What's Betsy DeVos real agenda ? Watch this video.
Remember the disturbing 2005 documentary “Jesus Camp”, about a Christian fundamentalist summer camp that was raising up a new generation, as an “army of God”, to enter politics and carry on the culture wars ?
Well, Betsy DeVos — who will likely soon be confirmed as Donald Trump’s new secretary of education — began funding a very similar venture in the 1990s : the Student Statesmanship Institute, a creationist, anti-gay, “biblical worldview” politics summer training camp.
“Jesus Camp” included footage of camp director Becky Fischer stating her hope that children at her camp might achieve a similar level of dedication as young Hamas suicide bombers.
By contrast, Betsy DeVos’ own “Jesus camp” looks to the ability of 20th Century tyrants such as Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Lenin to mobilize young people. That’s not hyperbole on my part. It comes straight from a 2014 SSI video (see link, above) celebrating the program’s 20th anniversary.
In 2010, the Student Statesmanship Institute's annual fundraising banquet, that each year raises money to fund the SSI program, featured as its keynote speaker the former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. While serving as a U.S. Senator, Santorum told the Associated Press that same-sex marriage could lead to pedophilia and “man on dog” bestiality.
Following Santorum’s 2010 SSI keynote address, SSI founder and head James Muffett told SSI supporters at the banquet of his hope to see “thousands of Rick Santorums in the next generation”.
Especially zealous SSI students can join SSI’s elite “Ambassador League”, a yearlong program of indoctrination and training towards a career of political activism. Ambassador League student activities include writing letters to the editor. Some examples: one such published letter stated that, according to the Bible, homosexuals can’t get into heaven. Another, published 6 days before the 2012 presidential election, declared,
“everyone should stand firmly against the lies and trickery of the president. He is shoving America down the wastebasket.”
When publicly confronted, in questioning before the U.S. Senate, with the record of what her Prince Family Foundation had been funding (Betsy DeVos has for upwards of two decades been officially listed as a Vice President of the foundation along with Blackwater founder Erik Prince) DeVos simply denied any involvement by claiming that her being listed as a VP on years and years of Prince Foundation 990 tax forms was simply a “clerical error”.
But the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation was back in the 1990s funding very similar causes as the Prince Foundation has funded in the decade of the 2000s — such as the Family Research Council (listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT hate group) and Focus on The Family.
And, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation also funded the Student Statesmanship Institute, starting in the 1992-1993 calendar year. That funding continued up into 2010, and Betsy DeVos was listed on the SSI Advisory Board up into 2015.
Total Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation funding of SSI since 1992 has been at least $232,000, and that total increases to at least $369,000 if one includes funding from the Prince Family Foundation and the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation whose board membership tightly interlocks with that of the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation.
But it’s about more than money — since 1993, when Betsy DeVos was honorary chair of the first major fundraiser for SSI’s parent nonprofit (The Foundation For Traditional Values, whose sole enterprise is running SSI) Dick and Betsy DeVos have given SSI something more valuable — their name. DeVos.
In Michigan, the DeVos name is huge — the conjoined DeVos/Prince dynasties are now probably the most powerful single force in Michigan politics.
The DeVos family has spearheaded what has become the almost complete capture of Michigan government by the conjoined forces of radical privatization and the religious right. The DeVoses represent the confluence of those two tendencies.
Now, American mainstream media has been loath to recognize that Betsy and Dick DeVos are squarely in the religious right, as much as any single national figure recognized as such, like Rick Santorum.
But it goes deeper than that. In 2012, I discovered an astonishing library of recordings from the annual meeting of elite conservative Christian philanthropists whose community and yearly event is known, simply, as “The Gathering”.
The Gathering community now dispenses over $1 billion dollars a year to steer America, and the world, towards a “biblical” future. The event was launched from a 1985 meeting of several “friends” at the Arlington, VA mansion known as “The Cedars” that’s owned and operated by the group that runs the National Prayer Breakfast : The Fellowship.
This secretive evangelical network, whose members refer to themselves as a “Christian mafia”, also looks to the fanatical dedication that 20th Century tyrants — such as Hitler, Lenin, and Mao — were able to inspire. Longtime Fellowship head Doug Coe has espoused such sentiments, and Fellowship heavyweight Rick Warren has done that too.
But even among the elites of the Fellowship and its financial wing, the DeVoses are special.
I learned that from listening to their 2001 appearance at The Gathering, audio of which I posted in 2015 and that was subsequently picked up in a vastly influential Politico story, which showcased something Betsy DeVos said at The Gathering 2001 — that public education could “advance God’s kingdom”.
What strikes me now, about that 2001 audio from The Gathering is that the DeVos/Prince power couple were, even among the assembled multimillionaires and billionaires, regarded as movement royalty. And, there’s reason.
Prince family money helped launch the Family Research Council. Amway founder and DeVos patriarch Richard DeVos funded Gospel films, which played a major role mobilizing the religious right as a political force by publicizing the idea of Francis Schaeffer, and he has served in several top leadership roles of the shadowy Council for National Policy, which brings together activists of the religious right with donors who fund their projects.
And, perhaps more importantly, the DeVoses didn’t merely help create the rising religious right — they pioneered a stealth approach which has now come to characterize the movement. The DeVoses have taken on strategic secular objectives which, if achieved, make the eventual triumph of the religious right, it’s dominance of American politics, all-but inevitable.
Along with Koch brothers operatives, Dick DeVos was part of the cabal which, since 2007, had schemed to implement a “right to work” bill in Michigan. The plot succeeded in 2012. Taking down unions has long been a shared Koch/religious right objective.
Public education is an even bigger target, and there the DeVoses have led the way. In the 2000 election, they backed school voucher ballot initiatives in California and Michigan. Both were decisively rejected by voters.
So, the DeVoses decided to try a sneakier approach. In a 2002 speech at the Heritage Foundation, Dick DeVos outlined a stealth plan to foster charter school initiatives on a state-by-state basis, with state-level organizations that would appear to be local initiatives.
While such efforts might seem secular, they have diverted a growing stream of public money to private religious schools and charter schools, some of which have a covert religious agenda.
Along the way, as they have begin to enter national politics, Dick and Betsy DeVos have over the last decade and a half shifted the funding pattern of their namesake family foundation — away from overt culture war concerns.
But meanwhile, Betsy also sat on the board of the Prince Foundation which doled out substantial funding to the hard religious right. And, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation’s board interlocks tightly with the board of the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, which also heavily funds the religious right.
In short, Betsy and Dick DeVos have become experts in stealth politics, and the reporters and journalists who cover them almost inevitably lack the critical discernment but also the background knowledge to cut through the ruse.
If — or when — Betsy DeVos is confirmed as Secretary Education, don’t expect anything blunt. She will not proclaim, a Christian flag waving behind her, the advent of a new regime of Christian fundamentalist madrassas.
She will announce a plan that will appear secular and, to many, even reasonable. But, a few years down, the end result may not seem reasonable at all, and will align with the objectives of initiatives such as the Student Statesmanship Institute : reclaiming America for Christ or, at least, the DeVos version of Christ — a Christ of coercive social legislation and radical privatization, bent on smashing the middle class and putting America under the boot-heel of a thousand sanctimonious Rick Santorums.
( on a related subject, also see my story DeVos Privatization Brings Racist "New Jim Crow" Education To Detroit Schools )
