Throughout history, autocratic regimes, especially authoritarian or populist ones on the far left and the far right, have demonized what they have determined to represent their nations’ “internal enemies,” foes who, if left to thrive, would undermine the security and very existence of these societies.

Regimes have done this to consolidate and expand its power, to divert attention away from misdeeds and failed economic and social policy initiatives, to justify repressive tactics, to stifle critical thinking, and to create a more pliant and obedient population.

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Though the processes of marginalizing and isolating these purported internal enemies vary by case and political objectives, some common patterns, nonetheless, have emerged.

Propaganda campaigns manipulate the narratives, which emphasize dehumanization, stereotyping, and scapegoating of targeted groups.

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The Gnomon Wise Research Institute discusses the realities of “dehumanization,” writing, “Dehumanization, as a psychological and socio-political process, represents one of the most destructive phenomena in human history. It involves the denial of attributes that define individuals or social groups as human, thereby devaluing their moral status and legitimizing violence and cruelty against them.”

Professor Nicholas Haslam of Melbourne University has identified two specific forms of dehumanization exploited by authoritarian regimes.

The first of these he terms “animalistic dehumanization,” which represents the targeted group as lacking uniquely human traits such as rationality, morality, self-control, and a culture. Stripping away these attributes from groups presents them as lower forms of life: as rats, monkeys, pigs, disease-bearing insects, as primitive and dangerous creatures to be exterminated. Or they are seen as physically and psychologically diseased, or as delusional.

Attached to this group often are disease-related images, presenting target groups as “tumors,” “viruses,” or “infections” that threaten the health of the individual and the overall body politic. This “animalistic” dehumanizing narrative is intended to inspire fear, disgust, and danger of contamination.

On the other hand, “mechanistic dehumanization,” Haslam’s second form, characterizes the group and individuals as lacking in essential aspects of human nature, like individuality, emotions, and empathy. Group members are conceived as objects without souls; they are machines or mindless robots lacking an interior consciousness, human feelings, or individuality.

This form of dehumanization portrays these supposed internal enemies as the personification of pure evil, as “immoral,” “domestic terrorists,” “Devil worshipers,” “agents of foreign governments,” without a sense of morality.

Using propaganda efforts throughout the overall process of dehumanization, the world is seen through the binary lens of good versus evil, right versus wrong, patriot versus traitor, us versus them. The result is a polarized, divided population that the regime can more easily control.

Following intensive systematic propaganda campaigns that articulate real and perceived threats posed by these “internal enemies,” an element or stage not included in the extant literature but one I consider as significant comprises the reliance by governments on the enactment of laws and other statutes curbing the civil and human rights of individuals within the groups targeted by the regime.

What follows are summaries of two comparative case studies: the first profiling the propaganda narratives of the German Nazis and their initial laws against Germany’s internal Jewish population. The second involves the dehumanizing propaganda campaigns currently circulating in the United States as well as a sampling of actual and proposed laws against transgender communities on the state and national levels.

How Nazis vilified Jewish people as Germany’s “internal enemies“

Dehumanization Campaigns 

A clear and extreme example of a dehumanization strategy and laws opposing a targeted internal group was crafted in the regime of fascist Germany. Among other groups, including homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with disabilities, communists, socialists, non-Aryan immigrants, and others, the Nazis singled out Jews as their primary objects of propaganda.

I use the term “objects” quite deliberately since these campaigns attempted to depict Jews as objects of scorn in attempting to deny them personal agency in defining themselves. As we know, the Nazis used contrived “racial” arguments as its philosophical cornerstone for justification in their persecutions of Jews, as well as most people of color and people with disabilities.

Nazis considered Jews and others as descendants of inferior “racial stands.” Nazi leadership argued vehemently that Jews were polluting the so-called “Aryan race.” They forced Jews to wear the yellow Star of David as a signifying marker, since to the Nazis, yellow represented a sign of “race pollution.”

