Project 2025's Devastating Attack on the Arts and Culture Started Last Friday in Florida
Governor Ron DeSantis in an Unprecedented Move Kills All Art and Culture Grants from the Sunshine State's 2025 Budget.
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Nearly 20 years ago, Mansoor Adayfi, an award-winning Yemeni artist, writer and activist now living in Serbia, was unjustly and inhumanely held at Guantánamo Bay. Like Josef K., the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, he did not know the reason for his imprisonment. Adayfi only knew he was rounded up as a suspected terrorist. Guantánamo is where he met Ron DeSantis.
Adayfi narrated this encounter in his 2023 Al Jazeera op-ed. As a naval judge advocate general (JAG), DeSantis told Adayfi his role at Guantánamo was to investigate if prisoners were being treated with dignity and the guards were adhering to the Geneva Convention. One of his questions probed why Adayfi and his fellow inmates chose to hunger strike. He told DeSantis that the guards and the prison’s conditions did not treat him and the others as human beings. The prison’s set up and conditions were below substandard. Guards even destroyed the prisoners The Holy Qurans.
The next time Adayfi saw DeSantis was when the future Florida governor and failed U.S. Presidential candidate cackled at him while a nurse force fed Ensure and a laxative through a tube placed in Adayfi's nose. Those force feedings DeSantis found hilarious resulted in Adayfi vomiting and defecating on himself.
Between that behavior, him eating pudding with three of his fingers and him wiping his snot on an elder wheelchair user, we should not be surprised that last Friday DeSantis eliminated over $32 million from Florida’s art and culture grants in his 2025 budget.
This marks the first time in Florida’s history that arts and culture funding have been completely slashed from the state’s annual budget. Executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art Michael Tomor told the Tampa Bay Times that he and other art administrators were blindsided and left without answers for why DeSantis extinguished their grants.
Not even endangered manatees remained safe. ZooTampa at Lowry Park expected to use their art grant to build a rescue habitat for the sweet sea cows. Now ZooTampa will have to independently raise funds to replace the rescue habitat’s half-a-million dollar grant. A group statement from the Florida Arts Alliance said, “This is unprecedented in the history of the grants program and is dismaying.”
“I worry it can be a contagious behavior to deny access of taxpayer dollars to things that enrich our lives educationally and spiritually, and in a way that’s very human,” Tomor told the Tampa Bay Times.
The problem is that DeSantis and Project 2025 do not understand or value humanity nor recognize how all humanityis connected. Make no mistake. This is not an isolated incident affecting a single state. Instead it is Project 2025's first victory in ceasing government funding for arts and culture.
A spokesperson for DeSantis told the Tampa Bay Times that the failed Presidential candidate decides his budget vetoes by what’s “in the best interest of the State of Florida.” Yet award-winning Palm Beach artist, gallery owner and arts advocate Rolando Chang Barrero has other ideas, telling Palm Beach Art News:
The long game is to get rid of all publicly funded programs, such as grants to bus kids to museums. They are trying to derail any culture [initiatives] because it is inclusive of anything that is not white supremacist …They can’t get these groups to erase DEI clauses, so they stop funding. DeSantis is laying the groundwork to be worshipped by (former President Donald) Trump in case he wins.
Earlier this month, I wrote about Project 2025’s plan to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). While The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, does not explicitly mention its plans for government-funded arts in its nearly 1,000 page dystopian playbook, it does devote an entire report on its main website that provides 10 reasons for exterminating the NEA. The ninth reason states, “Abolishing the NEA Will Prove to the American Public that Congress Is Willing to Eliminate Wasteful Spending.”
According to The Tampa Bay Times DeSantis claimed he merely tightened Florida's budget by vetoing items he believes “were ‘appropriate for state tax dollars.’”
Even the crooked, racist, anti-Semitic, vengeful and paranoid Richard Nixon in 1971 fought to increase NEA funding to develop and sustain American arts and artists. A Nixon administration official told Howard Taubman of The New York Times that Nixon viewed the NEA as “fixed government policy ‘to provide consistent, substantial support in a partnership that avoids government domination and encourages institutional and artistic independence.’”
Even without local, state and federal art funding, artists and art programs and institutions can still apply to private funders, but a leg from the table has been hacked off. Private and corporate funders set the terms for funding. Private and corporate funders can also end funding, a project or a program if they do not meet the funder’s political, civic or corporate outlooks. An example of this occurred during The Great Depression when Nelson Rockefeller ended his patronage of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and shattered Rivera’s commissioned Rockefeller Center mural Man at the Crossroads. This historical event was included in Julie Taymour’s Frida Kahlo biopic based on Hayden Herrera’s Kahlo biography.
Erica Jong, the legendary and acclaimed feminist, poet, novelist and essayist, told me for my 2017 Huffington Post commentary that “[m]ostly the NEA supports arts organizations--music, theatre enriching our communities. Those organizations get small amounts and raise other funds using this cheering interest as a base.” For the same commentary, Mark Kelly, the former commissioner of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events shared with me through e-mail that the elimination of the NEA “would have a devastating impact on Chicago’s arts and culture scene.
Centuries and decades ago along with today, art and artists are attacked and suppressed by authoritarian regimes. Like intellectuals, artists from all genres are critical and independent thinkers. The best ones push against the grain and often tell marginalized stories and hidden truths. Don’t discount what DeSantis did to artists and arts organizations in Florida. He’s just a cog in Project 2025’s gears. And I’m sure DeSantis is laughing his ass off about contributing to Project 2025’s goal to quicken the United States’ artistic and cultural decline.
It is my humble opinion brought about though my observation over the past 7 decades I have come to see art as found in any culture but in this case our culture as something akin to the spirit (literally breath) or soul , as it were , of our culture. How important is that breath? Well , in human terms going more than 3 minutes without the ability to breath can kill you. A culture that can not breath shall surely die. A society without art is unsustainable. It would seem that that this the point of project 25.
To effect our American culture with it’s ideas of acceptance and the encouragement of free expression everywhere but Especially thru art. To what ends? It has nothing to do with financial restraint and everything to do with gathering power and exerting control.
Art compels us to think. To feel. When you’re doing everything in your power to stop people from thinking and feeling, denying access to art is the equivalent of banning books.