The video concerns a project that Betsy and Dick DeVos funded continuously from 1993 to 2010, that aims to raise up a crop of “thousands of Rick Santorums in the next generation.”
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, it comes straight from a 2014 SSI video celebrating the program’s 20th anniversary.
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 VP 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.
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 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” was hacked.
The Gathering community now dispenses over $1 billion dollars a year to steer America, and the world, towards a “biblical” future.
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.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlGP6GDz8BI
Larry Elder Verified account @larryelder 