If you’d asked me what Charles Koch eats for lunch, I would have guessed pulled pork or jerk chicken. The billionaire industrialist and right-wing benefactor opted for the former when he sat down to dine and talk with Stephen Foley of the Financial Times for an interesting interview. Funny that Koch now regrets many of the policies he’s spent elephantine sums supporting in the new century. (Of course, it’s not the first time he’s voiced opinions at odds with the think-tanks, projects and politicians he bankrolls.) Something tells me he’ll be regretting the beliefs he currently supports in another decade.

An excerpt about the current slate of GOP 2016 hopefuls:

I ask about the rhetorical turn the race has taken when it comes to dealing with Islamist terror, and about Trump’s assertion that the US could require all Muslims in the country to register with the government.

“Well, then you destroy our free society,” Koch says of the idea. “Who is it that said, ‘If you want to defend your liberty, the first thing you’ve got to do is defend the liberty of people you like the least’?”

He then expounds on the war on terror. “We have been doing this for a dozen years. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. Has that made us safer? Has that made the world safer? It seems like we’re more worried about it now than we were then, so we need to examine these strategies.”

It’s a view that also contrasts with that of another Republican frontrunner; Ted Cruz’s plan to carpet-bomb Isis strongholds is anathema to Koch. “I’ve studied revolutionaries a lot,” he says. “Mao said that the people are the sea in which the revolutionary swims. Not that we don’t need to defend ourselves and have better intelligence and all that, but how do we create an unfriendly sea for the terrorists in the Muslim communities? We haven’t done a good job of that.” With about 1.6bn Muslims worldwide “in country after country. What,” he asks, “are we going to do: go bomb each one of them?”

These particular views could almost have come from the mouth of Bernie Sanders, the socialist challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and a regular basher of the Kochs.•