A related fringe group, though, became seminal to Charles Koch's political evolution during this period, the Freedom School, which was led by a radical thinker with a checkered past named Robert LeFevre. LeFevre opened the Freedom School in Colorado Springs in 1957 and from the start there were close ties to the John Birch Society...in 1964, Charles [then 22] was introduced [to the school]...(p 52)
(p 53)
LeFevre, who looked like a jolly, white-haired Santa, had reportedly been indicted earlier for mail fraud in connection with his role in a cultlike right-wing self-actualization movement called the Mighty I AM movement....[he] escaped prosecution by becoming a witness for the state, but continued on a wayward path, claiming to have supernatural powers and struggling through bankruptcy and an infatuation with a fourteen-year-old girl. Later, at the height of Senator Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist crusades, LeFevre became an FBI informant, accusing Hollywood figures of Communist sympathies and leading a drive to purge the Girl Scouts of Reds.
A stint writing editorials for the arch conservative Gazette-Telegraph in Colorado Springs enabled him to drum up funds to launch the Freedom School on a rustic, five-hundred-acre campus nearby. There, he assumed title of dean.
The school taught a revisionist version of American history in which the robber barons were heroes, not villains, the Gilded Age was the country's golden era. Taxes were denigrated as a form of theft, and the Progressive Movement, Roosevelt's New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, in the school's view, were ruinous turns toward socialism. The weak and poor, the school taught, should be cared for by private charity, not government. The school had a revisionist position on the Civil War, too. It shouldn't have been fought; instead, the South should have been allowed to secede. Slavery was a lesser evil than military conscription, the school argued, because human beings should be allowed to sell themselves
(p 54)
into slavery if they wished. Like Charles Koch during this period, the school tried to meld its vision of history, economics, and philosophy into one theoretical framework, which it called "Phronthistry."
A group of Illinois teachers sent to a session at the school in 1959 by a local chamber of commerce returned so shocked that they notified the FBI and published a letter denouncing the school for advocating "no government, no police department, no fire department, no public schools, no health or zoning laws, not even national defense." They noted that "this of course is anarchy." They also described the school as proposing that the Bill of Rights be reduced to "just a single one: the right to own property."