Outside the Beltway

Predictability in Authoritarianism: A Brief Three-Part Photo Essay

This administration isn’t debating history. It’s distorting it for its own narrow purposes methodically. And predictably.

Michael Bailey · Wednesday, February 11, 2026 · 1 comment

Here’s how predictable authoritarianism is.
I took this photo of a sign discussing “life under slavery” in Old City Philadelphia on October 25, 2025, simply to memorialize its existence. It presented a discussion of slavery in the 18th century in Philadelphia. I knew our president would have it removed. My only surprise was that it took until January 2026.

This is an administration that defends monuments to slave-holding Confederate “heroes” while rushing to remove educational placards about slavery itself. This administration isn’t debating history. It’s distorting it for its own narrow purposes methodically. And predictably.

Here’s how predictable authoritarianism is.
I took the lousy photo (below) in Acadia National Park on July 14, 2025 for one reason: to preserve evidence of park signage acknowledging climate change. I was genuinely surprised the administration hadn’t already removed it. I assumed its days were numbered. And they were. The signage was yanked down in September 2025.

I’d say it’s exhausting being right all the time, but with this administration it’s not hard. 

Here’s how predictable authoritarianism is.

And just this week: here we go again.

This photo is from Christopher Park, part of the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. I took it in early April 2025. President Trump has now ordered the Pride flag removed from the site. Because of course he has. 

According to the New York Times, “Elected officials and bar employees said they realized the rainbow flag was gone on Monday morning. On Tuesday, a bare flagpole stood on the monument’s grounds.”

The official explanation? “Consistency.”

Consistency. Think of that. The Trump administration championing consistency. An administration that has built its brand on grievance, exception, and selective enforcement. Okay, that’s too polite. The Trump administration is a chaos machine. Consistency apparently is for losers.

So what’s the real reason for the removal? Perhaps it’s the familiar aversion to anything labeled “woke.” Perhaps it’s simple hostility toward anything associated with Obama, under whose authority the site received National Monument designation. Or perhaps it’s the easiest and most likely explanation of all: scoring points with a base that has long treated the LGBTQ+ community as somehow both an existential threat to civilization and an easy punch line for its bigoted animus. 

When I visited Stonewall in April, I made a point of speaking with the staff about their concerns. To be honest, what I had in mind at the time was DOGE, not censorship. They were wary but not panicked. Much of the funding for the monument’s displays — including the artifacts and displays themselves — came from a $2 million private fundraising campaign led by a nonprofit foundation. The federal government contributes less than $400,000 annually for staffing and maintenance.

They seemed to think that this structure offered some insulation from Trump’s nonsense. This latest move suggests that insulation may not be enough.

For years leading up to 2024, conservatives insisted the United States was in the grip of a free speech crisis — that controversial or “unwoke” views were being canceled, often by private actors wielding social pressure. There was some truth to that depending on what means by crisis. More so than much of our readership here, I suspect, I actually believed that cancel culture was real, and at times excessive and illiberal. But I have always acknowledged that social backlash is not the same thing as state power.

What we are seeing now is not the messy, decentralized, and sometimes arbitrary social punishment we were experiencing in the Obama and Biden years. Now it is the federal government erasing, threatening, and censoring established historical and scientific realities such as climate change, slavery, and the persecution of people based on sexual orientation.

Whatever excesses accompanied the era of “cancel culture,” they were the excesses of a (still) free society getting worked up about social grievances. What we are witnessing today feels different to me. This is state power narrowing the boundaries of what may be acknowledged, displayed, or remembered for the convenience of Dear Leader. 

And that should trouble anyone who claims to care about free speech. Or freedom more generally.