Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Amway: The Gravedigger of Democracy

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

Robert is joined again by Jack O'Brien to continue to discuss Amway. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's truth in my squad? I'm Robert Evans. This is part two of our Amway episode. And by popular acclaim, Sophie, Jack, and I are going to start this by digging into the fact that when he decided Amway needed, it's an internal police force to make sure people weren't making illegal fraudulent claims about the products. He wanted to call it the truth squad that he was profiting off of.

Yeah, that made me think of all the, you know, the fact that everything that modern mega companies are profiting from are the things that like get the most attention and scrutiny from the media like Facebook and lies and, you know, misinformation. And so they're like, yeah, we're going to invest in like squat like these groups that are this like entire branch of our company. That's going to be the truth squad or the Facebook equivalent of that. And then like they just have their knees cut out from under them like the second that nobody's looking. Yeah, I should just named it the NARC squad. The NARC squad. Yeah, it's just so culty the name. It's like I it's like triggering. I'm like, yeah. Thank you. Jack. Hey.

Do your kids use the tick tock? Are they talking? His kids are so not old enough to talk. Because I just came across a letter Kevin Barron posted it, who's some guy on Twitter. I don't know that he got an email from his public school system that I just want to talk about now. And it's about like kids have there's like a series of escalatingly criminal tick tock challenges that kids are putting on each other in public schools, apparently, or at least in schools. Yes. Yeah, September's vandalized school bathrooms that I can confirm from friends who are teachers that their school bathrooms have been like massively vandalized on a problematic scale, like several of them are non functional. October is apparently smack a staff member.

I have no idea how accurate the rest of these are, but a bunch of kids did vandalize their school bathrooms for tick tock in September. There was a tick. There was a thing where they were supposed to be like stealing the biggest item in the room from schools like people and they would like take like they would take like an entire like sink set up from a bathroom from a school and take it home. Yeah. Talk about it and it's like, um, that's crime crime. Yeah, that's a crime. Yeah, a bunch of these are crimes. January is apparently jab a breast. December's deck the halls and show your balls. February's mess up school signs. Um, yeah, I don't know.

It seems like and grab a very different like I don't know who's children. I don't know who's decided these are like the things that are going to be done. I will say that I did walk in on my five year old and three year old planning this entire thing out. We found the origin point. Yeah, they are the bread the nerve center of this entire plot. Um, it feels, uh, suspiciously similar to like, uh, you know, you combine anything that's like a new fangled thing that parents don't understand. And, you know, maybe a seed of truth of like some misbehavior and like,

it just seems like catnip for the local news and parents, um, and educators, but you're saying that they're actually destroying bathrooms, which I can confirm that some kids for TikTok challenges have destroyed bathrooms in a couple of different schools, at least where I am. So there's an extent to which some not, I think this may just be that like that happened. There was a TikTok scam or a TikTok, not scam, but there was like a TikTok thing to like vandalize your school bathroom for the likes and a bunch of kids did it. And then school instructors like flipped the fuck out and somebody convinced them that there was a whole list of things for the next year because I can't imagine,

I can't imagine that a bunch of kids like planned the next 11 months of TikTok. Like who would even do that, right? Too much planning. Um, yeah. Jab a breast day. Jab a breast day seems kind of weird. Created by a like guidance counselor, like. I will believe in Deck the Hall show your balls.

That, that I will believe in. That's sprung from the mind of a year old. Yeah. Um, so I don't know, we'll see. It could just be a, it could be a real interesting the next couple of months on the tox. Stop fucking with your teachers. Yeah. Leave your teachers alone.

I do, I don't mind stealing the biggest thing in the room and then like returning. That's funny. That is fun. Like I'm trying to think of the biggest thing. Most of, I guess it would either be the teacher's desk or like the whiteboard. Yeah. If you could steal your teacher's desk like props to you, that's impressive. That is cool.

But, but it does. I mean, destroying school bathrooms is not cool, especially during a pandemic. Kind of a bad idea. No, that sucks. So does like slapping a teacher. That's like one less hand washing station that people. Yeah. Anything that violates someone's personal space or like bodily autonomy,

like get the fuck out of here. I shouldn't be showing your balls to anyone, but. I mean, yeah, that's, that's problematic for a number of reasons. Yeah. Um, if it was, I don't know, deck the hall, steal the school resource officer's car. Well, we'll probably move on to the episode. Um, okay. So Jack.

Robert. Tobrefest. Jack Tobrefest. Sure. That's the only holiday I celebrate, Jack. Yeah. It's all October for me. I'm just, just, I don't know what I'm doing.

I never really stopped to figure out how to celebrate Jack Tobrefest. I just hold it in my heart. Just Apple strudels day after day. Strudel, piles of strudel. So Jack, after Gerald Ford got Jimmy Carter in 1976, you know, he was the big in that Van Andel and Rich DeVos had that Amway's like political in was when he gets, you know, it's not, not president anymore. They didn't give up on influencing the government.

They just got better at it. They got into increasingly overt political fundraising. So they moved from, you know, they had started kind of supporting free enterprise think tanks and putting out propaganda booklets to try to, you know, change hearts and minds. Um, and they moved on to just making direct $10,000 donations per year to the Republican National Committee. This earned them the rank of Eagle, if you're curious what that gets you. Um, Richard DeVos as usual went a bit further.

The fucking Boy Scout? Yeah. Yeah, it kind of is. Um, well, you know, the Republicans love them Eagles. Yeah. Okay. Big, big, big on Eagles. So 10,000 a year doesn't sound like that much.

Well, this is 76. Okay. Yeah. That's like, I don't know, a hundred grand. It's a lot of money. Okay. More than it is now. And they're also giving more money, right?

This is what they're giving to the party, but this is like emblematic of the money they're shotgunning to different conservative causes. Uh, Richard DeVos started putting a lot of money into pushing for more right to work causes, um, which despite their name are actually make it easier for corporations to fire people without cause. Um, they're kind of skirt through like different union, uh, uh, restrictions and whatnot. Um, DeVos pumped a fortune into the council on a union free environment, which was an organization dedicated to stopping, making it harder for people to unionize.

Um, it had been founded in 1977, the year he started giving it money and he was almost immediately made a director. We saw this earlier with one of the other groups that like this group will start, he'll give them a bunch of money and then he'll be in charge of them. Um, so he's tactically donating money. I'm sure there's a tax thing there, right? Where like he pays less taxes cause he's giving these money, but also these are groups that he effectively runs and solicits donations from other people.

