“The Fool Killer’s comin’ to town, Jeff, and you don’t want him lookin’ fo’ you, so better not be a fool, understan’?”

Hobie Smith — a good man and at least 40 years my senior — was teaching me how to survive in the real world. “Keep your eyes on the hands of the man shuffling the damn deck, boy!”

The grandson of Alabama slaves, Hobie was tickling the tired, stained deck of cards, getting ready for the next hand of Tonk. In many ways, I grew up at Johnny’s Cab Stand, next to the railroad tracks in segregated Roslyn, New York, where Hobie was the taxi dispatcher and dispenser of gritty wisdom to anyone who’d listen. I was 15, the son of upper-middle-class parents who knew that if they couldn’t find me, to call Johnny’s.

At Johnny’s, I had another name — “the White Boy” — and it was said with love and laughter. You see, white people didn’t come to Johnny’s Cab Stand. They went to Salerno Taxi on the other side of the railroad tracks. Johnny’s was for the black maids on their way to and from jobs in houses like mine.

I’d stumbled into Johnny’s one cold night when Salerno was closed, and found myself among new friends. As the weeks went by and I listened to tales of life in the Jim Crow South and still-segregated North, I got more confident.

Whether we come at politics from the left or the right, having a voice means nothing unless we use it.

“Hey, Hobie, I think it’s my deal!” Hobie’s handsome, weathered face split into a wide, satisfied grin as he handed me the deck. He was getting through to the dumbass teenager who liked to hang out with and learn from black men who experienced life very differently.

Over the months of afternoons and nights I spent at the cab stand, I got to meet saints and criminals and a lot of people who (Hobie told me later) were “complete fools.” By the time my family left Roslyn for Portland, Maine, two years later, I had definitely decided against being a fool. Of course, I had no idea it would be an ongoing, lifelong effort…

Good intentions do not necessarily keep us off the List of Fools. Once, on a first date with a colleague — a lovely White House correspondent — I totally blew it. I was trying to impress her with how “compassionate” I was. Less than a block from the White House, we approached a group of homeless men. My date commented quietly on their difficult lives; puffed up by my own ego, I decided to get some points for being a Really Kind Guy. I looked at one of them standing over a heat grate and said, “Hey, brother, how’s it going?” He looked at me as though I were crazy, took one step closer, and decked me with a strong right cross.

When I looked up from the sidewalk, the guy was walking away, muttering about someone named “Idiot,” and the woman I’d wanted to impress was, well, not. It took me hours to figure out that I had paid the price for being an arrogant fool. I was so self-absorbed, it hadn’t occurred to me how it might feel to be that homeless man, encrusted in dirt, to have some well-dressed, clean-shaven fellow with a pretty woman on his arm enter his space, asking him, “How’s it going?” His punch to my head was a crime, but I provoked it — by being a fool.

I confess to having been a fool because I repeatedly failed to engage aggressively on behalf of causes in which I believe. I left it to others to rise up against environment-killing projects. I stayed warm, dry, and tear-gas-free while other friends journeyed to North Dakota to support the river protectors. I could cite other examples.

If we haven’t stood up for whatever it is we believe in, we have earned our way into the Club of Fools. Automatic membership is afforded to those of us who did not vote, did not demonstrate, did not volunteer, did not write letters to members of Congress, did not engage at all in making our country a better place to live. To all of us who fit that description, the joke’s on us. Especially if we’ve been too busy getting laid, getting rich, or playing games to get involved with real life.

Whether we come at politics from the left or the right, having a voice means nothing unless we use it. Having a conviction is meaningless unless we act on it. Of course, we all have to make a living. It’s how we assign the rest of our time and energy which defines whether we are, in fact, fools, or smart, active players in the lives of our communities and our nation.

Politicians often play the public for fools through their highly sophisticated use of media. Manipulative messaging is always wrapped in something noble-sounding. When a politician talks constantly about making us safer, his hidden message is, “Be afraid! Be very afraid!” Frightened people are the easiest to victimize — especially if the manipulators tell us how tough they are and how strong we’ll be so long as we support them.

