How an obscure school moved all of US higher education to the right

Part II in a look at robber baron Charles Koch

Today’s story comes from Dark Money, by Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker. For a primer on the Koch Brothers, I’d recommend an article Mayer wrote in 2010 and a large glass of wine.

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Next time on Skipped History…

We’ll look at what American high school students have learned in the past, beginning in the South. Our road ahead gets bumpier before it gets better, so I leave you with this James Baldwin quote that Chris Rock cited in his SNL monologue last week:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it's faced.” 

Wise words to live by, unless you’re the person sitting behind Robert LeFevre in the recording studio. The transcript of this week’s video is below.

Keep the faith!

Ben

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This week’s transcript

Hello, I’m Ben Tumin, and welcome to Skipped History. Last week, we discussed how after Charles Koch’s father died, the only thing left in his way were the courts and the government. This week’s story is about a fringe school that would further shape Charles’ future, and ours as well. I read about it in Dark Money by Jane Mayer, and some weird sources about cults.

Let’s just start with Robert LeFevre, the Freedom School’s founder. Born in Idaho and raised in the Addams Family, LeFevre worked in real estate, news, and as a disk jockey. While in the studio one day, he had a vision. A “glorious voice” said “I Am” to him “with the power of thunder.” The sound of the voice was accompanied,” he wrote, “by the gentlest odor of roses.”

I know what you’re thinking: Who hasn’t had thunderous indigestion after eating a bouquet and then dropped acid instead of pepto? But in LeFevre’s case, he belonged to a cult called I Am, believed humans had yet reached their full potential, and that the government was limiting us from doing so. So, in 1957 he started the Freedom School in Colorado Springs, which offered two-week seminars advocating for abolishing the government. 

One might call that anarchy. In fact, a group of Illinois teachers sent to a session at the school in 1959 notified the FBI that the school advocated for “no government, no police department, no fire department, no public schools, not even national defense…. This is, of course, anarchy.” Or as the Marquis de Lafayette might say: Anarchy? Anarchy. LeFevre made the teachers all panicky.

But not Charles Koch, who attended the Freedom School after getting a degree from MIT in 1958 and loved it. Totallllly unrelated, the school taught free market economics, which held that the government should place minimal restrictions on companies; y’know, restrictions that Charles was keen to avoid after a Trunchbully childhood. The school also taught a version of history in which the South should’ve been allowed to secede, taxes were theft, and the robber barons were heroes; a version of history that, according to an old Koch family friend, “If you grew up with more money than God, and felt weird about it… would certainly make you feel a lot better.”

And that seems to be the case: Charles, who’d been introduced to the Freedom School by a far-Right leaning friend of his Nazi-loving father, went on to become a funder and trustee of the school—and credited it as the place where he developed a passionate commitment “to liberty.” Speaking of liberty—well, actually, the opposite of it—in the 70s, at a conference sponsored by the Kochs, a historian named Leonard Liggio suggested that Libertarians should emulate the Nazis and indoctrinate young people to win more people to their cause. And you’ll never believe this but Charles, in the proud Fascist family tradition, warmed to Liggio’s idea, and in 1981 he began a quest to spread the Freedom School’s teachings to the rest of us.

His first target was George Mason, a public university in Virginia. There, the Kochs began funding the Mercatus Center, which advocated for similar economic principles as the ones Charles learned at the Freedom School. And sharing a building with the Mercatus Center was the Institute for Humane Studies, which was founded by another Freedom School trustee and staffed by historians like Leonard Liggio. And the fact that George Mason is close to D.C. is no accident. 

Fellows from Mercatus and IHS regularly testify as experts at congressional hearings. In 2004, for example, 14 of 23 regulations that President George W. Bush placed on a “hit list,” eight of which were environmental regulations, were suggested by Mercatus scholars. Several members of the Trump Administration working in health care, the EPA, and more were researchers at Mercatus and IHS. And they’re just the tip of the iceberg: the Kochs’ Freedom School-esque academic programs now extend to over 300 schools, ranging from the University of West Virginia to Brown University, where the Kochs donated to the Political Theory Project, a euphemism for, “Anarchy? Anarchie. We make the liberals free markety!”

So clearly, what we learn when we’re young can really shape our actions when we grow older. Just look at Charles Koch! Raised by a tyrannical father, he turned to the “liberating” teachings of a literal visionary who once farted a bouquet and came to equate freedom with the freedom to become a robber baron and pollute the planet we all inhabit. Although the Freedom School went defunct in the 70s and LeFevre died in 1986, his teachings now extend to countless students around the country thanks to the continued efforts of his star pupil. 

Thankfully, there was another Freedom School teaching students in the 1960s, in Mississippi. Tune in next time to learn more about that bit of Skipped History.

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Take a deep breath, look at some trees and shrooms, and see you next week!