The Nazi regime capitalized and extended millennia of anti-Jewish antisemitic tropes that have depicted the Jewish people in multiple negative ways. A partial list includes:

• Jews as Killers of God
• In Service of / Fathered by the Devil
• Host Desecrators
• Poisoners of Drinking Wells & Transmitters of Diseases
• Usurers
• Ritual Murderers & Abusers of Christian Children
• Forced Circumcisers of Non-Jews
• Judaism as an Immature or Inadequate Religious Consciousness
• They are Clannish
• An Alien “Race”
• Wanderers / “Stateless”
• Holders of Dual / Multiple Loyalties
• Proselytizers to Judaism
• Freedom-Killing Communists and Socialists
• Super Capitalists
• Sexually Perverse
• Oversexed or Sexually-Frigid Females
• Lecherous Males of Christian Women
• Feminized and Non-Athletic Males
• Controller of World Economic Systems
• Greedy for Wealth
• Financially Cheap and Cheaters
• Controllers of the Media
• Exaggerators of the Extent of Anti-Jewish Oppression
• Exploiters of the Oppressed

Under the direction of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, the regime used every means at its disposal to portray Jews in dehumanizing ways: by weaponizing grievance against the harsh realities brought about by the Treaty of Versailles (the international treaty negotiated by the winners of World War I to punishment Germany for its aggression in the conflict), for crime, and for severe economic privation.

The Nazi high command argued that Germany lost WWI because of its internal enemies: the Jews. Nazi campaigns of “moral, racial, and sexual purity” led to an intense and violent campaign against Jews and other groups, which ended in the Holocaust: the murder of an estimated 6 million Jews (equal to two-thirds of European Jewry, and one-third of the entire worldwide Jewish population).

In his book The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, historian David Welch discovered  that Nazi propaganda focused on simplified, emotional, and repetitive messages. They transformed the notion that the Jewish people were a religious or ethnic group into what they portrayed as a biological threat – as vermin, race polluters, as an infection – that threatened the Aryan race and the very existence of German culture and nationhood.

The Nazis used the descriptive terminology of Untermensch to further establish Jewish sub-human status. This gave the regime legitimacy in passing anti-Jewish laws that led to incarceration, enslavement, and eventually to mass murder.

How Nazi laws criminalized Jewish existence & love

The Nazi high command passed two distinct laws targeting German Jews in September 1935. Jointly known as the Nuremberg Laws, they exemplified the racial theories foundational to Nazi ideology. Separately they were branded as the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.

In the terms of the Reich Citizenship Law and several additional government pronouncements, the only people who could be classified as true Germany citizens were those of “German or kindred blood.”

The Law decreed that Jews were a separate race from Germans as defined by birth and by blood. People with three or more Jewish grandparents, even if they had never practiced religion or had converted to Christianity, were classified by law as being among the Jewish race and were, therefore, excluded from German citizenship.

The law included the additional complication of defining German residents as neither German nor Jewish if they had only one or two Jewish grandparents. Nazis termed people in this category as “mixed-raced” (known as Mischlinge). Though they were initially permitted some of the rights of “racial” Germans, these benefits were increasingly restricted and then fully denied by subsequent legislation.

The second Nuremberg Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, barred marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. It also criminalized sexual relations between them. These relations were labeled as “race defilement” (rassenschande).

The law also forbade all Jews from employing female German maids under the age of 45. This provision was drafted under the assumption that Jewish men would force German maids into sexual relations thereby committing race defilement. Ultimately, thousands of people were convicted of this crime and many were imprisoned in concentration camps.

How the U.S. right wing vilified trans people as the nation’s “internal enemies”

Dehumanizing Campaigns

As fascists have scapegoated and targeted Jews and other groups, neo-fascists in the United States and other Western countries are targeting immigrants of color, Muslims, Jews, homosexuals, transgender people, communists, socialists, and all progressives, labeling them as being the causes of all the evils of their nations.

The U.S. political right-wing has spread and capitalized on anti-transgender transphobic tropes that have depicted trans people in multiple negative ways. A partial list includes:

• Being transgender is merely a fad, a stage they are going through, comes about by peer pressure, it is a form of rebellion against parents and society
• They prey on women and children in public bathrooms
• They are psychologically confused and mentally ill
• They all want puberty blockers, hormones, and transition surgeries
• They are attention-seekers
• They are incapable of maintaining meaningful relationships
• They are spreaders of so-called “gender ideology,” which if allowed to continue, will destroy Western civilization
• They are the result of bad parenting
• They attempt to recruit young people into their “lifestyle”
• They hate themselves and their bodies
• Children cannot be transgender because it only occurs at puberty
• All transgender people are prostitutes and hustlers
• They threaten the safety and privacy of women and children
• They identities are an erotic kink or sexual fetish
• Since the Bible says that God made men and women, then transgender people don’t exist. Anyone who claims otherwise sins in the face of God.

Anti-Transgender Laws

Donald Trump’s actions by scapegoating and stereotyping targeted groups are intended to harden his appeal of his base of support for his failed policies and increasingly failing presidency.

President Joe Biden, shortly after taking office, signed an executive order allowing transgender troops to serve openly in the U.S. military.