Our free will is the guardian of our independence. Its erosion leads to our subservience. In our complex, informationally chaotic world, it’s possible to not even realize that we’ve surrendered because the process can be so gradual. Manipulative messaging can be so constant and repetitive that it seeps past our defenses and fools us into believing what’s not true. It’s especially difficult to know that our personal power is being compromised when clever messaging triggers our own very real and deep-seated frustration and shapes it into rage.

Then it’s game-on with the manipulators calling the shots. If unscrupulous political leaders can keep us enraged, they’ve got us. Fury can make us feel like roaring lions. Then there’s the embarrassment that follows after realizing we’ve been tricked into getting high on our anger.

From Moscow to Manila, from Washington to Islamabad, the power grabbers and the self-righteous are happy to make fools of us as they drain our personal freedom by misdirecting and frightening us. What they count on is that we are so drenched in our self-interest, so ego-involved that we won’t bother to observe, let alone speak out, as they vampire off someone else’s freedom or safety. Authoritarian regimes which attempt to damage us over the long run are already slicing and dicing the personal freedom of their own people.

In Putin’s Russia, the government is decriminalizing domestic violence. Anticipating the change in the law, some cops are already telling women who are being beaten by their husbands to call back, but only after their partners kill them. This is not an April Fools’ joke, nor are any of the other situations I’m about to describe.

In our complex world, it’s possible to not even realize that we’ve surrendered because the process can be so gradual.

In Turkey, the increasingly paranoid and repressive government is smashing the press, arresting, on average, one reporter every day, while forcing some journalists into exile, leaving the people to be informed by intimidated media.

In China, all forms of dissent are being crushed under the weight of the State. But there’s so much money to be made there, many American business leaders hold their noses, smile, and sell their souls by their silence.

In Washington, the Trump administration not only ordered the press to “keep its mouth shut” (yeah, that’ll work), but it has also issued a lethal “global gag rule” blocking federal funding to international nongovernmental organizations that “promote” or provide abortions. This makes pro-life purists feel better, but in the third world it creates horror. Forcing charities to shut up about safe ways to end pregnancies condemns impoverished women to head for back-alley abortionists, untrained local practitioners, or self-infliction, which leads to infection, sepsis, death, and the orphaning of their existing children.

In France, the anti-Muslim leader Marine Le Pen’s star is rising fast. The charismatic right-wing ideologue and powerful opponent of immigration is looking more and more like she might be elected President of France (and if not in the next election, then sometime soon). One of Le Pen’s admirers is the 27-year-old French-Canadian Alexandre Bissonnette, the right-wing extremist who confessed to slaughtering six innocent Muslims earlier this year as they prayed in their mosque in Quebec. Bissonnette invaded the sacred space with his AK-47 assault rifle and, reloading twice, shot people in the back as they prayed.

In Germany, the far-right wing is rising as more and more Germans join the ranks of the frightened because of violence committed by refugees, and the artful way right-wing politicians pumped up the anger of ordinary Germans. The biggest-headline crimes had to do with sex, including some rapes and the public groping of almost 100 women at a festival in Cologne. All of it is horrible and inexcusable. How it happened is complicated but instructive.

Stressed by the desperate need to find housing, food, and other creature comforts for over a million asylum seekers, the German government did not teach the tide of incoming, mostly conservative Muslims how to relate to Germany’s sexually liberated culture. An ugly collision was inevitable and predictable.

But being overwhelmed doesn’t excuse Angela Merkel’s government from climbing onto the Fool Train and dragging the entire country along. Poor Merkel was trying to do the right thing. Since the end of World War II and the de-Nazification of Germany, her country has worked hard to be a beacon of compassion. For decades, Germany has accepted and acted on the core truth that failure to accept our involvement in all of humanity condemns us as heartless fools.

After the horror of the Holocaust, a German Christian pastor named Martin Niemöller reminded the world of how frightened people remained silent in the face of Hitler’s rise to power. His words, crafted 71 years ago, are worthy of the attention of anyone who does not wish to be a fool today:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out. Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out. Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out.

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Pastor Niemöller’s warning slices into our consciousness like an icy rain. Our only hope for getting off the Fools’ Express is to become fully awake, to realize that we are being played by others for their own purposes, and to consciously reject anyone’s attempt to frighten us into the next level of being a fool: believing in false conspiracy theories.

