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Every autocrat needs a villain. Every failure needs a fall guy. When people start asking hard questions — about jobs, housing, climate, or corruption — Step 7 gives them someone else to blame. It’s not the ignoble policy or the hollow budget that’s at fault, they say. It’s the immigrant. The union organizer. The black pilot. The gay teacher. The Indigenous community that asked for too much. Scapegoating turns pain into propaganda. It tells people struggling that their real enemy isn’t the people in power — it’s their neighbor.
That lie is now baked into American politics and it’s deadly.
When the Environmental Protection Agency canceled [ [link removed] ] a vital flood-protection grant to stabilize a riverbank for the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk, officials bragged about cutting “wasteful DEI programs.” Months later, a typhoon hit, and the village flooded. Homes were torn from their foundations. Entire families displaced. One person died. This is what scapegoating looks like in practice: a federal agency punishes a disadvantaged community, all to score political points and avoid culpability. The cruelty is the point.
That’s how Step 7 works. For authoritarians, who are in search of government control, the mission is consolidating power by targeting an enemy that cannot fight back. For fascists, it’s about ideology: the objective is to achieve a degree of purity — racial, ethnic, religious, etc. — and to blame the victim for simply being. When the two collide, it doesn’t require the hate rallies or viral soundbites alone. Sometimes it looks like a budget cut or a press release. The autocrat’s tactic is to turn marginalized people into symbols and irredeemable offenders, to frame their existence, their suffering, or their needs as the problem. The term, scapegoat, comes from a Biblical reference, where a goat was loaded up with the sins of the community and then driven out of society to bear its burdens alone.
In modern political parlance, scapegoating is an effective tool of control. Hitler used it to consolidate Nazi power and justify unspeakable horrors against Jews, the Roma people and others. Orbán weaponized the LGBTQ community to transform Hungary into an “illiberal democracy.” Bolsonaro, Putin, and tyrants around the globe have followed the same script, using race, religion, gender, ethnicity or national origin to put a target on their backs. The mechanics are old, but the message is freshened for every generation: your struggles aren’t our fault — or ours — the fault is theirs.
In the U.S., a nation built on the motto of e pluribus unum (Out of many, one), the Republican regime has decided that the many pose a threat to their aggregation of power. Diversity has become a taboo. Equity a threat. Inclusion is a dirty word. The aggressive opposition to DEI isn’t about the letters — they’re worried about the foundational principles these values represent. Moreover, they are outraged by the litany of laws that prohibit discrimination or remedy past bad actions. The authoritarian right understands what DEI actually encompasses [ [link removed] ], sometimes more so than DEI’s allies. From the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Family Medical Leave Act to the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Respect for Marriage Act, DEI has been the pathway to progress for millions of Americans otherwise denied access to opportunity.
This regime understands exactly how much progress has been made, and they are terrified. So they cast immigrants as invaders. Trans people as dangers. Teachers and librarians as radicals. The disabled are now disposable. Each attack serves the same purpose: to divide people who might otherwise band together. When we’re busy fighting each other, we’re not watching the people in power who created the crisis in the first place.
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Ending DEI programs like environmental justice grants or firing transgender troops or eliminating exhibits about the painful history of our nation is about sending a message: you don’t belong here. It’s about signaling who is safe and who isn’t. Who is worthy of protection and who should be blamed for any harm. The Kipnuk flood made that message painfully clear: when fascists demonize inclusion, the fallout is measured in real lives lost, not just headlines.
But the success of Step 7 is not inevitable. It only works if the rest of us play along. For every Target that succumbs to the anti-DEI hysteria, there’s a Costco taking a stand. As universities reject extortion and promise to serve their students, we watch scapegoating fail. For every person who films an ICE agent abusing a migrant or offers a know your rights card, we are refusing to allow the propaganda to take hold. When people see through the manipulation — when we defend those under attack, when we refuse to let empathy be branded as weakness — their hate spell breaks. Solidarity becomes an act of resistance.
The 10 Steps to Autocracy and Authoritarianism [ [link removed] ] remind us that each step builds on the last. Once the courts are captured, the civil service hollowed out, and patriotic leaders are replaced by loyal minions, autocrats need new enemies to keep their base energized and the public distracted. Step 7 supplies them. Our job is to deny them that fuel. Thus, the 10 Steps to Freedom and Power [ [link removed] ] become our antidote and our way through.
Every time we stand up for a community being blamed, we’re doing more than showing compassion — we’re pulling democracy back from the edge.
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