Last May, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration has the right to enforce its executive order of January 20, 2025 (which went into effect on February 26), upholding a Department of Defense policy prohibiting transgender people from serving in the U.S. military.

Serving in the nation’s military has been one of the markers of citizenship in the United States. In denying transgender people the ability to serve their country virtually denies them their full citizenship rights.  

Donald Trump, amid his self-proclaimed “retribution” campaign, has specifically targeted members of the transgender community in his efforts to completely erase their existence from the human community. (No doubt he would attempt to wipe out gender diversity within non-human species if he could.) 

Trump signed a mean-spirited and petty presidential executive order in his attempt to rewrite history by expunging trans activism and trans lives. The order demanded that transgender people be deleted from New York’s Stonewall Inn National Monument website, developed by the National Park Service. The acronym that once read LGBTQ+ has been reduced to LGB, standing for lesbian, gay, and bisexual.

During his short second regime (reich), another of Trump’s executive orders bans trans athletes from school and professional sports, from using the public facilities of their choice, and from choosing to have gender-affirming procedures to maintain their bodily autonomy because, according to Trump, “there are only two genders: male and female.” All else, to Trump, contradicts the “natural” world.

He even signed an executive order to this effect declaring that there are only two genders. With this came a series of specific policy changes. Titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” the order describes biological sex as being determined by the size of one’s reproductive cells: small for men and large for women.

Government documents, including passports, visas, and employee records, can only show “male” or “female.” The government will no longer pay for trans-related health care, such as for government employees, military personnel, or federal prisoners.

In addition, all transgender women incarcerated in federal prisons he ordered thrown into men’s prison facilities, despite multiple court rulings blocking the president’s policy.

In another of Trump’s orders, the federal government will no longer even recognize the existence of trans people and will prevent federal funds from funding any programs that do so.

The order says, “Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology” and it directs the Bureau of Prisons to revise its policies to ensure that federal inmates do not receive “any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio banned Rainbow flags from flying at U.S. embassies.

The Trump administration, as was the case in other authoritarian regimes throughout history, have attempted to limit the bodily autonomy of women, trans, intersex, and lesbian, gay, and bisexual people for the purpose of attempting to control their minds and to limit their social power.

In 2026, anti-trans bills continue to be introduced across the country. These bills include anything from excluding trans people from receiving basic healthcare services, excluding them from classifications in civil and human rights protections, excluding them from participation in sports activities and teams other than those matching their sex assigned at birth, and excluding them from using public facilities other than those matching their birth sex. This exclusion from education, from legal recognition, and from social institutions, in fact, excludes them from the right to exist in civil society.

For example, Kansas Senate Bill 244 (2026), known as the “Women’s Bill of Rights,” defines “gender” as biological sex at birth for state law. It requires public building bathrooms and locker rooms to be separated by sex assigned at birth, and it mandates that all state agencies invalidate and reissue driver’s licenses and birth certificates to adhere to this definition.

Another example, WI AB100 is the Wisconsin legislature’s bill passed into law in 2025 that specifically restricts transgender athletes from participating on teams that are not aligned with their assigned birth sex.

According to the new law: “The bill defines “sex” as the sex determined at birth by a physician and reflected on the birth certificate. The bill also requires an educational institution to prohibit a male pupil from 1) participating on an athletic team or in an athletic sport designated for females and 2) using a locker room designated for females. Finally, the bill requires the educational institution to notify pupils and parents if an educational institution intends to change a designation for an athletic team or sport.”

“History doesn’t repeat but echoes”: There are no “superfluous people”

The acclaimed pioneer of discussions about totalitarianism, political responsibility, and the nature of evil is Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a German Jewish historian and philosopher. Her work focuses on the nature of political life. She explicitly explores the concepts of power, action, and totalitarianism, the latter defined as:

“a novel form of government characterized by the combination of terror and logicality, aiming to dominate and terrorize human beings from within, not just suppress political opponents. She emphasized its reliance on ideology, isolation of individuals, and the concept of ‘superfluous people’, where individuals are reduced to their bodies and deemed expendable.”

Arendt’s notion of “superfluous people” informs us how totalitarian regimes diminish and cheapen human life to mere bodies for the purpose of rejecting and disposing of them without any moral significance.

The often-quoted expression that “history doesn’t repeat but echoes” (often cited as “history rhymes”) proposes that though literal events rarely reappear, comparable patterns, themes, and human behaviors re-emerge over time. This notion highlights the point that studying the past affords us with insights into current developments and issues and alerts us to identify warning signs while learning from past mistakes.

The United States, by targeting members of our transgender communities and other marginalized groups, is treading down the path of our past mistakes.  

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