Gov. Ron DeSantis gave no explanation for zeroing out the $32 million in grants that were approved by state lawmakers.
…
Leaders of arts organizations in Florida, many of whom have worked in the state for decades, cannot remember a governor ever eliminating all of their grant funding. Even in the lean years of the Great Recession, at least a nominal amount — say, 5 percent of the recommended total — was approved.
Established arts organizations usually know better than to overly rely on nonrecurring state dollars subject to the discretion of politicians, said Michael Tomor, executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art. But to cut funding at a time when arts organizations are still struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic sends a concerning message “that taxpayer dollars should not be used in support of arts and culture,” he added.
…
Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, gave no explanation for zeroing out the arts grants. His office said in a statement that he made veto decisions “that are in the best interests of the State of Florida.”
In all, Mr. DeSantis vetoed nearly $950 million in proposed spending and proclaimed that the remaining $116.5 billion came in under the previous year’s budget.
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This man has not felt joy a single time in his life.
What a shit hole
Fascism.
The Nazis punished intellectuals and artists.
If the goal is to destroy art culture in Florida, I guess the Russian psyops have done their work.
Enjoy brutalist, colorless Florida in a couple of generations.
Is that what happens to architecture when fully submerged in salt water ?
Brutalism? You wish. Corporate style.
I think at that point you wander into whatever the architectural equivalent of Zombie Formalism is.
Because arts uplift, and misery is a huge part of the engine of fascism
Well adjusted societies have less temptation for it on the pro side, and a lot stronger and more inspired resistance to it from the anti side. It needs to breed sickness in order to really take hold and thrive.
I doubt DeSantis has that much of an organized plan for it, of course; I think it’s simple mean spirited ness on his part that he happened to see some vulnerable people that he can punish.
Art is also political, and more popular with open minded people than regressives. Fascists have historically hated art.
Not entirely true, they can’t get enough of art that is exactly like the things they already like. A boring landscape that could have been painted a century earlier? They love that shit.
But if you dare try to get creative (with message or medium) they will demand your head.
This high heeled tough guy wannabe is the living embodiment of poor and spiteful decision making. Nothing he does helps anybody. It’s fascinating really. Everyday I wake up I count my blessings I escaped that shit hole state
Fascist 101:
Blame minorities
Get to Power
Make things worse for everyone
Blame minorities harder
Manifest more power
…
run on “government bad”
get elected
govern poorly
“told you so”
Nothing he does helps anybody.
He’s been a real boon for the state’s money laundering, human trafficking, landlord profiteering, and fossil fuel industries.
I think he does help some people, primarily his rich donors and the rest of the do nothing class.
Yeah, I get it. When has the world ever become a better place when nations fund artworks?
Look at this Florentine shit:
That is what you get when a nation’s leader becomes a patron of the arts. Is that sort of smut what you want our kids seeing?
Next thing theyll do it paint porn on the roof of the Cistine chapel, however you spell it
You’re saying a cis teen painted this chapel? Woke agenda!
And it took him like 30 years.
The true horror is that this is some Greek smut. We need good, clean Christian nudity for our money.
Fucking Aristophanes… getting famous just because the Athenian government wasted money on dramatic competitions.
Greek smut.
You know the Greeks were one of the first editors of the bible? I think they gave us the Old Testament.
Those patrons of the arts the medicis were the oligarchs of their time.
And they used part of their considerable wealth to fund the arts.
Desantis hates culture.
Republicans hate culture
“When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun”
Seems that’s a slight mangling of the line, but it’s a common Nazi trope
Was it Goering?
Edit: it was not, see below.
The first paragraph on the wikipedia page linked says
"The statement “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun”, variously misattributed to Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, was in fact a corrupted version of a line in his play Schlageter. "
So no, I don’t think so.
Whoa there pal.
What part of driving pickup trucks with giant tires through the mud while drinking cases of ~~bud light ~~ Modelo and wearing jorts and a tank top with a picture of Rambo Trump firing footballs from a grenade launcher isn’t culture?
Culture cuts through their slimey veneer
It’s not that.
Outraging the left fires his base.
The Left: People who like art
Look at how art fared in Nazi Germany.
I mean, you can scratch that up more to the war time economy than anything.
If all your young artistic talent is getting methed up, loaded into APCs, and driven into the thick of Russian winter, they’ll have less time to make art at home.
