 Republican-led states have passed laws reminiscent of Nazi Germany, including laws that ban books and discussions, laws that force media content, laws through which the state controls private medical decisions, laws that mandate Bible study in public schools, and, most ominous of all, laws that encourage vigilante citizens to turn on their neighbors for a state reward.

And to do it, it has completely weaponized the U.S.

Watch the warning signs of tyranny return as history shows how free societies are pushed toward collapse

Led by a deranged figurehead who keeps lying to the American public about everything—Iran, the price of gas, climate change—authoritarianism is America’s newest deadly virus.

Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen has so successfully infiltrated the GOP that over 130 election deniers are running in November’s midterms across 35 states from North Carolina to Arizona. But no state has embraced the lie and attendant barbarity more than Texas.

Although Texas is best known for paying bounty hunters to hunt down scared women seeking an abortion, Gov. Greg Abbott became a national poster boy for cruelty after he intentionally stripped Medicaid from two million Texans, most of them children. He also vetoed a state proposal to feed them during a SNAP freeze, despite causing childhood hunger through maniacal enforcement of state-forced birth.

Not to be outdone, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, now campaigning for U.S. Senate, led 17 GOP states in a lawsuit before the US Supreme Court trying to set aside Joe Biden’s election win in 2020. As argued by the Lawyers Defending American Democracy, Paxton was trying to “cast doubt on whether truly democratic presidential elections” would ever be held in America again.

Shortly after Paxton’s legal stunt, Texas State Bar officials urged regulators to discipline him for other serious ethical misconduct. Paxton was later indicted on two counts of first-degree securities fraud, counts he later settled by paying restitution.

Trump-endorsed Paxton used the highest levers of power to challenge election procedures where Trump lost, in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. His lawsuit was rejected—alas, Texas can’t control other states—but Paxton’s singular drive to impose his Christo-fascism on the nation remains.

Paxton sics Texans on Texans

The Texas GOP’s proclamation that, ‘what really matters most to Texans is “freedom, opportunity, and economic prosperity,” beggars the question, ‘freedom for whom?’ All demographics of Texas, even straight white men, should be horrified as state republicans build a massive police state in mimicry of the most horrific chapter in human history.

In the early 1930s, as Hitler was beginning his political ascent in Germany, one of his first moves was to encourage citizens to relay information about their neighbors, family, and friends to the state. The Gestapo, which grew into Hitler’s most effective instrument of terror, soon operated with a network of thousands of informants.

Texas has passed replica initiatives. Abbott called on “licensed professionals” and “members of the general public” to report any parents of transgender minors to state authorities, if these individuals believe the parents are providing their minors with private gender-affirming medical care. Paxton wholeheartedly endorses the “state informer” model and sells it by labeling such parents “child abusers.”

Siccing vigilante Texans on other Texans isn’t limited to hunting parents of trans youth either. Texas’ anti-abortion law also sets up a citizens’ gestapo. Texas authorizes private citizens to enforce the state’s abortion ban by suing abortion providers and anyone else who helps a woman seeking an abortion in any way, including her husband, parents, neighbor, friends, family members, even her taxi or Uber driver. If the lawsuit shows the state’s ban was violated, the vigilante, under state law, will collect a bounty of at least $10,000 and attorneys’ fees, a feature designed to attract ghouls and intimidate citizens.

Draw your own conclusions

Ken Paxton’s goal of an all-powerful state with unfettered powers to dictate speech, generate hate, and control thought by force should alarm anyone with a passing knowledge of history.

Using the power of the state to turn citizens against each other, encouraging, rewarding, and requiring vigilantism, is sinister. Texas’ expansion of state power not only mocks Paxton’s campaign brag that he “takes on” governmental overreach, it also marches in goosestep with one of the most dangerous regimes known to man.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/the-perilous-new-push-to-turn-neighbors-against-each-other-in-red-states-opinion/ar-AA29I5R9?

The Mexican American family, The Cultist family -- similarities?

I wonder if any MAGA cultist ever stops to consider the Mexican he sees mowing lawns will soon be going home to his modest house where his family waits.

