Changes at the Koch Brothers charities and institutes

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Koch’s rhetorical shift is easy to document. These changes evidently are designed to go down better with the values of Koch’s new partners on the ideological Left. They likely represent a true change in values and priorities, not merely a new outreach strategy.

One recent change sums it up. “Market-Based Management” (MBM) has been redesignated “Principle Based Management.” Koch Industries made this change to its business philosophy publicly between June and July of 2022, although some sources say it had been planned for a few years. KAP, an education program for early-career professionals, similarly changed its website sometime since last November.

MBM, Koch’s core management philosophy, was always based on principle, especially the principle that a firm should be run something like a free market, where value creation is rewarded and individual initiative is respected.

“Principle Based Management,” though it may signal a new emphasis on principle, really reflects the implementation of new principles to replace the old. And it appears that the “market” concept is now almost entirely absent from Koch’s self-understanding.

A key inflection point was in 2019 at internal staff and all-staff meetings. At that point, Koch had announced a rebrand called “Stand Together”—a name that evokes leftist “solidarity” over individualism. At the meeting, as one mid-level manager recalls, a senior leader announced that terms such as “liberty,” “freedom,” and “constitution” would be downplayed in public communications because those terms “alienate key audiences.”

Mr. Koch had called “capitalism” an incorrect term for his interests at least as early as 2016, but Stand Together and CKF have gone farther. “Economic freedom”—once the primary motivator of hundreds of millions of dollars of investment—is nowhere on the Stand Together Foundation’s website. The term is nowhere to be found in Stand Together’s Twitter history except in the context of women finding “true economic freedom,” and it is virtually absent from Stand Together’s website.

CKF last tweeted about “economic freedom” in August of 2021. “Economic freedom” and “free enterprise” are absent from CKF’s 2022 partner impact statement. Don’t say freedom when you can say “bottom-up solutions.”

Mr. Koch’s 2020 book, Believe in People, had been largely completed in Old Koch style when it went through a complete rewrite. The earlier version was like his previous books, which had merged practical and intellectual wisdom to focus on what Old Koch called MBM and principled entrepreneurship. The new version became pablum: “What would it mean to truly believe in people?”

True enough, “Principled Entrepreneurship” remains a philanthropic focus area. But giving to formerly key partners in this area has diminished substantially or been cut off entirely. Meanwhile, Wichita-based Youth Entrepreneurs now does business under the name Empowered.

KAP now explains that it “equips associates with the tools, mindsets, and community to succeed as social entrepreneurs—individuals excited to find new and better ways to break barriers and eliminate injustice.” All parties involved can understand that “breaking barriers” and “eliminating injustice” are leftist buzzwords that signal openness to Critical Race Theory while flying under the radar of well-meaning but inattentive “compassionate conservatives.” As a result of KAP’s rhetorical changes, liberty-movement organizations can no longer presume that KAP alumni are ideologically aligned.