"Project 2025 has every element that [MLMs] would ever want." Bridget Read on the political impact of pyramid schemes

Read's new book, Little Bosses Everywhere, uncovers the parallels between Trump's America and the multi-level marketing industry.

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May 14, 2025

*Book cover courtesy Crown Publishing Group; Photo by Lynne Jaeger Weinstein*

Bridget Read’s yearslong journey into the heart of the multi-level marketing (MLM) industry began in 2021. As a reporter at The Cut, she was assigned an article about a surge in women, many left jobless by the pandemic, being lured into exploitative pyramid schemes.

“I just became obsessed with this little world because in defining MLMs for this short article, they really still didn't make any sense,” Read recalls. “I sort of had to hand wave away a lot of inconsistencies and contradictions and curiosities, namely, how this weird, scammy business model had powered some of the most influential, wealthiest people in the world, and I just couldn't let those questions go.”

Her quest would result in her book, Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, released May 6 to glowing reviews, with The New York Times noting how it “lays out an almost prosecutorial case against many multilevel [sic] marketing” businesses. In the book, Read (now a feature writer at New York Magazine) turns an 80-year history of a money-making scheme into a political thriller, unraveling how MLMs — including the likes of Amway, Avon, Mary Kay, and Herbalife — have often enriched a select few at the expense of the poor.

In Read’s telling, these MLM leaders used their fortunes to wield influence in Washington, D.C., with a goal to derail regulation that would hurt their profits. In the process, they reshaped American politics in the image of MLMs themselves, pushing a fundamentalist brand of unfettered capitalism that captured the conservative imagination.

Near the end of Little Bosses Everywhere, Read observes how Project 2025, the much-discussed blueprint for a second Trump administration (which the White House appears to be implementing), “conjured a future society run by an autocratic executive and ordered by insular family dynasties that are headed by white men cared for by women.” It imagined an America where “regulatory oversight is non-existent,” where work is “constant, temporary and unpredictable,” and where people “are guaranteed nothing from each other.”

While many critics noted this vision evoked the patriarchal dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, it reminded Read of something else. “To me it sounded like multi-level marketing,” she writes.

In this Depth Perception interview, Read talks about reporting from inside MLMs and why it felt like being in the presence of “cult,” as well as why she thinks pyramid schemes crave societies without a safety net. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. —Christopher Mathias

What set you on this path to devote the last few years of your life immersing yourself in pyramid schemes and MLMs?

I think MLMs sit at the nexus of so much that I'm interested in, in terms of far-right ideology, in terms of gender ideology, in terms of labor exploitation, and obviously the dynamics of late capitalism. So it just had everything I wanted in a topic.

What frustrates you now about how MLMs are often covered in the press?

Well the inventors of MLM realized really early on, when they created “The Plan” — which is what they called it — is that when you're doing “business,” you get a lot of leeway and credibility that you otherwise wouldn't if you were doing other types of fraud. So rather than being gangsters or being drug dealers or whatever, these guys cloaked themselves in sales, and the level of credulity that the media showed them right away has really never wavered.

The fact is we just don't treat white collar crime, financial crime, with the same level of scrutiny that we do other types of crime.

Can you talk about your interactions with the top brass at these MLMs, or the companies themselves? Were any of them willing to talk to you?

So we did a full fact check, and almost no companies responded. There's one company that held this convention during COVID in 2021, after which multiple people passed away, and some of the consultants of this company, called Paparazzi, have spoken out about how they felt coerced into buying products they didn't need, and that company did respond to the fact check.

When I went to the Mary Kay convention, that's probably the closest I got to being around a lot of the top uplines [MLM speak for superiors], and they are so incredibly on all the time in talking up the Mary Kay opportunity. It was honestly like being in the presence of people in the cult.

MLMs teach their practitioners to confront any negativity by tuning it out, like that's an age-old skill in multi-level marketing. You're supposed to pass negativity only upward, never downward, meaning you never talk to outsiders, or anyone but your upline about anything negative. You certainly never talk to anyone you recruited, and then you never talk to people in the same position as you in the company, which is called cross-lining. It's all basically to quash dissent, and a big part of that is you don't read the news, you don't look at social media about MLMs, and you certainly wouldn't read a book or talk to a reporter. There's a real culture of silence.

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Why do you think MLMs have disproportionately ensnared and exploited women?

MLMs were invited by men. They first recruited couples, like white middle class couples who were trying to ascend to the ownership class, and in the ‘60s, MLM expanded to the newest demographic that was doing that, which was women. So women were going to work in droves in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but they were going to work in the most insecure parts of the economy, in the service sector — retail, clerking. And they were in this low paid, flexible, unprotected independent contractor work, which is where MLM flourishes, because the pitch is that you can do it while you're doing childcare. You can do it while you are a student. It goes after people who need to fill in the extra gaps in their income. And that was women.

So when MLM really exploded, it was by kind of attaching itself like a leech onto this demographic of Americans who were most vulnerable to the pitch, and now that has morphed. A lot of immigrant women participate in MLMs, and in some places it's Christian women who stay at home. It's Army wives who also have to do childcare.

“When you're doing ‘business,’ you get a lot of leeway and credibility that you otherwise wouldn't…. So rather than being gangsters or being drug dealers… these guys cloaked themselves in sales.” — Bridget Read

There's a really striking passage near the end of the book where you talk about reading Project 2025 and how it reminded you of an MLM. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Project 2025 has every element that [MLMs] would ever want right? So doing away or whittling down Social Security, Medicaid, lowering the personal tax rate even more, [and] increasing the abilities of private companies to then hold onto their wealth in other ways.

MLMs operate with these little family kingdoms where they're all under this authoritarian figure… and the whole family works for the company, and usually the mom is doing the work of the MLM, and the dad is kind of a figurehead. That's a classic sort of structure in MLM.

Obviously Project 2025 encourages that same type of nuclear family where everyone is in their own little economic unit, whether by encouraging school vouchers, which is like a huge pet cause of the DeVos family. Betsy DeVos wants to get rid of the Department of Education. They want school voucher systems in every state, meaning public money will support religious schooling, so kids are homeschooled, kids are working for the business. MLMs want to do away with any part of the welfare state that would encourage collectivism and make it harder to recruit people into this system, that would give them some kind of safety net where they didn't need to join a side hustle.

It feels like a dystopian and dark and almost tinfoil-hat level, but I don't think it is. I think that's what's actually happening… [Barbara Van Andel-Gaby,] the daughter of Jay Van Andel [a co-founder of Amway], is the chairperson of [The Heritage Foundation] right now. And when she inducted Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, she said directly that he's going to increase their influence on Capitol Hill. So they're not even hiding it.

What gives you hope that MLMs could one day be reined in or regulated?

Oh I don’t know if I have any hope for regulation.

My positive answer though is that I encountered so many people in reporting this book that like, no matter how vulnerable they were to the pitch, and no matter how much money they had spent, or how deep they found themselves inside of this system… they were still able to say to themselves, “I'm worth more than this,” and to get out.

So there really is this incredible human spirit in people that have left MLMs. They just show us time and again that we are more than who we are as, like, economic actors… There's an incredible lesson there in terms of understanding what our value is to each other, in what we owe each other, in how we should relate to each other, in a good society where people are healthy and happy.

"Project 2025 has every element that [MLMs] would ever want." Bridget Read on the political impact of pyramid schemes

Read's new book, Little Bosses Everywhere, uncovers the parallels between Trump's America and the multi-level marketing industry.

Brace for impact: Subscribe to Long Lead today

Further reading and listening from Bridget Read

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