Billionaires’ 2025 Plan to Bankrupt TN Schools, Part 1: From Amway to Bill Lee’s Way

Betsy Devos and her family amassed their billions by exploiting untold numbers of people around the globe with delusional schemes of becoming rich by buying in to the Devos family’s de facto Amway pyramid scheme. With promises of wealth and financial independence spouted during capitalist cult revival rallies, generations of the gullible and desperate have fallen prey to the siren song sung by agents of the corrupt, immoral, and unethical Devos clan and their army of recruiters and marketers. (Check out this NBC segment of Dateline here, or read the transcript here.)

Hoping to escape its international reputation as a corporate bloodsucker based on recruiting, exploiting, and discarding its distributors, Amway is now rebranded as Quixtar.  

Co-founded in 1959 by Richard Devos,  the enormously profitable Amway scam grew alongside the Devos patriarch’s extremist conservative political commitments and the family’s white nationalist religious fundamentalism.  Richard Devos was instrumental in founding and financially supporting the Council for National Policy (CNP), an ultra-right  John Birch Society spin-off that sought to “remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders” (Dallek, 2022). DeVos served as CNP's President from 1986-88 and 1990-93.

For the Devos clan, “pro-moral” translates to mean Christian nationalist.  As the school voucher movement failed to justify its existence on sound policy or empirical grounds, libertarian and fascist oligarchs like the Kochs and the Mercers turned to white Christian nationalists like the Devoses to sell their educationally-bankrupt and racist school voucher privatization scheme. After all, the Devos empire was built on a foundation of zealous propaganda, and these were exactly the skills needed to sell a voucher scheme that had been demonstrated inferior to public schools in terms of educational value. 

And so Betsy Devos was the “chosen one” for the Lout’s first-term Education Secretary, not because of any educational knowledge she had but, rather, for her already well-established and zealous connections to a right-wing infrastructure built to destroy public education, specifically because of public education's non-sectarian, humane, and democratic foundations.  Betsy’s leadership and support of voucher marketing organizations like American Federation for Children and Alliance for School Choice placed her front and center as the mouthpiece, albeit an ignorant one, for the latest fascist scheme to destroy public schools.

But the fascist oligarchs needed something else to sell increasingly unpopular school voucher schemes besides a theocratic billionaire zealot intent upon establishing her version of a white heaven on Earth. They needed willing politicians, either guided by greed, ignorance, and/or religious zealotry. 

Enter Tennessee Governor Bill Lee.