And they're just all of these different organizations are effectively like instruments of Richard DeVos's political whims, um, which he hates unions, um, which why are you even care about unions, Richard DeVos and wait, like none of them are your employees. How could you like, I've been thinking about that, like, because they go from this, uh, you know, uh, triangulatively shaped financial model, uh, thing company to like going really hard in the direction of like be almost like legendarily, uh, you know, big influencers in the, in the realm of like conservative politics in like all these different ways. And I, I feel like there's like when you look at the central lie that their family is trying

to perpetuate, it's that they like deserve more than their fair share rather than less because they've like who they've morally they're like fucked so many people over. Like the amount of damage caused by this company where everyone who works for them loses all their money is like absolutely incalculable. And so they have to convince themselves that not only that that's not bad, but that they are worth like billions times as much as other people. And I think one of the ways they do that is by believing that everyone is lazier than them, and so it's unions would make it easy for people to be lazy and like laziness at

scale. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just trying to like perpetuate this lie across generations, like to make it so that reality like bends to like kind of your warped like hope. And this is how he bends reality too, because like he believes that his opinion, his beliefs are worth more than other peoples and he makes that real because he has all of these different political action organizations that are lobbying and that are getting donations that he winds

up running either he was the one who orchestrated them being started or because he gives so much he just winds up in charge. But these are all instruments of his will that effectively like he was one of the earlier earliest rich people in the country to really figure out how to make how to do like what the Koch brothers do, right, where you have this sprawling network of think tanks and lobbying groups and influence operations that all basically exist to make people, to make it so that people what you think about the world matters. And so to keep Charlie Kirk employed.

Yeah. And to keep Charlie Kirk employed. Now one of the first politicians, Amway went whole hog on electing was Sue Myrick, who eventually became a congresswoman. She'd initially joined Amway in 1992. And by that point, she'd been elected once to the Charlotte, North Carolina city council. She lost a bid for mayor in 1985, but then won in 1987. So she had a history of trying to get elected losing and then getting elected the next election.

So she had a proven ability to like, figure out how to make things work for her in politics. Now the year she joined Amway, she ran for Senate and her campaign did not get off to a good start because she had a lot less money than her rival. But once she joined Amway as a distributor, the company decided to allow her to start selling her own motivational tapes at company rallies to raise money for her campaign. Even though she was very new, Amway also donated more than $16,000 to her campaign. Now she lost this first Senate election, but Amway continued to invest in her largely because she was an effective speaker.

They put her on their national circuit and she visited hundreds of Amway rallies for distributors around the world and was able to sell five and $10 audio tapes of her motivational speakers that went right into her war chest. We've talked about these tapes a few times and I should probably provide you with an example of how they sounded. I haven't found any of Sue Myrick's Amway recordings, but I did find a video made by her Amway mentor, Dexter Yeager, who was actually, he gave her $13,000 of that $16,000 that her campaign got from Amway.

So this is the guy who was like her mentor, Dexter Yeager. This is a segment from one of his motivational speeches from, I don't know, like 30-something years ago. Sovi. So I know a guy that was dating a girl back when he was about 16 years old. And when he dated girls, you always liked to take them out first class in accordance with his income. And he had a girl he was dating, but she turned to him and said, my folks would never allow

me to marry you. Do nothing but a spendthrift and you'll have nothing ever. And I was that guy. I was that guy. I don't know where that girl is, but I know where this guy is. And I can, I can tell you about Dexter and Birdie living on the alley, broke. Anybody can go down on Cortland Ave in Rome, New York, and they can see how we lived. And it was in a sloppy section.

It was a poor section of town. Don't tell me how bad you got it. Tell me how good you're going to get it. Don't tell me about your problems. Tell me about your dreams. Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah.

That's, uh, that's hot shit, Jack. That is good American-ing right there. And you'll notice, again, part of how, like, what keeps them safe from getting charged with the shit they got charged with the past. He's not like, and often generally isn't, like, making specific promises about Amway. He's making promises about, like, the way they, they, it started out when these distributors started putting out these motivate, they'll be like, they would be saying like, the Amway, you know, if you sell the way I tell you to sell, you're going to be a millionaire in

six months. You'll get rich. You'll get, and that's illegal. Right. What he's doing is very general. And he's getting people, it makes people believe, yeah, I can become a millionaire, too. It's all on me. It's totally on me to do the work necessary, but he's also, he's very, he says very little

about Amway. Like, that's, that's a general thing with a lot of these folks. They're making these very general motivational claims about what you're capable of, which is not a crime. Right. Yeah. So that's cool. But also, everybody knows, like, believing in yourself and not accepting no for an answer.

Working the system. And yeah. It could be a speech at literally any capitalist institution about any job. And you say it could be a speech at like literally any capitalist institution, part of what has made the kind of speeches that I'm sure a lot of people listening, you've gone to some sort of like corporate event where somebody saying shit like that came up just to motivate you, not necessarily for a scam, just because like your company was like, well, let's hire a motivational speaker.

Right. The reason they all sound like Dexter Jaeger is because they're all copying guys like Dexter Jaeger and other people at Amway. Right. And they helped invent the concept of these kinds of motivational speeches that are now everywhere. And there's other people too. I don't want to like pretend like this all came from his mind.

But this is really when this shit starts happening, the 70s and 80s. And by the 90s, it's a finely tuned machine. So Sue's doing the Amway circuit. She's selling tapes, probably a lot like what we just played, but with a lady. And Dexter Jaeger, who did that, would regularly record messages about her. And he would put them out to Amway distributors via Amvox, which was a voice messaging line. Amway members were encouraged to pay to have access to Richard DeVos and other high ranking Amway grifters would often use it to push members towards political action.

We'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. So when Sue Myrick runs for Senate again in 1994, Jaeger sends out Amvox messages to everyone in his downline and gets them to donate to her. Now this was, as Mother Jones will argue, very likely a crime, quote, those messages may violate campaign laws. The use of corporate resources on behalf of a federal campaign is illegal, says Kenneth Cross, a former head of enforcement at the FEC. Gross says that if Jaeger used the voicemail system for fundraising, the law required either

Amway or Jaeger to report it as an in kind contribution that should have been reimbursed by the Myrick campaign. If corporate resources are not properly reimbursed, then it would result in a violation of federal election laws, Gross says. There is no FEC record of any such contribution from Amway or from Jaeger. Amway spokesman Robert Loom says that Jaeger rinsed the Amvox service for $16.95 per month. What he does with it is his business, Loom said. Jaeger would not re...

