# Freedom School **Freedom School** was an unaccredited libertarian academy that [[Robert LeFevre]] founded in 1956 near Larkspur, Colorado. It was small, short-lived and eccentric. It is also one of the most consequential schools in the history of the American right, because [[Charles Koch]] studied there, became a trustee and funder, and credited it with his "passionate commitment to liberty." ## What it taught LeFevre, who also wrote editorials for R.C. Hoiles's *Gazette-Telegraph*, preached what he called **autarchism**: self-government in the most literal sense, the rejection of all coercive state power, and a principled pacifism that set him apart from most of the right. Taxation was theft, and the state was organized violence. The curriculum was a compressed form of what would become the modern libertarian canon: - the [[Non-Aggression Principle]] - Austrian economics - a revisionist history that treated the robber barons as heroes and Southern secession as defensible Guest lecturers included [[Milton Friedman]], [[Ludwig von Mises]], [[Rose Wilder Lane]], Frank Chodorov, Leonard Read, Gordon Tullock and Bruno Leoni. ## Rampart and the end LeFevre added an unaccredited four-year college, **Rampart College**, on the same campus in 1963, and published the *Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought* (1965–68). A 1965 flood damaged the Colorado campus, and operations eventually moved to Santa Ana, California. The Rampart name survived until 1975. ## Why it matters **The Koch pipeline.** Koch came to the school after MIT, reportedly through a family friend on the right, and stayed on as trustee and funder. Jane Mayer's *Dark Money* treats it as the ideological seedbed of the [[Koch Network]]. The Colorado seminar's hard, anti-state libertarianism became, decades later, the program of the Cato Institute and Koch's university funding. **The fringe line.** The school's alumni also include [[Kerry Thornley]], later a co-founder of the Discordian movement and an acquaintance of Lee Harvey Oswald. That strand runs through the vault's conspiracy-culture pages to [[QAnon]] and [[The Big History Behind January 6th]]. ## See also - [[Robert LeFevre]] · [[Charles Koch]] · [[Koch Network]] · [[Non-Aggression Principle]] - [[Rose Wilder Lane]] · [[Kerry Thornley]] · [[Libertarianism]]