Advancing White Supremacy

Through Academic Strategy

Preface and Table of contents

In Florida, a state certified program funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and private prison GEO Group, teaches “Tea Party” religious-extremism to prisoners under the guise of "civics" education. This program is directed by Florida Atlantic University political science professor Marshall DeRosa.

DeRosa is a scholar at Florida’s premier Koch-funded think-tank, the James Madison Institute, where he published a report suggesting that restoration of voting rights for prisoners be dependent upon the completion of civics courses, such as his.



Coupled with the larger criminal justice reforms being pushed by the Koch network, DeRosa’s project paints a grim picture of things to come. Under the pretense of reducing recidivism, and with the help of deeply flawed research, Koch-network reformers are advocating for the mass privatization of prisoner reentry programs. This will create more opportunities for private contractors to profit, and for Charles Koch and his allies to inject free-market and religious extremism into public institutions.

DeRosa is part of a larger network of extremist scholars who subscribe to Austrian economics, with close affiliations to, if not direct funding from, the Charles Koch Foundation. Many of these scholars join DeRosa at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a “neo-confederate” think tank.

As recently as 2009, several joined him as “faculty” at the League of the South Institute, which serves as the “educational arm” of the violent white nationalist hate group, the League of the South. Many of these “neo-confederate” economists hold high positions within Koch’s top academic operations, including the Association of Private Enterprise Education, the Institute for Humane Studies, and George Mason University.

Building off of this example at Florida Atlantic University, this report exposes Koch’s financing of scholars and operatives who have fought against civil rights for decades. The Koch family’s network not only spread free-market/white supremacist ideas, but it also turned those ideas into action, leveraging research for political change.

The report’s chapters describe the interwoven infrastructure of neo-confederate scholars, funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, who are training and recruiting the next generation of anti-civil rights Austrian economists. We explore the dangerous ideologies involved in this network, past and present, including recent influence on the violent Alt-Right and Neo-Nazis.

Other chapters highlight the Koch family’s involvement in Nazi sympathizing, efforts to oppose the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and the present-day Koch network’s effort to roll-back opposing civil rights.

We believe that understanding the Charles Koch Foundation’s material support for, and ideological confluence with, a network of Neo-Confederate and white nationalist scholars is integral to understanding the Koch-network’s past and present efforts to resegregate our nation’s schools, dismantle voting rights, and expand the prison industrial complex -- all at the expense of people of color.