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Paul Manafort walking onto the floor of the Republican National Convention possibly illustrated that the GOP under Trump has become thoroughly corrupted into an authoritarian party aligned with foreign dictators.

Manafort first advised and then managed Trump’s 2016 campaign. A long-time Republican political operative, he came to the job after the Ukrainian people threw his client, Viktor Yanukovych out of Ukraine’s presidency in 2014. Yanukovych was backed by Russian president Vladimir Putin, who was determined to prevent Ukraine from turning toward Europe and to install a puppet government that would extend his power over the neighboring country. Beginning in 2004, Manafort had worked to install and then keep Yanukovych and his party in power. His efforts won him a fortune thanks to his new friends, especially Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. Then in 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity.

Yanukovych fled to Russia, and Putin invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.

Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort stepped in to remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking Kilimnik how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and he made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign.

Everything about modern life is just so completely wrong and strange. We have a situation where, at any moment, millions of people could instantly die at the turning of a couple of keys at some missile base somewhere, when ordered to do so by some senile "world leader". People froth at the mouth over text on an electronic screen that some stranger half a world away posted on this thing called 'The Internet', while others are confused about what gender they are when all they have to do to settle the question is just look between their legs. We have naive young people who don't know any better openly supporting communism, while everyone else is deeply nostalgic for a past that only ever existed in their imagination because life now has become unbearable, even though from a purely material perspective things have never been better. In some countries (like Canada) the government has no issue with murdering its own citizens (euthanasia), while in others (Australia, England) the police act like the Gestapo when someone just expresses an opinion that isn't politically correct. In many nations people now actually accept constant surveillance if in return they're promised, by their government, security and safety.

This isn't normal. For most of man's history, things just weren't like this. What went wrong, how did we end up this way?

Following someone's suggestion on another thread, I've decided to watch Bad Faith. A must-see for every American voter.

Bad Faith is a documentary film which came out this year about how christian nationalism came to be a serious threat to democracy, in the United States.

Focusing particularly on the Heritage Foundation and its key people like Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell, the film discuss the movement's ideological ties with white supremacist, its avowed aim of usurping the US government and the many, many devious initiatives that the movement put forward over the last decades to build their own separate culture, in order to try to smother what they see as perverse, immoral left-wing hegemony over society.

Bad Faith exposes the dangers of christian nationalism and the ties it developed over the years with the republican party (including Ronald Reagan) and, most recently, the administation of Donald Trump and the surrounding MAGA culture.

It paints a picture of profoundly dishonest and deranged people who claim to be the purest christians there is, all the while showing little or no interest for actual christian values. Angry, bigotted, authoritarian people ready to shoot and already assuming that one day they will have to fight a holy war against the government and a society which may not conform to their beliefs.

Sometimes, people who denounce "evil" in the name of Jesus truly are the product of the deepest bowels of hell and these people truly deserve to be crushed.