Yeah, so you get it, right? Like you get the... And it worked, right? Like, yeah, maybe it was illegal, but they didn't get charged for it because I think the... He gave them enough of an excuse and they had enough people in power that were sympathetic to Amway that nobody went after them for this. And the messages worked, a review of the FEC filing shows that at least 171 Amway distributors and family members, 143 of whom did not live in Myrick's home state, gave Myrick's campaign

more than $178,000 in 1994. That is election... When you're talking about like a Senate race like that, that's enough to tip a fucking election. Right. Yeah. And every time you mention like a new Amway product for the distributors, like Amvox or these...

Amvox, yeah. ...like these motivational tapes, I'm just like seeing a person who like is like sees somebody else using it and is like jealous, they're like, wow, they're hot shit, they have access to Amvox. And then like they sell all their kids toys so they can like pay for access to Amvox. It's just like so dark and so profoundly American. Yeah. Yeah.

Dark and profoundly American is the Amway motto. Now flush with real cash this time, Sue Myrick won her Senate campaign. Once she was in office, she wasted no time in cosponsoring a home office deductibility bill which offered tax write-offs for independent contractors who use their homes as offices and was heavily pushed by Amway. She pushed a bunch of bills that specifically were in order to reduce the tax burden on people who worked for Amway. On July 24th, the day before Amway announced a $1.3 million donation to the Republican

Convention, Bob Dole announced his support for Sue's bill. It's all very direct, you know? They fund her, she pushes this bill, they give $1.3 million to the Republican Party. The next day, Bob Dole announces he supports the bill like obviously, right? Like it's not illegal, it is corrupt. Now and also, you know, I will admit like when we're talking about the scale of crimes Amway's committed, a home office deductibility bill is not the shadiest thing an elected leader has ever pushed.

I'm just laying this path out because it's illustrative of how the company wields influence for a variety of purposes all geared towards protecting the profitability of Amway for the people at the top. As Myrick became and stopping things from like, there's a reason the FEC didn't look into shit, right? There's a reason why this stuff that might be illegal never gets prosecuted and it's because they've got friends in high places. Myrick became very popular within the GOP.

Speaker Newt Gingrich appointed her as a freshman senator to the budget committee, which is not like, that's a very powerful position. Like the Senate budget committee is a big deal. And yeah, she's a freshman senator and gets in there. This was widely seen as Gingrich supplicating what became known as the Amway caucus, which included three other senators at this point. So four senators are all like Amway distributors. One of these senators, Jack, has the best name I've ever encountered for a senator.

Oh, give it to me. Dick Chrysler. What? Yeah. Dick Chrysler. There's a senator named Dick Chrysler. Yeah. Well, at least there was in the early nineties.

Yeah. Dick Chrysler. Wow. Well, his democratic rival, Cockford. Dick Chrysler. Dick Chrysler. What an incredible name for an Amway distributor who becomes a senator. Dick Chrysler here to tell you about the most incredible opportunity you're ever gonna have

to make a fortune. Oh my God. Is that? Yeah. Dick Chrysler. If that's not his actual like given name, that is one of the great works of like authorship of all time. Whoever came up with the name Dick Chrysler.

No. Dick Chrysler. Richard Chrysler. Yeah. That's his real name. I have politician from Michigan. Born in Minnesota, but of course he's in Chrysler, so Michigan. Yeah.

Dick Chrysler, in office from 1995 to 1997. Kyle looks like Steve Martin. He does look a bit like Steve Martin. If Steve Martin looked kind of more like shit. Okay. Yeah. If Steve Martin looked a little bit more like shit, he would look like Dick Chrysler. Yeah.

Oh yeah, he does. Just wow. Like he looks like Steve Martin got tanned by. Just on his forehead though. Just a forehead. Just like haphazardly had himself like sprayed with a brown face or something. Yeah. It's amazing because the way the shading looks in this photo, he's clearly a white man,

but it also looks like he's wearing white face because if I shade it there, his skin is like the scalpist. What is happening? Yeah. Nobody taught him how to correctly blend his makeup. What a fascinating looking man. Also the person who succeeded him had an incredible name, Debbie Stab now. Wow.

This is just like gold mine. Yeah. What an incredible Michigan. Something's going on with people's names in fucking Michigan. Shout out the state of Michigan. Shout out to Michigan for some in entertainingly named legislators, at least one of whom was a corrupt Amway shill. Amway acknowledged the existence of the Amway Caucus.

In fact, they kind of celebrated it. Company lobbyist John Gartland told Mother Jones that the caucus would meet with him to discuss legislation or set up conversations between senators and high level Amway distributors. Quote, we'll tell them Amway's opinion. We can't guarantee their votes, but they love Amway. There we go. So long as the Amway Caucus voted the right way, they could count on a virtually limitless source of funding from Mother Jones.

Karen and Craig Jones, both former distributors, attended one rally where Sue Myrick spoke. She got up with her husband and said, you are the kind of people we like, Karen says. After Myrick's speech, Amway leaders passed around buckets for contributions and asked donors to write their names and the names of their Amway sponsors or upline on the envelope. Karen's husband, Craig adds, it wasn't like you need to do this or else. It was more like, if you're smart and you want your business to grow, I'm sure your upline was aware if you gave or if you didn't.

So that's fucked up, but not illegal. It's all just social pressure and like building out this kind of network of like this community where the cool thing to do is to just buy into this thing and give people who are richer than you all your money. It's just basically the, I wouldn't be shocked if like the Republican party like saw this and was like, we've got a future. Oh, they did, Jack. Yeah.

Spoiler, Amway kind of helped create the modern Republican party. And this is the process. This is what's happening because they're also, again, they give $1.3 million to the 94 Republican Convention. They're giving meaningful amounts of money and Republicans are paying attention. Oh, these guys, these, we're getting more Republican senators in competitive districts in some cases because of Amway money and because Amway is really good at organizing funding and voting and stuff.

There's a reason that Betsy DeVos was the secretary of education and it's because Amway money and clout is really important to the Republican party. They are kind of king makers within the Republican party. Also Donald Trump has plugged for Amway in the past. So I mean, that makes perfect sense. Yep. That's good shit. And you can see, again, so it's number one, they say like, well, these caucus members,

we just let them know what Amway wants. We can't make them do anything. Yeah. But that money spigot can get turned off for your reelection campaign if you don't make Amway happy, right? Which again is not illegal. A lot of other industries do this. We're seeing this with Kristen Sinema right now.

