Here’s a story that will be breaking this week in advance of the January 31st final vote to confirm Betsy DeVos as Donald Trump’s new Secretary of Education.
If you feel so moved, please share this video !
Several hundred thousand public school teachers across the nation really need to see it, because Betsy DeVos may be coming for their jobs.
Forewarned is forearmed — despite blandishments from the right leaning spectrum of American media, the real Betsy DeVos is far more radical than the American public knows.
So, Betsy and Dick DeVos, for decades, have supported an educational venture that looks to the prowess of Hitler and Lenin at mobilizing youth and aspires to raise up a crop of “thousands of Rick Santorums in the next generation” ?
Who could have imagined ?
Their foundation 990 tax forms show that Betsy and Dick DeVos’ financial support for the Student Statesmanship Institute goes back as far as the early 1990s, and in 1993 Betsy was honorary chair for the first fundraiser of the nonprofit that runs SSI. She was listed on the SSI advisory board up into 2015.
One way to look at SSI is as a DeVos funded and supported educational venture which is possibly even more renegade, in terms of being wholly unaccountable, than the “wild west” charter school regime inflicted upon the state of Michigan, and the city of Detroit, by Betsy DeVos’ school privatization steamroller machine.
SSI promotes a literal interpretation of the Bible, and all that tends to flow from it — creationism, anti-LGBT ideology, and so on, the whole raft of positions typically associated with the politicized Christian right. But SSI also pushes the sort of radical privatization, pro-business, anti-regulatory agenda associated with the Koch brothers.
No surprise there — Amway patriarch Richard DeVos can be found at Koch brothers events sitting alongside the two brothers, looking much at ease and very much their equal.
As researcher Rachel Tabachnick described in a landmark 2011 Talk2action.org story, the DeVos and Prince families, both of which have financially supported SSI, are “at Intersection of Radical Free Market Privatizers and Religious Right”.
It’s really the worst of both worlds, and the combined package looks suspiciously close to what’s long been envisioned by the Christian Reconstructionism movement, which has long aspired to smash American public education.
By 2012, the conjoined DeVos and Prince families were doling out over $46,000,000 in philanthropic largesse, and the two dynasties have played a whopping and almost wholly overlooked role in rearing up the modern Christian right, a movement now taking control of entire sectors of the federal government, a movement that now dominates Congress and the Senate.
Back in 2011, mainstream media pundits were pooh-poohing something called “dominionism”. Well, its day has arrived. Fasten your seat belt.