I might argue that the biggest thing we’ve done for the arts in the United States is to eliminate the draft. Now you can have a professional artistic community AND a professional military. Then they can come together to make the next Top Gun or Transformers or Marvel movie.
I’m pretty sure this is all related to Hitler’s failing out of art school.
Monocultures are as stupid as they are dangerous.
Yeah! Fuck lawns!
Rotation! Revolution!
He doesn’t know what culture is.
Sure he does. It’s drinking a warm can of Bud at a Lee Greenwood concert.
It’s Bud woke or something? Or did they move on from that already?
They offered an apology for daring to do a small barely publicized promotion with a queer person and then did a partnership with UFC, so they love the all-American company owned by the Belgians again.
HORSES!
The horses woke up now? I’m so out of the loop.
You can’t defund social welfare programmes without defunding the arts first. To defund healthcare you have to defund the arts. To defund schools, you first have to defund the arts.
You know where this is going.
The arts are the canary and it is lying dead at the bottom of the cage.
To defund healthcare you have to defund the arts.
To defund schools, you first have to defund the arts.Why are the arts required to be done first, or at all? I’m not seeing it. They seem separate, and doable in any order.
That’s a fair question.
The arts are seen as a luxury and a frippery. They are also seen as elitist.
If you want to defund public services and remain popular, the playbook is to remove the arts first. That way you are demonstrating the order of needs.
What a fucking shithead
I hope some of the “artists” that make those photos of “trump” with shirt off and a fake chiseled, glistening physique get unintentionally caught up in this grant cancellation - you know these images, the ones they stare at for hours while locked in the bathroom thinking about how straight they are.
Ha! The last line!
At least he’s not on a bear. And bear is not on him.
How much you wanna bet that somebody tied to the arts recently emasculated Ron in public? Pulling funding from a huge swath of people over a petty personal embarrassment is a very on-brand move for DeSantis.
Is there a perception that arts are more likely to have gay and lesbian people? Dumbass would do anything to hurt them.
Not even that the arts have more gay people, but people involved in the arts are much more likely to be accepting and fair to gay people. So they want to hurt these people too. This is maybe overused but I think it’s appropriate and I think about it a lot:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
This guy originally supported Hitler. He said this after the war.
Does a bear shit in the woods?
When does his tenure as governor end? He can’t run again so guess he tries for congress.
When does his tenure as governor end?
He’s obligated to take a two year hiatus from his current position at the end of eight years. But he’s free to run for another office during the downtime.
That’s why Rick Scott became a Senator after his gubernatorial tenure.
And people elected him after that tenure. That’s the crazy part.
Florida has a long history of bombarding the North Atlantic ex-pat contingent with reactionary propaganda and disenfranchising everyone else.
I wish this turd would choke on his banana pudding already.
This comment would get you banned on Reddit.
Exactly…and this ain’t Reddit so Say what you mean
“I wish this piece of shit waste of oxygen would choke on his food and then fucking die.”
Florida and her meatball will be textbook evidence of a failed state swallowed by the Ocean and drowned by social conservatism terrorism.
failed state swallowed by the Ocean
Not for another 40-150 years. By then local politics will have shifted substantially in the state, and future external fascists can claim Florida was destroyed for being too brown, woke, and gay.
Florida woke and brown? Half the state literally needs to take a nap, and the only brown is in their Depends.
Florida has one of the highest Latin and African American populations in the country. They just aren’t allowed to vote.
And over half of the under 18 population of Florida is non-white. In another twenty years it will be majority minority.
By the time to state is fully fucked by climate change, you’re going to see reactionaries in the Midwest having a field day saying the state failed because it turned into “Detroit” wink wink nudge nudge
Detroit failed because of automation and off-shoring. Things that could have been repaired or prevented politically, sure. But not directly caused by policies based in bigotry and ignorance.
If any correlation can be made, it’s from white-flight. Which would be caused by Detroit’s massive loss of jobs and Florida’s massive loss of land. But white flight, imo, is the reaction, not the catalyst, of its downfall.
Detroit failed because of automation and off-shoring.
That’s the mechanism behind why it failed, but not the reason for the policy. Automation and off-shoring were tools intended to re-segregate and depress the wealth of the working class. Once the city sufficiently shocked into collapse, financial investment came flooding back into the city in the form of foreclosure sale purchases and low-wage service sector expansion. The modern city is seeing the first population expansion it’s enjoyed in decades, but with an enormous new disparity in income and political organization between the richest and poorest residents. Dan Gilbert, the co-founder of the largest private mortgage lender in the US - Quicken Loans (now Rocket Mortgage) - owns enormous swaths of the downtown district and has his talons in a host of municipal and state political figures.
