# Robert LeFevre **Robert LeFevre** (1911–1986) was a radical libertarian lecturer and educator who founded the [[Freedom School]] (later Rampart College) and mentored a generation of the American right — most consequentially [[Charles Koch]]. In [[Dave Troy]]'s "[[The Big History Behind January 6th]]" Part 5, LeFevre is the hinge between three otherwise separate stories: hardline anti-government libertarianism, the [[I AM Activity]] occult movement, and the conceptual machinery Troy argues fed QAnon. ## Autarchism and "molestation" LeFevre pushed libertarian logic past even anarchism. Rejecting the "anarchist" label, he called himself an **autarchist** — a believer in absolute individual self-rule who opposed the initiation of force *even in self-defense*, and who held that "[[Natural Law]]" stands above the law of the state. To LeFevre, all taxation and essentially all government were illegitimate coercion. Central to his teaching was an idiosyncratic use of the word **"molestation"** (catalogued at [[Molestation (Libertarianism)]]): the subversion of another's will or property. Taking someone's cookie "molests" its owner; taxation "molests" the citizen. This older, property-centric sense of the word is, in Troy's reading, the etymological seed later conflated with the sexual sense to power "cancel culture" and QAnon rhetoric. LeFevre's ethics rested on the libertarian **[[Non-Aggression Principle]]**. ## The Freedom School and the Kochs LeFevre founded the [[Freedom School]] in Colorado in 1956 (renamed **Rampart College** by 1963), an unaccredited academy for his brand of radical liberty. He drew star faculty and guests from the libertarian firmament — [[Murray Rothbard]], [[Milton Friedman]], [[Ludwig von Mises]], and [[Rose Wilder Lane]]. Per [[Jane Mayer]]'s *Dark Money* (2016), LeFevre's most important recruit was **[[Charles Koch]]**. Koch was introduced to the school through Robert Love of the Love Box Company, a fellow [[John Birch Society]] associate of Koch's father [[Fred C. Koch]]. Charles Koch attended courses and became a trustee and financial backer — making LeFevre a formative influence on the ideology of the Koch political machine. ## The "I AM" indictment Before founding the Freedom School — and before a stint in the Army Air Corps — LeFevre was a follower (roughly 1936–1940) of the **[[I AM Activity]]**, the occult "Ascended Master" movement of [[Guy Ballard]] and Edna Ballard. When federal prosecutors charged I AM leaders with mail fraud in 1940, a supplemental indictment named LeFevre among the defendants. Troy (drawing on Mayer) treats this occult-plus-libertarian biography as the template for the syncretic belief systems that resurface in the QAnon era. ## See also - [[Freedom School]] · [[Molestation (Libertarianism)]] · [[Non-Aggression Principle]] · [[I AM Activity]] · [[Charles Koch]] · [[The Octopus]]