That, of course, does not preclude the existence of real conspiracies — including the corruption of politicians by corporations, drug dealers, and foreign governments, and coordinated efforts to deny Americans access to the ballot. Every single one of those conspiracies is not only real, but plays all of us for fools no matter what month of the year it is.

On the other hand, false conspiracy theories are distractions, designed to increase fear and subvert the clarity of our thinking. So long as we are obsessed with phony conspiracies, the very real manipulators pick our pockets, create false divisions within our society, and make our country more vulnerable to attack from actual terrorists.

The master of real conspiracies inside the Trump White House is Stephen Bannon, the right-wing extremist writer and media manipulator who redirected Trump’s faltering campaign to victory by playing on the frustrations of middle- and working-class white people in states rich in electoral college votes.

Bannon has a big agenda of his own: tearing down existing democratic institutions. His conspiracy to do just that required him to get his hands on the levers of power inside the White House. He already had prime access to the Oval Office and the president’s ear. But he wanted to make sure that nonpolitical national security professionals — our country’s best experts — would be unable to influence Trump in ways contrary to Bannon’s desire.

To do that, Bannon would have to keep the president from the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — our top military commander. These men would routinely see any president at regular meetings of the Principals’ Committee of the National Security Council — the organization responsible for providing the president swift guidance on immediate and long-term threats to the nation.

So, Bannon had Trump remove the Director and the Chairman from those regular meetings. In their place: Bannon and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. That turns the Principals’ meeting of the NSC into an ideological echo chamber of shared political perspective led by people who boast of having “alternative facts” when the real facts are displeasing to them.

With the Director of National Intelligence and the nation’s top military leader excluded from regular NSC Principals’ meetings, dissenting opinions are likely to become things of the past, and further wall off the president from reality — should he ever be interested in it. That kind of insulation leads to incompetent and highly destabilizing actions, like Trump’s partial ban on Muslims entering the U.S.

Trump’s ban created havoc and utterly unnecessary pain in the lives of thousands of innocent and fully vetted people. More than 100,000 visas were revoked within days of Bannon/Trump’s new policy. Denying access to all Syrian refugees who were fleeing absolute horror began to create a new, darker picture of America. The Statue of Liberty’s lamp had been dimmed, albeit temporarily, in the name of “security.” The ban also fed neatly into the ISIS narrative, which says the racist West, led by America, is engaged in continuous conflict with Islam.

That’s all fine with human wrecking ball Bannon, the white nationalist who once declared, “I’m a Leninist.” Bannon’s words refer to the brutal leader of the Russian Communist Revolution of 1917. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too,” Bannon told the Daily Beast four years ago. “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Bannon’s desire to trash all institutions includes respected right-wing media organizations. “National Review and The Weekly Standard are both left-wing magazines, and I want to destroy them also,” he said. That Bannon is now the Svengali at Trump’s ear, that he now has a seat at the NSC, is a huge joke on all of us. Bannon is making a fool of Trump, who is so blinded by his own narcissism that he loses interest in seeing anything but his own reflection. One former CIA case officer said of Trump, “Oh, he’d be easy to manipulate, because of his narcissism.”

Today, the phenomenal power of our executive branch appears to be in the hands of an emotionally insecure president, vulnerable to flattery, who’s under the sway of Bannon, a brilliant manipulator with his own bizarre and dangerous agenda.

In a demonstration of startling tone-deafness, the White House put the seven-country Muslim ban into effect on International Holocaust Remembrance Day — the day the world is supposed to remember the horrors of the Nazi death camps. That’s when we are all called on to honor the memory of six million Jews, plus thousands of gay people and other enemies of the Nazi State who were gassed, shot, strangled, and beaten to death. The orders for those mechanized murders came from Berlin — from Adolf Hitler and the architects of what was elegantly titled, “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

In its official Holocaust Remembrance Day declaration, Trump’s White House did not use the word “Jew” for the first time in the European history of such declarations — as though the mass murder of Jews had not been the reason for the Holocaust. Was that a strange oversight? No. It’s part of an emerging pattern. The White House ordered the State Department not to publish its annual Holocaust Remembrance statement because it referred to Jews as the primary victims. Officials in the State Department were flummoxed. A routine declaration had been turned into an alarming act of censorship. What’s going on? In public discussion of the Holocaust, eliminating references to Jews or downplaying the number killed is the beginning of Holocaust denial and is a hallmark of the anti-semitic, white nationalist movements associated with Bannon.

