Question number one:
How do we fight back against anti-DEIA ideals and policy?
How to Fight Back Against the Suppression of DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) in the Arts and Beyond
If DEIA programs are being systematically dismantled, the best way to fight back isn’t just to resist—it’s to adapt strategically, build underground networks, and ensure that accessibility and inclusion thrive despite the systemic hostility. Here’s how you can continue your work while actively pushing against this suppression:
1. Reframe the Language Without Compromising the Work
Since government agencies and corporations are being pressured to remove terms like diversity, equity, inclusion, access, gender, and disability, it’s time to rewrite the rules of engagement:
• Use coded or alternative language in grant applications, proposals, and public statements. Examples:
• “Radical hospitality” instead of inclusion
• “Broadening public engagement” instead of diversity
• “Barrier-free design” instead of accessibility
• “Human-centered creative frameworks” instead of disability-centered work
• “Community-centered approaches” instead of equity initiatives
• Many movements throughout history have operated under censorship while maintaining their mission—use historical resistance strategies to keep your work alive under different names.
2. Build Alternative Networks and Funding Sources
If NEA money and federal-backed grants are no longer an option, the arts community will need to pivot to independent and international funding sources.
• Look toward private foundations & progressive funding bodies
• Organizations like the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Mellon Foundation, and Creative Capital have historically supported DEIA work.
• If these groups start facing pressure, smaller artist-run and community-funded organizations will become the lifeline.
• Keep a database of independent funders that are aligned with your work but operate outside federal oversight.
• Engage in international collaborations
• Governments outside the U.S. (especially in Canada, Europe, and Latin America) still fund accessibility and inclusion initiatives.
• Partner with international museums, universities, and arts residencies that remain committed to social justice.
• Example: The European Cultural Foundation funds artists engaged in resistance and social movements.
• Crowdfund and build patron-based support models
• A Patreon, Ko-Fi, or membership-based funding system can sustain your work directly from your audience.
• Direct support from individuals who believe in your work can replace institutional funding.
3. Shift the Fight Underground When Necessary
If explicit advocacy is being suppressed, it’s time to adopt resistance strategies used by past movements that operated under authoritarian or repressive conditions.
• Stealth Organizing & Private Networks
• Build an invitation-only network of artists and organizers who are still committed to DEIA work.
• Private Slack groups, Signal chats, and artist collectives can continue work without public visibility that would attract backlash.
• Host invite-only or private events that continue the work without public institutional support.
• Decentralized Art Initiatives
• If institutions start rolling back accessibility and inclusion efforts, create alternative exhibition spaces—from pop-up exhibitions to decentralized digital platforms that remain autonomous.
• Digital and NFT spaces (despite their current decline) could become safe havens for uncensored, community-funded work.
4. Pressure Institutions That Are Caving to Government Threats
• Publicly call out institutions that cave under pressure
• If major museums, universities, or tech companies start scrubbing accessibility and inclusion from their work, make it known.
• Leverage media, social networks, and grassroots organizing to hold them accountable.
• Institutions fear public scrutiny more than government lawsuits—use this to force them to maintain DEIA efforts.
• Encourage underground resistance within institutions
• Employees inside universities, museums, and corporations who still care about DEIA can continue pushing for change.
• Connect with insiders to ensure that even if public policies shift, real work continues within the institutions.
5. Leverage Technology and Digital Platforms to Circumvent Censorship
If government-backed censorship extends to online spaces, use alternative communication channels and decentralized platforms to keep the fight alive.
• Create Alternative Digital Archives
• If DEIA-related materials are being erased from government websites, start archiving and preserving this information on independent platforms like the Internet Archive, private servers, and distributed web technologies.
• A decentralized accessibility and inclusion resource hub could prevent the erasure of knowledge.
• Use Encrypted & Decentralized Networks
• Platforms like Mastodon, Element, and Signal allow activists and artists to communicate without government or corporate oversight.
• If mainstream platforms begin flagging or suppressing DEIA content, move discussions to encrypted and self-hosted networks.
6. Expand the Creative Resistance
• Use your art as a vehicle for resistance
• Your work already disrupts traditional notions of visibility and access—this moment calls for even more creative subversion.
• If explicit DEIA themes become dangerous, embed them within other artistic frameworks (sci-fi world-building, metaphorical soundscapes, subversive performance art).