But you can see the financial value of this arrangement for Amway because again, it is kind of hard to tell like, what did this exactly result in? And I think a good way to do that is to look at what happened in a country where they do not have political influence. That's very close to the United States and I'm talking about Canada. So while the FTC gave up on regulating Amway in 1979 and it's been smooth sailing for them ever since because they give a lot of money because they have a lot of ties to American politicians, the same has not been true in Canada.

I'm not saying they have no ties to politicians, but they do not have the kind of influence there that they have here. In 1989, they paid $38 million to settle a lawsuit with the Canadian trade office that alleged they'd been illegally skirt in customs dues. In 1983, the province of Ontario nailed Amway with a $25 million fine for fraud to which Amway pled guilty. So you can see why like, yeah, give a couple of million a year to the Republican Party, it's going to save us money in the long term because we're not dealing with the kind of

shit we're dealing with in Canada. That's why it's worth it for them. And it very much is. But you know who hasn't been convicted of fraud in a Canadian court, Jack? That nice and specific, I think we can probably guarantee that that's true. Yeah, absolutely, none of the sponsors probably of our podcast. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

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What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when

a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. And we're talking Amway. So Amway's deep integration with the Republican Party did not start or end with just business. For years of congenial relations, the two melded together into something terrifying and inseparable.

And to walk through the story of the merging of Amway and the Republican Party, I'm gonna have to peel back to 1979 one more time. That's the year the religious right became an organized force in U.S. politics for the first time. The moral majority is formed in 1979. That election Reagan's election is like the first time the religious right was a political block in American politics. And yeah, this all happened just in time, obviously, to push Ronald Reagan into the presidency.

The Amway co-founders were very bullish on Ronald Reagan. Not only did they pour money into supporting the campaign, but they encouraged other Amway leaders to use their tax-deductible business functions to get the word out, as one former distributor claimed. They tell you to always vote conservative no matter what. They say liberals support the homosexuals and let women get out of their place. Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel there, the homosexuals as well. Speaking of the homosexuals, well, not quite yet.

So by the time he died in 2018, Richard DeVos had personally paid out more than $200 million to fund the Republican Party and other right-wing causes. In addition to the groups we've already named that he gave money to, he sent fortunes to the Family Research Council, focus on the family and the Acton Institute. Donald's generosity earned him serious rewards. This is where gay people come into it again, unfortunately. Most notably, Ronald Reagan appointed him to the president's commission on the HIV epidemic. Oh my God.

Yeah, Richard DeVos, that fucking guy, gets put on the president, which tells you how seriously Reagan treated HIV. Yeah, I get the Amway guy on there. He knows how to deal with a pandemic. He'll clean it right up with frisk. Yeah, you got to frisk it. So Richard DeVos later wrote of this time, quote, of his time on the president's commission on the HIV epidemic, quote, I listened to 300 witnesses tell us that it was everybody

else's fault but their own, nothing to do with their conduct, just that the government didn't fix this disease. I said, you are responsible for your actions too, you know, conduct yourself properly, which is a pretty solid Christian principle. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's the guy you want.

That's the guy who's right there. Yeah. Love of me does his Shapiro voice out of nowhere. Yeah, it's my right-wing shithead voice. Richard used his influence to fight vigorously against workplace democracy, supporting right-to-work laws throughout the 1970s by funding a variety of anti-worker organizations. These included the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the American Conservative Union Victory Fund, the National

Right-to-Work Committee, and the Public Service Political Action Committee. Amway didn't start the push to force right-to-work laws in place across the country, just that they didn't start the MLM industry, but their specific brew of grifting and political activism was extremely influential and has been copied by every generation of MLMs and right-to-work advocates since. We could talk, as we often do, about how the state of Utah has famously lax laws on supplements because certain companies that sell essential oils have lobbied for those laws, but that's a rant for another day.

But the point is that the fact that Utah has these very lax laws on supplements, which benefit a variety of MLMs that have given money to Utah politicians, those MLMs are very much copying Amway. They saw what worked and they're doing the same thing. It's not a super complicated story. Right now, though, let's talk about another way Amway was an innovator in the field of mixing religion into conservative action and into grifting. The sociologists David Bromley and Anson Schup have argued that what is unique about Amway

is not its melding of God and capitalism, an amalgam almost as old as Christianity itself. Instead, the power of Amway lies in its ability to harness these ideologies to motivate individual salespersons far beyond the scope of their actual remuneration or realistic prospects thereof. Amway takes free market worship a step further, garnering much of its wealth from selling the idea of prosperity itself. Upper-level distributors, the top 2%, don't sell soap. They hawk instructional seminars, CDs, books, website access, voicemail recordings, and other sales tools to the lower-level sales force at huge profit margins.

As Amway profiteer Dexter Yeager once noted when describing Amway's model, if you work just for money, you'll reach a point where you may have enough and you'll let up. We build relationships and people don't normally quit on people who love them. It brings to mind earlier that Amway couple who got scammed out of like 50 grand in four years who sold their home and moved to be closer to their upline because you make them think that you care about them, that's how you get money from these people. And also, you're constantly having to explain to them why they're losing money, right? So you have to just be like, I mean, if you lived closer, maybe we could like make something

work a little bit better. Oh shit, you just bought the house down the street from me. You guys just don't want it enough. The degree to which the energy and like what you see at an MLM versus the actual product that is being sold like are completely out of any sort of like ratio to one another is always interesting to me. Like the fact that Amway is like you heard that guy speak about like, you know, he was basically selling the fact that that mean woman didn't want to fuck him and like, you

know, he's the best. But like the thing he's selling is shitty soap like substandard like soap. Yeah. Bad toilet paper. Yeah. Bad toilet paper that couldn't even be sold at Kroger. Yeah. Yeah.

It's amazing. And that's again, you what's amazing to me is that like, you know, we talk a lot in the old, the old cracked crew about like how at times unreasonable everybody's devotion to work was in about like the workloads that we would take on, but it's because we like we were doing the thing that was our dream as opposed to selling bargain like terrible soap for a markup. Like that's what the genius of Amway is getting the like, you always will have people who are willing to like put in unbelievable amounts of work for things they love.