President Trump’s chief strategist Bannon is working to expand the limits of acceptibility of the kinds of lies, deceptions, and other poisonous propaganda that he delights in spreading as part of his campaign of societal destruction.

Bannon is making a fool of Trump, who is so blinded by his own NARCISSISM that he loses interest in seeing anything but his own reflection.

Thanks in part to Bannon, we are living in a time of fear-driven politics successfully masquerading as the defense of national security. But the falsity of the national security argument becomes apparent under any careful test. When the Cato Institute — a conservative think tank — researched the number of Americans killed by terrorists from the seven countries Trump banned, researchers came up with a stunning answer: Zero. None. Not even one. And Cato went back to 1975, when my dear friend and mentor, Dr. Robert H. Kupperman, did the very first study of terrorism for the White House. (In 1989, Kupperman and I wrote the book Final Warning: Averting Disaster in the New Age of Terrorism.)

It’s remarkable that Trump’s partial Muslim ban, which was supposed to make us safer from terror, excluded Saudi Arabia, the country that produced 15 of the 9/11 hijackers. The Saudi power structure has long been the top funder of the extremist Salafist Sunni Muslim preachers whose fiery rhetoric feeds the flames of jihadism around the world and justifies its bloody violence. But Trump has done big business with the Saudis, so it’s no surprise that Saudi Arabia was not on the list of banned nations.

The ban was all smoke and mirrors. It was deception designed to make Trump’s angry, frightened political base feel like he’s keeping his promise to protect them. It didn’t.

The biggest threat from jihadists inside America comes from young people who become radicalized over the internet. The Obama administration created funding for local groups to educate young people across America away from the propaganda of ISIS and Al Qaeda, and of white supremacists. Within days of the new president assuming office, word began leaking that Bannon/Trump wanted to change that program to address only the prevention of violence by Muslim extremists. Then Trump issued his travel ban. Quickly, some of the nonprofit organizations receiving that anti-violence funding began rejecting it out of disgust with the Bannon/Trump campaign against Islam.

Mubin Shaikh, a former intelligence operative whose undercover work prevented multiple terrorist attacks in the U.S. and Canada, says the insistence of Trump supporters on believing that his Muslim ban was a good idea reminds him of the mind-set of radicalized young Muslims he interviewed. They had become so invested in their beliefs that no presentation of facts could move them from their fiercely held ideology.

On the travel ban and the program to prevent radicalization, Bannon/Trump played us all for fools. But more and more people who have no political agenda are beginning to speak out. Among those who are hoping to keep us from marching into the Fools’ Hall of Shame is Michael Vincent Hayden. Before he retired, he was a four-star Air Force general. His brilliant mind and willingness to speak truth to power took him to his next three jobs: Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the CIA. General Hayden says the Muslim ban only helped ISIS, and that its effect on the humanitarian crisis is “an abomination.”

Even Bannon/Trump would have trouble making people believe Hayden is soft on terrorism. But if he does bad mouth General Hayden, there are some who would believe it, because breaking from Bannon/Trump would be akin to separating from an imagined, all-powerful daddy who will protect us, no matter what. When our brains are in the hands of Bannon and his crew of master message manipulators, anything can happen.

During the presidential campaign, many people came to believe the completely bizarre rumor that the Clintons were running a child sex ring out of a popular pizza joint in D.C. where I would routinely bring my daughters to play ping-pong and eat. Thank God we were not there the day some poor fool who believed the fake news he’d read online walked in with an assault rifle. He’d come to liberate the children he thought were being held as sex slaves. He fired a round, fortunately hitting no one. As the police led him away, the poor fool was heard to say, “I guess the intel on this wasn’t so good.”

It all takes me back to my after-school life at Johnny’s Cab Stand and my first guru, Mr. Hobie Smith. “You got to stay awake and pay attention to what’s going on around you,” Hobie warned, “because the Fool Killer is always out there.”