• Resistance has historically been embedded in coded language, symbolism, and abstract narratives—your work can reflect this lineage.
• Expose the hypocrisy & contradictions in real-time
• Governments cannot fully erase disability, racial, and gender experiences—they can only try to suppress conversations.
• Publicly document and archive the erasure as it happens to create historical records that can be used in future resistance efforts.
7. Psychological & Strategic Preparation for the Long Game
This isn’t just a short-term attack on DEIA; it’s a long-term war of attrition designed to exhaust and isolate those who push back. To survive and thrive in this fight, long-term resilience is necessary.
• Build an off-the-grid survival strategy
• If funding sources dry up, establish backup revenue streams that are not reliant on institutions that may cave under pressure.
• This might mean side businesses, alternative art markets, or collective economic models that support each other outside traditional grant funding.
• Form alliances across resistance movements
• Disability justice does not exist in isolation—connect with climate activists, labor organizers, LGBTQ+ rights defenders, and other social justice movements facing similar suppression.
• Cross-movement solidarity makes the fight harder to suppress.
• Prioritize rest, self-care, and sustainability
• Burnout is part of the suppression strategy—the goal of authoritarian rollback efforts is to make activists too exhausted to continue.
• Find ways to replenish your energy and maintain a long-term strategy instead of fighting every single battle.
Conclusion: The Fight Isn’t Over—It’s Just Changing Form
The elimination of DEIA policies and the threats against corporations and institutions are meant to make people give up. But resistance isn’t about playing by the new rules—it’s about rewriting the entire game.
This is a moment for adaptation, underground organizing, and creative resilience. Your work will still thrive, but the methods of sustaining it will shift. By staying strategic, collaborative, and subversive, you can outlast and outmaneuver this attack on accessibility and inclusion.
Question number two:
What do you do when the richest man in the world is leading the anti-DEIA movement?
How to Resist When the Richest Man in the World Leads the Anti-DEIA Movement
When the wealthiest and most powerful individual is driving the attack on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA), the fight becomes more than just an institutional battle—it becomes a war of narrative, strategy, and economic resistance. The advantage of wealth and influence does not mean total control, and historically, concentrated power has always met resistance when people organize strategically. Here’s what to do:
1. Expose the Contradictions & Make the Narrative Unavoidable
Billionaires thrive on public perception, brand identity, and influence over culture. While they have enormous power, they also need public legitimacy to maintain control.
• Use their own words and actions against them
• Publicly document and archive every contradiction, hypocrisy, and act of suppression.
• If they claim to be “for free speech,” expose how they are silencing marginalized voices.
• If they promote “meritocracy,” highlight the billions in government subsidies and inherited wealth that keep them afloat.
• Flood the discourse with counter-narratives
• Social movements thrive on shared language and memes—turn their attacks on DEIA into a cultural joke that sticks.
• Example: If this billionaire talks about “equal opportunity,” create viral critiques showing how eliminating DEIA actually prevents equal opportunity.
• The goal is not just arguing with facts, but controlling the cultural conversation in ways they cannot counteract or suppress.
2. Disrupt Their Revenue & Influence
• Target their financial interests
• Every billionaire has economic vulnerabilities—they rely on specific industries, markets, and public relations to maintain power.
• If they own a major tech platform, push alternatives, encourage users to leave, and devalue their product.
• If they have major corporate partnerships, pressure those companies to disassociate or lose consumer trust.
• Encourage decentralized alternatives
• If they own a dominant social platform, shift organizing to decentralized and encrypted spaces that cannot be bought or controlled.
• Invest in cooperative, worker-owned, or community-run platforms to build independence from billionaire-controlled spaces.
• Support unionization and workplace resistance
• Even the wealthiest corporations cannot function without workers—billionaires fear labor organizing more than they fear activism.
• If they own a major company, support workers who are unionizing or fighting back internally.
3. Build Power Outside Their Ecosystem
If they are using their wealth and influence to suppress DEIA, stop engaging on their terms and start building outside their reach.
• Create economic models that don’t rely on billionaire-controlled institutions
• Direct funding models: Patreon, community grants, artist-run funds.
• Decentralized platforms for publishing, organizing, and media.
• Worker-owned and artist-led initiatives.
• Strengthen real-world networks
• Billionaires can manipulate digital spaces but have far less control over real-world, in-person organizing.