Amway got people to do that for nonsense and they figured out that the way to do it was it's not about the product. It's about what these people believe about America and capitalism. And that's the thing that's hardest for me. I can, I can imagine like doing like, I can imagine selling my home and moving. I can imagine like working, you know, unbelievable hours, even doing a chunk of it for no money, which I've done before like for like my novel, right? I were, I spent hundreds of hours working effectively for free to write a novel.

It's because I loved the thing. Right. The thing that Amway does that's so scary is they're able to hack people into doing it for like nothing, none of them care about soap. Like they're not like huge into Amway brand Ziploc bags. That's the thing that's so like fucked up. And that's the thing that I don't think is possible without the cult shit. Right.

Like that's how you get people to love. And I'm sure there's like a way that they, in which they, uh, resent the products because it's like so out of whack with like they're like selling their lives for these like shitty paper plastic products or it's just like, yeah, it's like how you, you get people who will work and I mean, there's, you can, we can talk about like the degree to which it's a little messed up, but people who are willing to like take huge pay cuts to work for like SpaceX because they believe in space travel, right? Sure.

Cause they have a, there's a real dream that they're pursuing, that this company's letting them pursue. And it's, it's amazing that Amway is able to do that, but the dream is making Rich DeVos richer. Like that's what you're giving up your life for is the dream of making Rich DeVos more money so that he can fund anti-union legislation around the country. And it's like, and the central tenant is like happiness through willpower and through being able to like just kind of focus on, like put on blinders to everything except what's in

front of you and just, yeah, just will yourself to happiness, which is, yeah. And it's the kind of like, this is not one of those episodes like with Nexium where we're going to talk about a cult leader who like raped a thousand women or whatever. Like this is not one of those episodes with like a body count, but there is what you have to, when you actually try to like the body count of Amway, it's like that one couple lost four and a half years to it. The amount of, if imagine if all of these people had, had either been working on something they truly cared about that wasn't just like making Rich DeVos rich had, had been pursuing

a real dream beyond selling soap or that they just put that time into their families. Like it's the, the evil of Amway is like the, the cumulative probably tens of millions of hours of human life that could have been spent making something worthwhile or being with the people they love that was instead spent selling soap. I mean, that's, yeah. That's true. I think of a lot of current, you know, there's that essay from, I think it was like 10, 12 years ago about bullshit jobs and just how many jobs only exist to justify a boss having

somebody to like push around essentially and they don't contribute to the greater good of society. And in fact, it's like a lot of times they hurt and like people know that and that's doing like psychic damage and these are like, you know, oftentimes creative people who just happened to, you know, this is where they landed. And like it's, it's kind of hopeful because it's like there's so much time and energy and you know, ingenious like fucking human brilliance, charismatic people with like, you know, who are putting all of that energy and inspiration towards just nonsense.

And like, so yes, we have like a World War two level problem to solve in climate change. But like, it's like, we, the energy is there, the like capital is there. It's just a matter of like getting people to fucking put it towards something that will actually like save us. Yeah. Yeah. That's the, that's the thing that's, and I, you know, I wonder because I guess I've had the debate in my own head, what's sadder, the person who works a bullshit job that exists

to like give someone an underlaying or to perform some other meaningless purpose and knows it. Right. But at least like that you're making money, right? And often, often times a lot of money, a lot of bullshit jobs pay you well as opposed to a bullshit job where you give up everything in order to make someone else rich and you do nothing for society or for yourself really. That's the sad one.

That's the sad one. Yeah. The sad one, you're right. Yeah. You don't even get to like, you know, do the thing that makes them happy while pretending to work, like, you know, work on their novel or fucking or whatever. I do know a lot of people who work with, they admit are bullshit jobs and are perfectly happy.

Yeah. It's my, you know, I do 30, 40 hours a week. I spend half the time like reading a book anyway, and then I come home and I get to live my life. And it's like, well, fine. That's not the best human beings could be, but like whatever, like everybody makes compromises as opposed to, yeah, I don't know. This has been a long, like existential digression about what's like horrifying about Amway.

It's not one of those things where I could say like, Amway's evil because they killed X people or because the founder was a child molester. It's Amway's evil because of like this gaping maw that swallows human potential. Yes. Yes. That's right. And just like the, the hope in that person's face when I keep coming back to a Voxway or AmVox and like the person just like being like, I'm going to buy AmVox and all my problems

are going to be over because that is me leveling up and this is the way. And then they sign up for this and get to call in and just like have somebody tell them to buy something else that's going to be, or give money to Sue Myrick, lobby for Amway. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah, it's bleak. It is. I do wish I had access to a reputable independent biography that talked to folks from Richard

DeVos's early life and from, from J. Von Andels. All Amway publications I found note that both of their families were religious. Obviously, they both went to like a religious private school. But I don't know like to what extent evangelism was a, they were huge about it within their, their jobs at Amway that were big about like the pushing evangelism. I don't know the degree to which they actually believed in anything. Was this just like a convenient way for them to cloak their radical free market ideology or was it like critical to their self perception that they believe God wants me to have this

wealth? Cause there's certainly a lot of like people who are like that, like prosperity gospel stuff. I don't know what these people actually believed. And I just don't have the kind of insight into their early lives to know like how much of this was maybe directly what they were raised to believe as opposed to something they came up with, you know, post-hoc to, I just don't know. The purpose of religion in Amway though, as in the modern Republican party is to render

debate over economic and political issues impossible. If capitalism is a system made by people for the benefit of a segment of the population, then it can be criticized. It can even be altered or abolished entirely in order to build, you know, either make it better or replace it with something better. If capitalism is a system made by people, it can be changed or removed, right? But if property rights in the free market are divinely inspired and the United States was chosen by God to be a Christian nation specifically to protect free enterprise and

the property of the wealthy, well, then there is no room for debate. Then it's holy to be an entrepreneur, right? Which is now kind of a Republican gospel, but it was really introduced in a big way. Again, these are not the only people. As we talk about like the religious right, this is part of a broader movement. But Richard DeVos is one of the major people pushing this. He's a huge part of why this is so prominent because he's got, number one, the money to be that influential.

And again, $200 million over his lifetime that he put into pushing these causes. It seems accurate to say, though, that Amway was initially, before it became as big as it was, a lot less religious than it became, just as it was initially less political than it became. The process of both started in the 1970s when Von Andel and DeVos became very wealthy, and by the early 1990s, Amway meetings had taken on the characteristics of a revival gathering. One distributor told a journalist at the time after a meeting, quote, it wasn't like any church I'd ever been to.

