"10 Steps of Authoritarianism" list by Kim Scheppele, a Professor at Princeton University. This should sound eerily familiar to EVERY American patriot right now... because Trump is systematically following EVERY STEP of this disturbing playbook. Judge for yourself... Step 1, you have a free and fair election, but likely, it's the last one. And that's because once that wanna-be dictator wins, they have no intention of ever relinquishing the power again. That's how autocrats are born. Step 2, they start to cement their power by exceeding the bounds of executive power. That's why you see this rash of executive orders, each one claiming even more power than the day before, and they are not responsive to critique. Step 3, those autocrats start to weaken competing power. So they go after Congress and make it complicit, threatening people who disagree with losing their jobs. You go after the judiciary, and you either make them complicit by watching a Supreme Court weaken its positions or a lower court that is made irrelevant because those positions no longer have meaning. You move on to Step 4. They gut the government. They break democracy so people forget how it works. You fire the experts, you dismantle agencies. You break public trust because people don't believe that you will serve them anymore. Checks stop coming, mail stops being delivered and people start to forget what democracy was supposed to do. Step 5, you install loyalists. You put in place people who have no loyalty to the Constitution or the American people. You put in place people whose loyalty is only to the executive, to the autocrat-in-training. And once you've done that, you go after the media, Step 6. You go after the media because you have to discredit the truth. You have to tell people that there's no one they can trust except the person in power. And then you build an echo chamber, and that echo chamber just pumps out propaganda that is told so often, it starts to actually sound like the truth, even though we all know it's not. And then you get to Step 7. You have to pick someone to blame. And so you weaponize DEI, you weaponize diversity, equity and inclusion, because you know that it is the system that protects us. It protects women and children and people of color. It protects immigrants and the disabled. It protects the labor community. Anyone who looks different or thinks differently becomes a villain, and you must make them the scapegoats. Step 8, you target civil society because that's the group that defends our rights. And so you sue lawyers. You attack philanthropies. You dismantle universities so that we never know what we need to know. You smear community organizers. You undermine the very people who are doing the work of keeping power in check. Step 9, you incentivize private violence. You send in the National Guard, into communities not to protect protesters, but to arrest them. You militarize federal agents. You send the Marines into communities, knowing that our nation has always said that that is not allowed. And you do it because it makes people afraid to speak up. It makes civic participation feel dangerous, and it makes silence feel safer than the truth. And that gets us to Step 10. If you're looking for autocracy, Step 10 is where it happens permanently because that's the endgame. You make certain that NO ONE VOTES AGAIN because they don't believe it's safe. They don't believe it works. They don't believe that it matters. They're poor. They're scared. They're exhausted. And now the autocrat can win without having to fight, and the dictatorship is complete. If this sounds familiar, that's because all of this is happening NOW, under Trump. Speak up, American patriots, before it's too late!