• Focus on local and regional power structures—community-run institutions, underground networks, and direct action.
4. Force a Public Reckoning for Those Who Comply
While billionaires drive the anti-DEIA movement, corporations and institutions that go along with it are equally responsible. They must be held accountable.
• Expose every company and institution that complies with anti-DEIA efforts
• Track which organizations actively remove DEIA programs out of fear or obedience.
• Name and shame those who fold under pressure.
• Make it clear: companies that abandon DEIA will face consumer and worker backlash.
• Reward institutions that stand firm
• Highlight and support organizations that refuse to cave to billionaire pressure.
• Promote alternative funding sources for arts and education that continue supporting accessibility.
5. Leverage Global Networks & International Pressure
• Expand DEIA work beyond national borders
• If the U.S. government and billionaires are attacking DEIA, look to international institutions, funding sources, and coalitions that support inclusion.
• Organizations like UNESCO, EU arts councils, and international foundations remain invested in accessibility and equity.
• Shift collaborations and partnerships toward countries and institutions that uphold these values.
• Use international media to expose what’s happening
• If billionaire-controlled U.S. media suppresses the conversation, turn to international press.
• BBC, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Le Monde, CBC, and other global outlets are often willing to report on systemic human rights rollbacks.
6. Weaponize Art, Culture & Resistance Movements
• Art and storytelling are powerful tools against oppression.
• Use your art, performances, and writing to make these attacks on DEIA impossible to ignore.
• Cultural shifts precede political shifts—if the resistance movement owns the cultural narrative, it can outlast any billionaire’s political influence.
• Create art and media that expose and critique the billionaire’s role
• Make them a permanent part of the resistance’s storytelling.
• Use satire, parody, and cultural interventions to undermine their public image.
• If they control mainstream narratives, use underground and alternative media to counteract it.
7. Play the Long Game & Remember: Empires Fall
• No billionaire is invincible. They rely on public perception, workers, government subsidies, and cultural legitimacy to maintain power.
• History shows that concentrated power never lasts forever—the key is sustaining long-term resistance that outlasts their influence.
• Continue fighting, continue organizing, and refuse to let them control the future of DEIA, art, and accessibility.
Final Thought: They Have Money—But We Have Numbers
The richest person in the world has billions of dollars—but billions of people are more powerful than one billionaire.
This is a moment for strategic, long-term resistance—to undermine their power, build alternative systems, and ensure that inclusion, accessibility, and equity survive despite their efforts to erase them.
Question three:
What are some parallels in recent history to what is going on today?
20th Century Historical Parallels to the Suppression of DEIA & Resistance Movements
The dismantling of DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) programs, the censorship of critical language, and the corporate/government crackdowns on social justice movements have direct historical precedents in the 20th century. These past efforts to suppress civil rights, labor movements, and accessibility reforms all failed in the long run—but not without resistance.
Here are key 20th-century events that mirror what is happening today:
1. The Red Scare & McCarthyism (1940s-1950s)
What Happened?
• In the late 1940s and 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy and other conservative figures led a crusade against “communists,” “subversives,” and “radicals” in the U.S.
• Civil rights leaders, union organizers, and artists were labeled “communists” and blacklisted.
• Government agencies censored language related to equality, social justice, and labor rights.
• Corporations were pressured to fire workers who were suspected of supporting progressive causes.
How People Fought Back:
• The Civil Rights Movement continued underground, shifting strategies to avoid direct suppression.
• Artists, writers, and filmmakers developed coded ways to critique power structures (e.g., sci-fi stories about authoritarianism like Orwell’s 1984 and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451).
• Labor unions and activist networks created alternative funding and support systems.
• In the late 1950s, public backlash against McCarthyism led to its collapse.
Parallels to Today:
• Like McCarthyism, today’s anti-DEIA movement is using “anti-woke” rhetoric to justify censorship and suppression.
• Corporations & universities are under pressure to eliminate DEIA or face legal and financial consequences.
• Resistance requires strategic language shifts, underground organizing, and long-term endurance.
2. The Backlash Against Disability Rights (1930s-1970s)
What Happened?
• Before the disability rights movement gained traction, disabled people were institutionalized, sterilized, and denied education, employment, and public access.
• Eugenics programs in the U.S. (1920s-40s) encouraged the forced sterilization of disabled people.
