The hardened conservative right wing of the Republican Party has done everything possible to transition the public into a more manageable form of governance from controlling the courts, delineating illegal gerrymandered court districts, heavy-handed out-and-out voter suppression to, most recently, the actual admission of electoral fraud by local Republicans in North Carolina. Apparently, the GOP’s intent is to amass never-ending power; a power not unlike Russia where billionaire oligarchs, in proclivity with Putin, use heavy handed control on the Russian people by dangling a few crumbs of hope and change that are never to be.

Republicans depend on lies because lies go out of the way to distract, distort and turn you away from the truth.  And in some lost corner of their souls, GOP minions use vile, hateful rhetoric regardless of causing suffering or loss. Their tunnel-visioned, staunchest supporters see this period in history within a fixed point; an exact moment of zero dimension and reckoning as they refuse to acknowledge or admonish disreputable low-minded actions and cruel unethical deeds.

The Republican Party has willed itself to power with a cunning pay for play as they “trade their heroes for gold.”

An obsessed crony cabal to cover, not only their base, but all the bases. As authoritarian groupies court their great leader, conservative policy debate becomes lost to political battles of radicalism.

Truth, integrity, decorum and the rule of law must kowtow while waving the white flag of surrender to the far right. Zealots blur fantasy and reality while feebly attempting to discredit capitalist democratic socialism as a getting something for nothing welfare state.

All while the Republican Grand Old Party voted for socialist style tax cuts for the 1 percent; saving the banks $21 billion with hefty bonuses going to Wall Street execs while at the same time 4,000 lower level jobs were lost. And no sooner do taxpayers turn around; another $6 billion bailout is apportioned among needy farmers unfortunately caught in the middle of our current administration’s disastrous trade war.

What Republicans fail to grasp is that the American worker is not at all concerned about “the ride being free.’

They are concerned that “the door, at least, be open’ — open to meaningful, productive and honorable work. Not the kind of work where one sits in a comfortable sound booth or studio spouting hateful messaging throughout America’s airwaves. Or, the type of employment where, even at the highest level of government, one trolls with hate fueled speech through erratically coded texts.

Fear and loathing beyond campaign rallies. And while most immigrants come through ports of entry legally and willing to work, America’s border with Mexico has become an unbalanced profusion of so much cruelty that it boggles the psyche.

U.S. immigration policy at our southern border shows the effect of GOP administrative policies which use the credibility of democracy only for its authority while doing nothing to uphold its set of ideas and beliefs; the doctrine that democratic principles are built on.

In author Don DeLillo’s novel ‘Libra,’ there lies a clarifying unriddling of our present-day political landscape. DeLillo’s words unfold as a sordid dark master plan: “A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not”.

It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach.

All conspirators are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some “criminal act.”

As we move forward in these divisive times we need to ask, and seek answers, as to whom may be exploiting America by playing that ‘inside game,’ and why?

When “all the world’s a stage” as Elysian Fields await, the tragic character of King Lear affirms, “choices bring about downfall, not fate.”