I saw people professing their faith in Jesus Christ and not ashamed. I didn't see one person who reached high levels who didn't acknowledge the Lord and give him credit for the success. Now, there are a lot of Amway horror stories you can find online. Reddit in particular has a whole community, the anti MLM subreddit with nearly three quarters of a million members that's dedicated to telling stories from different MLMs. And there's a lot of Amway stories there. I want to read one that I think does a good job of laying out the culty nature of the

company. There's a lot of entrepreneur stuff intersects with just straight up cult shit, quote, my ex-husband got involved in Amway. Every cent of our miniscule budget in our twenties was spent on expensive products, training materials and conferences. I made it clear that it was his thing, that I didn't want to be involved. I tried supporting him in meetings, but there was always a pressure to convert me as being an unsupportive spouse.

He argued with me that the hours I spent commuting to university to complete post grad studies could be better spent prospecting new sales for him. The only way I survived this part of my life was to sleep on trains during the commute as I went to school eight hours, commuted five hours, then lectured at college six to ten p.m. each night. You do the math. I was exhausted. He glowingly reported how many Amway bigwigs showed up to conferences in limousines.

I argued that I too could rent a limo and appear to be prosperous for about $100. The training materials were nothing short of brainwashing. He listened to them religiously, then he started prospecting my family and friends. Our marriage was on a down slide since this. I couldn't take the passive aggressive demands that because I saw more people on a daily basis than him, that I owed it to him to prospect them. The day that I decided to leave him, I had my bags packed and was walking out the door. He said, don't blame Amway for this.

Amway is just a vehicle for success. Frederick from his training materials, I kept walking like, oh, yeah, that's really bad. I thought he was going to, that's a great twist at the end, but the thing he's most afraid of is that she's going to blame Amway for just a vehicle for success. Jack. Yeah. That's this is my fault. I failed as a husband.

Not anyway. I was a shitty husband because I wanted you to give up your post grad dreams and or at least try to convert your fellow grad students to sell Amway. Oh my God. Yeah. There is a bottomless well of stories like this, Jack. And I want to read one other one that I think gets to just how deranged people are when they're stuck in kind of the worst level of Amway, uh, cultishness.

I was in the military and lived far from post. So to get to PT, physical training in the morning, I had to wake up at 5am and leave by 5.15am. We usually networked until 11pm each night at Amway after work and I wouldn't go to bed until midnight or later because we'd only eat dinner after networking. Well on a Friday after a big meeting that lasted towards 2am, I got up at 5 like normal. Keep in mind we're told that listening to any music that is negative or not value based would hold you back.

Being a metalhead and only into rap and hip hop meant that I shouldn't listen to anything I like. So usually I just listened to my Bible app. The Bible narrator has the most monotone voice ever, and some parts of the Bible are seriously the most boring and arduous things you could ever hear just about being real. Also the only drink I'd allow myself to drink is either water or XS. XS is an energy drink with enough caffeine and vitamins to do absolutely nothing, especially if you pound six a day.

Seriously, if a sleeping fly fell into that drink, I would drown before waking up. So driving down the highway after a long night, I passed out at the wheel, even though I was drinking an XS. My car lurched to the right and caught the ridges on the edge of the road, and if I didn't jerk the wheel back and skid onto the road, I would have caught the railing. What's sad is I padded myself on the back for being so tired, because it meant I was a hard worker. We didn't leave until over a year later, and nearly falling asleep at the wheel was a

common occurrence, at least two or three times a week. Hey man, that's what the rumble strips are for, you know? That's what they're there for, guys. It's for the amway reps. It's to grind. It's for the grinders out there. It's the endemic among especially enlisted soldiers, because soldiers don't make a lot of money, but they'll often get a signing bonus, so you'll have 10 grand, and some amway

will be like, hey, you want to just waste that, or do you want to turn that into a fortune? You want to be able to not have to work in the future, you know? It's the best, Jack. It's really the best. I know, I found myself when you were telling a story about the person whose husband's life got taken over by amway, being like, how did she end up with such a dummy when she was such a grad student, but I was also just realizing I've known people who were in medical school who got whose lives, who ended up devoting their lives to multilevel marketing, who are

still trying to recruit me to multilevel marketing, and the same thing, they say cult members tend to be just as, if not more intelligent than non-cult members, like I'm sure that there's some of that. Yeah, it's not an intelligent thing. It's what you're vulnerable to, you know? It's in the same way, Jack, that getting addicted to drugs doesn't mean you're dumb. It means you're vulnerable to whatever drug it is, right? There's a bunch of people who can do cocaine at a party once and never want to do it again,

and then there's somebody who does it, and it just captures them. It's the same thing with cults. People have, for whatever reason, what amway puts out, the specific kind of propaganda latches on to certain kinds of people's heads, and it can destroy anybody who's got kind of the right vulnerabilities to it. It's like a virus. I did want to note, by the way, that the excess energy drink that that guy says nearly got him killed because it's so shitty is an amway product, and if you buy it, Jack, you can

get 12 250-milliliter cans for $24, and here's the best part, 48 amperks points. Wow. Okay. Now we're talking. 80 milligrams of caffeine per can, which is nonsense. That's not enough? Red Bull. Red Bull's about 80, I feel like.

No, I think it's 111. 111. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the highest that energy drinks goes, like 200, usually, without, it's the highest they can go without threatening to explode your heart, but. Yeah.

What you even need a heart for is what I ask. Excess. But. Yes. Yeah. Not, I wouldn't call it excessive. I wouldn't call 80 milligrams of caffeine per can excessive. No, for sure.

Now, in 2008, as a result of lawsuits in the UK, government authorities carried out a mass survey of amway distributors in that country. They found that out of a population of 33,000 UK distributors, only 90 people made enough money to cover the costs of operating the business. Wow. Out of 33,090, at least broke even, I assume some of those people got rich, right? Because there were a lot of 33,000 people. That's a lot of downline.

But 90, the total number of people who either got rich or didn't go into debt was 90 out of 33,000. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's what that means with the 99.9% percent, right? Like it's a fucking. Holy shit.

Robert, speaking of covering costs so we can operate our business. Speaking of covering costs, you know who more than 90 out of every 33,000 people make a profit from? Is it the products? Yeah. That's right, Jack. Products and services support this podcast. I don't know.

