The Manhattan Institute Helped Kill DEI. Now It’s Coming for Protests

A right-wing think tank responsible for the emergence of zero-tolerance policing in 1990s New York City and the Trump administration’s scorched-earth campaign against “diversity, equality and inclusion” programs is behind state-level legislative efforts to classify minor protest-related crimes as “civil terrorism.”

The Manhattan Institute, cofounded in 1978 by former Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey, is in the midst of a yearlong campaign to pass state-level legislation reclassifying minor crimes like vandalism, blocking a roadway, or trespassing during a protest as felonies that would carry 18-month prison sentences as punishment.

The Manhattan Institute’s push to criminalize forms of nonviolent disobedience as a form of terrorism comes amid a broader Trump administration effort to crack down on leftist organizations, causes, and social movements, while recasting acts of nonviolent civil disobedience as potential crimes.

“Today’s left-wing agitators deploy random acts of lawlessness designed to inconvenience and disrupt as many civilians as possible, hoping to pressure them to get the government to change course. This tactic is reasonably described as a form of terrorism, though the activists aren’t murderous like al-Qaida or Hamas—they don’t use guns, bombs, or threats of unpredictable bloodshed. Instead, they engage in civil terrorism,” wrote Manhattan Institute legal policy fellow Tal Fortgang, a recent New York University law graduate who lambasted students protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza for “Jew hatred.”

Fortgang, who’s spent his career at right-wing think tanks, appears to be the main proponent of the “civil terrorism” theory, beginning with a February 2025 Wall Street Journal op-ed that argued acts of nonviolent disobedience like blocking a road was something far more sinister. More recently, he authored a piece in City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s in-house magazine, targeting the Answer anti-war protest network’s “central role in organizing an act of civil terrorism and its advocacy on behalf of Venezuela, Iran, and China [which] are reason enough to believe that its actions may be unlawful under statutes like FARA,” the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

In response to WIRED’s questions, Fortgang claims that he focuses on anti-war, pro-Palestinian, and Black Lives Matter activists in his writings justifying the novel “civil terrorism” theory “because they constitute the overwhelming majority of groups engaged in this behavior.” Asked why states should step up protest-related crimes from misdemeanors to felonies, he wrote: “When hundreds of people gather to commit disorderly conduct together, we are dealing with something completely different. That is what I call civil terrorism: mass commission of minor crimes to intimidate or coerce a population into adopting certain policies.”

Two pieces of state-level legislation ghostwritten by the billionaire-backed Manhattan Institute take steps to see Fortgang’s vision come true. Utah’s legislature passed HB 331 earlier this year, and Governor Spencer Cox signed it into law on March 24. Scant resistance was offered in the Utah House of Representatives and Senate, with only two members voting no during HB 331’s entire trajectory. In addition to heightening penalties for “aggravated disorderly conduct” during protests and creating a new crime for “unlawfully advancing foreign organizations,” the Utah law would also outlaw civilians wearing masks at protests, which the Salt Lake Tribune criticized for the open contradiction of local cops and federal immigration agents being allowed to mask up.

In Arizona, where the statehouse and governorship are split between Republicans and Democrats, the Manhattan Institute’s model legislation is currently awaiting a vote in the state Senate, having cleared the Lower Chamber in early March on a 31-21 vote. Arizona democrats are vowing to hobble the bill, while Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed a similar bill last year that would have made it a felony to block a roadway.