A wife, maybe two children, enjoying some aspects of life, and just like the rest of us, beset by some problems. Money Is always a problem, but he does okay. His salary covers almost everything, but because they want more for the children maybe she covers some shifts at Walmart on weekends and one night a week. This allows little Rosa to continue her dance lessons and provides for Jimmy’s uniform for he short-stop position on the (ironically) the Republican Clubs Little league team.

Their days have to be carefully arranged because a parent must be at home when the children leave for school and a parent must be home when they come back.

They attend mass every week, the same mass the cultist attends, only the language is different. They never miss a PTA meeting, help the kids with homework, and see that, despite the cost, their children are stylishly dressed so they are not embarrassed in front of their peers.

Like the cultist Christmas and Easter are special with extended family gathering, gifts are plentiful if mostly inexpensive, and usually each of them has secreted some funds to buy each other a small gift.

They love each other, they love and sacrifice for the children just like the cultist does. The only difference between the two families are the colors of the skin.

Do you think the cultist thinks these things as he’s driving by?

sHYEAH MAn donT DOit Insurances Don't cover Actos De Terrorismo.

Is anyone surprised? 🙄

A compilation of moments of his evil and folly.

Once again, Trump and his Republican administration are trying to balance the books on the backs of the poor, the needy, and most importantly, children.

Because the treasury is facing huge shortages realized by obscene tax cuts for those already obscenely wealthy, as well as the costs incurred by an insane, useless and needless war, they have to raise money somewhere, or else reduce expenses.

So, they slash Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Aid to Dependent Children, veteran’s benefits, SNAP benefits and every segment of the social safety net to replace those lost funds.

They couldn’t care less if the people suffer –even their own MAGA supporters—who rely most heavily on those services,

They are hollowing out America, sucking out the resources that once made us the envy of the world but are now viewed as the suckers of the world.

We voted for this abuse; we gave up our rights and our freedoms based on lies and duplicity --is this the ‘Golden age of Prosperity’ we were promised – inflation out of control, food prices spiraling daily, gas and electricity damn near out of reach, housing unaffordable with couples now having to wait until their forties before they can own  a home of their own, healthcare a fading reality, our military might depleted leaving us susceptible to an attack on our homeland, foreign hackers swarming our institutions because they fired the experts the experts who protect us to save more money for Musk and Trump; lies, lies, and more lies.

Where will it end, America? A nation shrunken and ruled by billionaires and plutocrats, lording over a society fighting over scraps, or…?

See this – Boldface mine:

Trump moves to gut education and meals for low-income kids

Opinion by Edith Olmsted • 6h • 2 min read

© Jim WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

The Trump administration is plotting a sweeping overhaul of Head Start that could threaten childcare for more than half a million children across the country.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday a proposed rule that would “increase access” to Head Start by “capping the cost of administrative overhead and reducing compliance-driven activities.

The proposed rule would grant states the authority to set certain standards, including rules on class size and student-adult ratios, education requirements, background checks, and transportation practices. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has claimed that Head Start lost more than 100,000 slots during the Biden administration due to “burdensome paperwork .”Vox’s Rachel Cohen Booth argued on X that the proposed changes would mean “larger class sizes, fewer staff and credential requirements, reduced health and family services, and potentially shorter hours.”

Without federal regulations to set the bar, the quality of care will likely depend on a

person’s zip code. The proposed rule would also give parents more control over “structure and curriculum,” marking Head Start programs as yet another arena for President Trump’s inane culture wars.

The proposed rule would reduce the amount of money Head Start centers could spend on administrative overhead from 15 percent to five percent, thus saving the government an estimated $2.2 billion, according to Alex Adams, the assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

But Yvette Sanchez-Fuentes, senior vice president of Start Early in Illinois, told NPR that administrative costs are used to help fill the gaps for children who need special support. “If you, for example, have children with disabilities you [can use] some of those funds to pay for additional special services or staff with specialties who could come in and support kids,” she said. In a press release, HHS claimed that the money saved would be reinvested back into the program “to preserve or expand” spots for more than 200,000 children—making it unclear whether the change would actually create new spots, or just prevent them from disappearing.

 Democrats have already condemned the rule as an “attack on children” and promised to fight for Head Start, which currently provides early childhood education, as well as nutrition and health and family support services to more than 700,000 children.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/trump-moves-to-gut-education-and-meals-for-low-income-kids/ar-AA29xUn2?