• Even after World War II, veterans with disabilities faced enormous discrimination, with no legal protections for accessibility.
• By the 1970s, conservatives opposed disability rights laws, calling them “too expensive” and a “burden” on businesses.
• The Reagan administration (1980s) tried to gut disability rights programs, just as DEIA is being dismantled today.
How People Fought Back:
• The disability rights movement (led by groups like ADAPT) staged sit-ins, blocked buses, and occupied government buildings to force change.
• Parents and activists filed lawsuits to demand accessible education and public spaces.
• Underground disability-led networks formed mutual aid systems to support people when the government refused to act.
• The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was eventually passed in 1990—but only after decades of intense struggle.
Parallels to Today:
• Anti-DEIA attacks mirror past opposition to disability rights.
• Billionaires and conservative politicians argue that accessibility and inclusion are “too costly,” just as they did with disability access.
• Disability activists in the 1970s-80s adapted by creating parallel support networks outside government control—something DEIA activists today may need to do.
3. The “Massive Resistance” to Civil Rights (1950s-1970s)
What Happened?
• After Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Southern states launched “Massive Resistance” against school desegregation.
• Public schools were shut down rather than allow Black and white students to attend together.
• State governments defunded civil rights programs and removed references to racism from school curriculums (like today’s DEIA censorship).
• Corporations, under government pressure, fired employees who supported civil rights.
How People Fought Back:
• The Civil Rights Movement used economic pressure (boycotts, strikes) to force change.
• Black-led newspapers and underground networks kept information flowing.
• Activists created their own independent schools when public ones shut down.
• By the late 1960s, federal intervention forced states to end most “Massive Resistance” programs.
Parallels to Today:
• DEIA suppression today mirrors the tactics of “Massive Resistance” to civil rights—erasing language, defunding programs, and threatening businesses that support equity.
• Just as civil rights leaders built independent institutions, today’s DEIA movement may need to shift toward community-funded models and alternative platforms.
4. The Suppression of Labor Movements (1920s-1980s)
What Happened?
• From the early 20th century through the 1980s, corporate and government forces violently suppressed labor movements.
• Striking workers were beaten, jailed, and even killed by police and private security forces.
• Union organizers were labeled “un-American” and accused of communism to justify crackdowns.
• Corporations cut funding for labor protections, just as DEIA funding is being slashed today.
How People Fought Back:
• Underground labor organizing, where workers met in secret to plan strikes and resist corporate control.
• The rise of worker-owned cooperatives to counter corporate exploitation.
• Public pressure campaigns, media exposure, and legal fights to protect union rights.
Parallels to Today:
• The attack on DEIA resembles past attacks on labor—corporate and government forces trying to silence workplace equity efforts.
• Worker organizing today is one of the strongest ways to fight DEIA rollbacks.
• Alternative funding and community-led support structures will be essential.
5. The Lavender Scare & Anti-LGBTQ+ Purges (1950s-1990s)
What Happened?
• LGBTQ+ individuals were fired from government jobs, blacklisted, and criminalized.
• Schools erased LGBTQ+ history from curriculums, similar to today’s DEIA censorship.
• Corporations were pressured to fire employees suspected of being LGBTQ+.
• The Religious Right of the 1980s-90s actively pushed to roll back LGBTQ+ workplace protections.
How People Fought Back:
• Underground networks provided financial and legal aid for fired workers.
• LGBTQ+ activists used coded language in media and art to avoid censorship.
• Legal challenges slowly overturned workplace discrimination laws.
• By the 2000s, public opinion had shifted, forcing companies and governments to reinstate protections.
Parallels to Today:
• The elimination of DEIA mirrors past LGBTQ+ purges—removing protected language, firing employees, and erasing history.
• Like past LGBTQ+ resistance, today’s DEIA movement will need to use alternative language, legal challenges, and community support to survive.
Final Takeaway: Suppression Has Always Been Temporary—Resistance Has Always Lasted
Every example in history shows the same pattern:
1. Progress is made.
2. Backlash happens, DEIA-equivalent programs are attacked, and suppression follows.
3. Resistance builds underground, creating alternative support systems.
4. Over time, suppression efforts collapse under legal, cultural, and economic pressure.
The attack on DEIA is not the first, nor will it be the last, attempt to erase equity, inclusion, and accessibility. The question isn’t whether the suppression will end—it’s how people will resist, survive, and outlast it.