I'm not entirely certain what claim we're making either, so that's the way it goes. Sometimes you don't know what you're doing and you just do it anyway, like amway. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not on the gun badass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. And yeah, so let's, let's, let's, let's, so, yeah, um, yeah, thank you, Jack. Thank you for appreciating my professionalism.

So one of my favorite articles, if you want to get like an idea of the desperation of Amway, people who really buy and do it, who, who drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak, is an article. Don't blame Amway for this, Robert. No, this is not Amway's fault. The author, it's an article I came across in The Baffler, which is one of my favorite publications. The author, Matt Roth, was invited to Amway by a co-worker, someone he respected who

got roped into Amway with her husband. He attended a handful of motivational events for distributors and he even purchased a small number of products. I don't think he ever bought into it, but he like, I think he believed at one point, well, maybe this is a business opportunity. I don't know. He also was a writer. So it may have just been like, I want to see what's going on in this weird subculture.

Much of Matt's article delves into what a horrible deal Amway is for its distributors. One of their main selling points is that Amway distributors get Amway products at wholesale prices. So even if you're only buying the products for yourself, it's a good deal because you're going to save money on the stuff you need for your house. You get cheaper detergent and toilet paper and all that stuff, right? Matt found that not only were a lot of Amway's products of questionable quality, but their wholesale prices were at best slightly cheaper than supermarket retail prices for branding.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, Matt's friends repeated to him the line that distributors enjoyed a 30% discount on basic goods, which on its own might make being an Amway worth it. But this would appear to be a complete falsehood. None of the promises Amway made hold up to even a tiny degree of scrutiny. That's why the company spends fairly little effort on these claims. The products, again, are not what bring people in. What brings people in is a mix of peer pressure and the sheer spectacle of Amway events, which

are forcefully pushed on new recruits and distributors to keep them in business. One of the first Amway events Matt went to was something called Dream Night. It began with the triumphal entrance of the Amway Diamond Couples, half jogging through a gauntlet of high fives to the theme from Rocky as the audience whooped and hollered and twirled their napkins over their heads. When the standing ovation finally tapered off, the MC offered a prayer thanking God for the fact that we lived in a free enterprise system where there were no government agents kicking down the doors of meetings like Dream Night.

As dinner wound down, the video screens displayed a picture of what the guy next to me was quick to identify as a $20,000 Rolex watch. He went on to tell of a fellow he knew who had a $30,000 Rolex and who couldn't tell the time for the glare of the golden diamonds. As its hands reached midnight, the Rolex dissolved into a series of video montages depicting the consumer Shangri-La that our own forthcoming Amway success would open for us. We leered as a day in the life of a typical job-holder, all alarm clocks, traffic jams and dingy cubicles was contrasted with that of an Amway distributor who slept in and lounged

the day away with his family. We gawked hungrily as real-life Amway millionaires strutted about sprawling estates, proudly referred to as family compounds, and explained that such opulence was ours for the asking. We chortled as a highway patrolman stopped an expensive sports car for speeding, only to ride away a moment later with an Amway sample kit strapped to his motorcycle. Our laughter became a roar of delight as the camera zoomed in on the sports car's bumper sticker. Jobless and rich.

Wow. Yeah, and that jack gets to one of the things I find most interesting about Amway and its place in our culture. Richard DeVos was the ultimate cheerleader of the side-hustle, grind-set capitalist attitude. He was a man who got famous saying stuff like this. If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trade of persistence, determination, the will to endure to the end, to get knocked down 70 times and get up off

the floor saying, here comes number 71, which is a great thing to get people to believe if you want them to spend years giving all of their money to Amway. Rise and grind, get my paper up, all that. So, yeah, Amway's a huge originator of that attitude, of the grind-set, you got a grind attitude, but also, at the same time, a massive amount of their propaganda revolves around the idea that there's basically nothing worse than having a job. And I want to read a quote from Amanda Montel's book, Coltisch Next. Quote,

At Amway, the world's biggest MLM, anyone who works for an employer as opposed to an upline mentor is said with disdain to have a J-O-B or jackass of a boss. When you work for someone else, you will never get paid what you're worth, Amway's recruits are all taught to say. To MLMers, the word entrepreneur represents not just a career, but a morally superior way of being in the economy, comments Nicole Woolsey Biggart, a UC Davis sociologist and author of Charismatic Capitalism, Direct Selling Organizations in America. MLMs gaslight you into believing that if you follow their flawless system and don't

succeed, there is simply something wrong with you. Every willing and hardworking person can be successful in this business, a good system always works, is a thought-terminating cliché pulled from Amway's handbook. There are countless MLM vision boards all across the web featuring emotionally-manipulative platitudes like, people often fail in MLMs before they ever begin because the approach is from at the head, not from the heart, and I really hate when broke people who don't work complain about being broke, hashtag billionaire mindset. In an article titled, Top 50 MLM Quotes of All Time, the website onlinemlmcommunity.com

showcases a litany of misattributed inspirational quotes, including this axiom falsely associated with Winston Churchill. The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity at every difficulty, as if the British statesman's successes had anything to do with direct sales, or even if the quote were really his. Right, I mean, Churchill or Einstein, like, if you want to just make your quote sound like it, it's smart, just give it to them. I'm pretty sure they do not speak in, like, quippy reversals of, like, phrases.

No, Winston Churchill was, for one thing, when he was witty, a lot wittier than that. Yeah, Amway is essentially the arch-cult of American capitalism, and it's now spread across the world and into the highest levels of power. It's allure comes from both a religious worship of capitalism and a bald-faced admission that the realities of life under capitalism are unbearable. Amway's pitch doesn't work if you don't think one of the worst things possible is to work a job all your life, right? Like, that's his key factor in why their shit works.

The solution to how nightmarish it is to live, unlike the economy, is to leave the daily grind and instead work yourself to the bone to make your Amway dreams come true so that one day you can quit working and give speeches to cheering crowds while light shows play. It's an incredible grift. Richard DeVos died on September 6th, 2018, at 92. He was worth more than $5 billion. Yeah, he died, like, the 200 richest person in the world at the time. Jay Van Andel died in 2004 of Parkinson's.

His family today is worth $4.7 billion. I'm sure you all know of the DeVos clan and have been waiting for the moment where we discuss them. Now, one thing I find interesting is that when Rich died, he was worth $5.1 billion, and today the family's worth an estimated $5.4 billion, so they've gone by about $300 million since 2018 when he dropped. Betsy DeVos is Richard's daughter-in-law, so she's not a blood relative. She was originally a prince, like her brother Eric Prince.