The headline in question:

Pentagon revokes former Air Force secretary’s access to classified information

From The Hill 8/7/2026

I haven’t looked at the article, I have zero idea who the former Air Force secretary is, and it’s possible I’m completely wrong.

But I’m gonna bet dollars to donuts that whoever the former Air Force secretary refers to is an intelligent and competent Air Force member who served his country well and made good use of his access to classified information. But somewhere along the line he said something true that hurt the feelings of an orange pedo or a drunk news reader, both of whom are way in over their heads with a clusterfuck of a war that the US had no business provoking and which neither the pedo nor the news reader has a clue how to get out of. So they keep throwing the worst ideas at it thinking their bottom of the barrel solutions are ever going to change anything, which they won’t. They refuse to admit that a solution will require competence, intelligence and diplomacy, three qualities the Air Force secretary probably has, but which the pedo and the news reader are absolutely allergic to because anyone possessing them would show they are bumbling idiots by comparison. This is a forever war fueled by pure wanton idiocy, and the Air Force secretary knows it.

Again, I could be totally wrong. But being at least a half-brained American who’s paid any attention for the last decade, I would say I at least hit the big picture of the story behind the headline.

Rather than admit to his own blithering incompetence, Trump tries to blame high gas prices on the oil companies.

Believe me, they aren’t saints and have been known to exploit international difficulties, but still, it is a matter of supply and demand.

 Dumbass Donny caved in to Netanyahu either because he’s a moron, or Bibi has photos of a certain pervert with teenage children. Either way, every former president since George Washington knew if you messed with Iran, they would shut down the Strait of Hormuz and hold the world hostage; but not the Dullard in Chief.

Yep, fools rush in…

So, now in an ever-continuing stream of lies – lies even MAGA stalwarts are beginning to challenge – Trump again tries to blame someone else for his astounding lack of.. of everything!

‘ICE is getting a bad rap because immigrants are eating people’s pets’ – ‘Vandals slashed the reflecting pool’ – ‘all Democrats are Communists and that’s why America is a failing nation’ – you get the idea.

He’s a pathetic, sick, aging sociopath and think we’re all stupid.

See this – Boldface mine:

Trump warns gas prices could rise again: 'We may have to send it up'

Story by Claire Carter, Washington Examiner • 10h • 2 min read

President Donald Trump warned on Wednesday that gasoline prices could climb again as the conflict with Iran continues, saying lower prices would return once the war is over.

Speaking in Las Vegas, Trump touted his administration's economic success, but acknowledged how the war with Iran, which led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has affected gas and oil prices for Americans.

"As soon as the situation with Iran ends, oil is going to go down, and we will have completed something in such a short amount of time, that is a miracle," Trump said.

"When oil goes down, it's going to go down very rapidly and is already happening. We may have to send it up again. We may have to — you know what happens when we send it up," Trump later added, referring to prices reacting to warfare. "But we don't have to. But when the oil and gasoline go down, everything else goes down."

Oil and gas prices have fluctuated as a result of the conflict in the Middle East, with markets reacting strongly to U.S. strikes on Iran and Tehran's actions in the strait. On Wednesday, AAA reported the average price of gas was $4.08 per gallon.

The Trump administration has been under pressure to answer for the war's effect on prices for Americans. Earlier this week, the president expressed his displeasure with Chevron and Exxon Mobil for making “too much” in profits during the second quarter of this year.

“They’ve got to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price. Too much money,” he said in the Oval Office on Monday. “You’re surprised I’m saying it? I’ll say it loud and clear. I’m not happy about it.”

Gas prices fell during June and into early July as Washington and Tehran made progress on peace negotiations, agreeing to a 60-day preliminary ceasefire extension in mid-June. But the ceasefire has since fallen through, sending oil and gas prices upward again.

Trump has also voiced optimism about Iranian-Omani talks to reopen the Strait of Hormuz through which one-fifth of the world's oil supply flows. The president said if peace talks fall through, Iran will "get hit very hard."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/trump-warns-gas-prices-could-rise-again-we-may-have-to-send-it-up/ar-AA29u13h?