He’s revitalized the city with enormous amounts of public money, laundered into private profits, through the private lending racket. And he’s used the depressed wages and real estate values in the town to reap huge margins on the cost of labor, relative to more traditional finance centers like New York or Dallas.
This sounds like social regressivism rather than terrorism.
Might be that they will, but for now they are doing very well on an objective scale, beeing placed on #1 for education and economy compared to the other states and beeing on #9 overall.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/florida
If this is able to hold will remain to be seen.
#1 for education
This is the same Florida where the governor has already gotten rid of some AP courses and has suggested getting rid of them completely, right?
This is also the same Florida that now teaches children that black people learned useful skills when they were slaves, right?
Sounds like pretty low bar.
That is one sketchy ranking if I ever saw one.
OP is being dishonest about it too. It’s #1 for higher education in Florida, #10 for K-12. And I’m not sure where they get #10 from because it looks like it’s marginally above average based on their own numbers.
In fact, as far as I can tell, their whole metric for #1 is because Florida college students end up in less debt than in other states. And that is great, don’t get me wrong, but not exactly the best education metric.
It’s a bit silly that Florida ranks above states like Massachusetts and California when it comes to higher education. I don’t know that any Florida university comes close to Harvard or CalTech. Cheaper, sure. A better quality education? I doubt it.
Same for economics. Their metrics are slightly above average, how is that #1?
I hadn’t even looked into it after seeing how bogus the education numbers were, but that also doesn’t shock me.
It also occurred to me that their main metric for K-12 education was high school graduation rate and since there’s no national education standards, that can mean different things for different states. The other metric was a math score based on something I’ve never heard of, but it was not a test my 14-year-old here in Indiana has taken yet and it’s not the SATs.
And part of their education score is “citizens holding degrees” which… That’s not education, that’s attainment rate.
And a lot of those citizens are retirees from other states who can afford to retire in Florida. So of course they’re more likely to hold degrees.
It’s a bit silly that Florida ranks above states like Massachusetts and California when it comes to higher education
The quality of education in these states varies radically by zip code and regional average income.
In California, the local school board superintendent Joseph Komrosky lost a recall election for trying to ban critical race theory (a thing his district wasn’t formally teaching) on campuses, among other shady bullshit. But his ilk isn’t unusual in the right wing fruit basket of SoCal or the Techbro patriarchy infesting the Stanford campus.
Education in these states can be better. But it can also be right in line with the Florida reactionary crowd, and for the same reasons. This is a national project by American plutocrats to brainwash the next generation of young people.
Well he’s already axing that 1% in education by cutting all the arts funding. Science will probably be next.
A short boost from tax breaks to convince rich people to move there doesn’t make the place financially successful or livable. It just looks better for a bit.
The category is a bit wider than that, but yes, low taxes seem to contribute.
https://www.richstatespoorstates.org/states/FL/
Edit:
Did a little digging after some flaws have been pointed out by @Silentia below. This source is not neutral.
https://ballotpedia.org/ALEC_Rich_States,_Poor_States_Report
The American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonpartisan organization of state legislators, releases an annual report entitled Rich States, Poor States: ALEC-Laffer State Economic Competitiveness Index, which analyzes economic competitiveness in each state. The report is authored by Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore (chief economist at the Heritage Foundation), and Jonathan Williams, the director of the Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative 501©(3) nonprofit think tank founded in 1973 and based in Washington, D.C.[1] In 2013, The Atlantic described the organization as “the de facto policy arm of the congressional conservative caucus.”[
I’m assuming that’s the Laffer behind “the Laffer curve,” AKA the unscientific bullshit “graph” he drew on a cocktail napkin that would essentially become the basis for supply-side economics AKA “trickle down.”
That Laffer?
Because ruining the US economy and setting us on a 3+ decade ride towards record (and frankly inhumane) income inequality once just wasn’t enough I guess.
Fucking ghouls.
If billionaire real estate magnets say your education system is good, who are we to argue?
I took a look at the first ranking I saw. You a free to have a look for studys or other objective sources that come to a different conclusion.
I don’t wish to invest that time right now, but I’ll be happy to be proven wrong by a better source if you want to look for one.
I don’t wish to invest that time right now
Maybe don’t cite something if you have no idea how it reached its conclusions.
What an absolute skid mark.
