The Manhattan Institute Helped Kill DEI. Now It’s Coming for Protests
The right-wing think tank is actively pushing “civil terrorism”—increasing penalties for minor crimes committed while people engage in constitutionally protected free speech.
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.
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, wi
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