But she has conducted herself in a way that would have made Rich proud. She is also a Christian supremacist. She attended a very expensive Christian school as a child for basically her whole education. And as an adult, she became the Republican National Committee woman from Michigan in chair of the Michigan Republican Party. She used her position very effectively to advocate for charter schools. Leaked videotapes in 2017 revealed Betsy admitting that her goal in doing this was to hinder secular public schools, which she called a dead end and provide public funding to religious

schools and thus, in her words, advance God's kingdom. When Donald Trump made her the secretary of education, she was only barely confirmed. Mike Pence, another religious extremist, cast the tie-breaking vote. Here's how the website Chalkbeat, which is dedicated to education, sums up her legacy as the secretary of education. In her first year as education secretary, DeVos's education department revoked guidance that spelled out how schools should protect transgender students, which included providing them access to facilities corresponding to their gender identity.

DeVos reportedly opposed the change at first, but eventually went along with it, saying the issues were best left to states and local school districts. Eliza Byrd, the executive director of GLSEN, which advocates on behalf of LGBTQ students, said the effects were chilling and immediate. Several GSLEN chapters reported cases of transgender students losing access to bathrooms they'd been able to use before. Byrd noted, transgender students who filed civil rights complaints with the department after being denied bathroom access had their cases thrown out.

In 2018, DeVos rolled back the Obama administration's guidance around school discipline, as well as guidance for school districts that wanted to use race and admissions and enrollment decisions to integrate their schools. It's unclear how many school districts changed their policies in response. DeVos's education department also quickly closed many of the civil rights investigations that inherited from the Obama administration, then limiting the length and scope of the investigations it did conduct. DeVos also blocked some efforts to desegregate schools, ending a program that would have

given school districts $12 million for school integration efforts. Without the federal money, many districts abandoned their ideas. So yeah, Jack, it's been a pretty bad run of her as secretary of education. I don't know, I think she nailed it. She's just like, when she's in a room, you get the sense of competence. We all saw that 60 minutes interview. There's a woman who should be in charge of how all kids in America learn. Yes, nailed it.

My brain is so poisoned by modern media and the billionaire off that we get to witness between Bezos and Elon Musk that when I heard $5 billion, I was a little bit like, oh, that's all the thing. Yeah, you call that money? So I always, this is a simple trick, but it always works for me, comparing 5 million seconds, which is 57 days, to 5 billion seconds, which is 158 years. Yep. It's always helpful for me to just kind of put the just completely, just unethical amount

of wealth you need to have to be a billionaire in perspective. Yeah. And every hour, every dollar in that bank account is, again, like dreams not pursued, family not spent time with, like debt incurred, it's money made, breaking people. Like the original DeVos guy was going to probably be successful and powerful no matter what he did. And he went into stealing money from people and then spending all his time convincing people it was okay.

Yeah. And it's a part of this broader, like the destruction of the middle class and the growth of the billionaire class. He just did it very directly by just taking the middle class's money, making them mortgage their homes and giving them fairy tales. It's great. As a billionaire, thanks to, well, both her dad, who was rich and Richard Jr.'s inheritance, her husband, who is also rich DeVos, but, you know, Jr., Betsy has poured almost 2 million

into anti-LGBT causes in recent years. She and her husband funded the passage of right to work legislation in Michigan. And the exact wording of the legislation they pushed is being used as a blueprint for efforts in the remaining 23 U.S. states without right to work laws. We can all be grateful that Betsy's general legislative incompetence, which was matched by the incompetence of the Trump administration, meant that she failed in many of her goals. Charter schools were not massively expanded. Department of Education funding was not cut to a massive degree.

The most sweeping changes she supported required an entirely compliant Congress, and we as a nation just weren't quite ready to end public education yet. But Betsy DeVos and Richard DeVos are hellbent on continuing the legacy of Richard DeVos Sr., using the amway money that still daily pours into their coffers. They see this wealth as entitling them to rule over the rest of us. In 1997, Betsy wrote a column for the magazine Role Call, where she made this very clear. Quote, I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point.

They are right. We do expect something in return. I hate her so much. Role Call is like, this is the role that you are called to. This is an American caste system. Just really a great crystallization of all the most rotten values that were created by the original sin of this company, and then also a great illustration of the diminished returns that you get by just being just through nepotism and spoiled shitty, you know, children.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Jack, that's our episode. I wanted to direct. Oh, good. I actually need to go get to Dream Night. Yeah. You got to do your Dream Night.

Yeah. I'm going to be a Dream Night. You're a double diamond. You got to walk through that cheering crowd. They know me as Jack Pontiac. Jack Pontiac, because you always drive a, well, no one would brag about that. Amen. Your Fiera was a nice car.

Yeah. It's in my Pontiac, baby. Yeah. I want to remind people again, we've got one of our fans is putting out a comic book series. Ringo Award nominated comic creator, Brenton Langel, is trying to crowdfund Daruti Shadow of the People about an anarchist militant during the Spanish Civil War, Buenaventura Daruti. You can find and back his comic on Kickstarter.

If you just type in D-U-R-R-U-T-I Daruti at Kickstarter, and if you back at the book level or higher and comment Bastards, you'll get a unique signed print for free. So Daruti on Kickstarter. Check it out. Jack. Hey. People can find you at the Daily Zeitgeist. Yeah.

The Daily Zeitgeist. It's a nice daily podcast that I host with former news Miles Gray. Pretty soon, it's just going to be, you're never not podcasting. Yeah. That's where I'm headed. You can also follow me on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien, O-B-R-I-E-N. Thank you for that. I am excited, Jack, for when we just install recording equipment in your head on a daily

basis and there's, you're never able to, you're never able to stop podcasting all the time, no matter what. Amen. That grind mentality, you know, rise and grind, got to get my paper up. Yeah. I'm, it's going to be rad when that becomes common and you can also like hear in your head the voices of your commenters, just like telling you to do things like when you're out.

I mean, there's people doing that already, right? With, with Twitch. Why not just make it perpetual for everybody? You think I can already hear my commenters in my head, man? Think hard at Jack and I'll do what you tell him. It's true. All right. Thank you, Jack.

Bye. Bye. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. He didn't inside his hearse with like a lot of guns, but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.