Thread by @wokal_distance

1/
Congress gave The National Endowment for the Arts *207,000,000*, and then told the NEA to fund projects focused on "the history of Systemic Racism"

Let's look at what the NEA did with your money.

A thread🧵

2/
Congress has the power to fund agencies and tell them how to spend their funding, and Congress told the NEA to "Continue prioritizing diversity" and to prioritize increasing diversity among "NEA staff, the National Council of the Arts, Discipline Directors, and Peer Panelists"

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In 2021 the NEA said they were "centering equity and justice along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, religion, gender identity and sexual orientation, geography, poverty, and the infinite ways these intersect in everything we do"

So this isn't something new.

4/
The NEA funds wokeness several ways, one of which is the artsHERE program.

artsHERE provides support and grants to "organizations that have demonstrated a commitment to equity within their practices and programming."

So this is funding for explicitly woke organizations.

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artsHERE handed out 112 grant totaling*12.3 Million Dollars* to organizations who "demonstrated commitment to equity within their practices and programming."

This means the NEA handed out grants to organizations that adhered to the Social Justice politics of the left.

6/
So, why is this happening?

In 2021 the NEA created a new strategic plan which stated that the NEA was going to "model diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the arts through all its activities and operations."

So DEI is quite literally part of the plan.

7/
According to this plan, one of the goals is to "Invest in the Capacity of Arts Organizations and Artists to Serve a Broader Public through Digital or Emergent Technology."

The reason for this is because tech artists engage with "climate change and racial justice."

8/
To be clear, I don't oppose artists who make political art, I'm in favor of free speech. But this is different. The NEA is only funding art that agrees with leftist Social Justice politics. So in effect they are advancing their politics using taxpayer money.

9/
The NEA also says that it is going to implement racial quotas in selecting panelists.

This is basically intersectional bean counting. IT is to hire people are select them for roles because of their race or ethnicity, rather then their qualifications.

This is tokenism.