The Manhattan Institute helped kill DEI. Now it comes to protests

A right-wing think tank responsible for the emergence of the Zero Tolerance Police in New York City in the 1990s and for the Trump government's scorched earth campaign against the “Diversity, Equality and Inclusion” project is behind state-level legislative efforts to classify minor offences related to protests as “citizen terrorism”.

The Manhattan Institute was created in 1978 by the former Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, and is conducting a year-long campaign to recategorize minor criminal acts, such as vandalism, blocking of roads or incursions during protests, through state-level legislation, as felonies with a prison sentence of 18 months.

As the Manhattan Institute promotes non-violent insubordination as a form of terrorism, the Trump Government is intensifying its efforts to combat left-wing organizations, businesses and social movements, while recharging non-violent civil disobedience as a potential crime.

“Today's left-wing instigators randomly commit unlawful acts aimed at causing inconvenience and disruption to as many civilians as possible, in the hope of putting pressure on them to force the Government to change its course. This tactic is reasonably described as a form of terrorism, even though the activists are not as brutal as Al-Qaida or Hamas — they do not use guns, bombs or threaten unpredictable bloodshed. On the contrary, they engage in civil terrorism, wrote Tar Fukuoka, a legal policy researcher at the Manhattan Institute. A recent graduate of the New York University School of Law deplored the “hate of Jews” students protesting Israel's war against Gaza.

Fukuoka's career has been a right-wing think tank, and he seems to be the main supporter of the “citizen terrorism” doctrine, starting with a column in the Wall Street Journal in February 2025, which considers non-violent insubordination, such as road blockages, to be more dangerous. Recently, he published an article in the internal magazine of the Manhattan Institute, City Magazine, on the anti-war protest network Answer. The central role in the organization of acts of civil terrorism and its propaganda on behalf of Venezuela, Iran and China [there are sufficient grounds to believe that their acts may be unlawful under such regulations as the Foreign Agent Registration Act”.

In response to a question from the magazine Wireline, Fulgang claimed that in his writings he focused on anti-war, pro-Palestinian and “black life is life” activists, defending the novel theory of “citizen terrorism”, “because they constitute the vast majority of the groups involved in such acts”. When asked why states should escalate protest-related crimes from minor offences to felonies, he wrote: “When hundreds of people come together to commit acts of disorder, we face something quite different. This is what I call citizen terrorism: the massive commission of petty crimes in order to intimidate or force people to adopt certain policies.”

Two state-level legislations of the Manhattan Institute, supported by billionaires, took steps to realize Fukuoka ' s vision. The Utah legislature passed HB 331 earlier this year and Governor Spencer Cox signed it into law on March 24th. There was little resistance in the Utah House of Representatives and Senate, and only two members voted against the HB 331 process. In addition to increasing the penalties for “serious disturbance of the peace” during the protests and creating new offences for “illegal promotion of foreign organizations”, the Utah law also prohibits civilians from wearing masks during the protests, which the Salt Lake Tribune criticizes as an open contradiction that the local police and federal migrants are allowed to wear.

In Arizona, state councils and governors are divided between Republicans and Democrats, and the Manhattan Institute model legislation is currently awaiting a vote in the state Senate, which was passed in the lower house in early March by 31 to 21. The Arizona Democrats vowed to block the bill, while the Governor, Katie Hobbs, rejected a similar bill last year, which would make the blockade a serious crime.

“The Arizona legislature has a history of targeting protesters, dating back to the opposition movement SB 1070 around 2010. At the time, the state's demographic structure began to change, increasingly using political procedures to target colored communities, “Darrell Hill, Policy Director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Arizona, told Connect magazine. “This is part of the narrative being promoted by the Trump Government, which attempts to equate left-wing protests with extremism and terrorism solely on the basis of the views or expressions that have taken place”, he says. “The passers-by of these laws has a very biased view of the world, and they never imagined that these powers would be used against them.”

The “Citizen Terrorism” bill, supported by the Manhattan Institute, is part of a series of anti-protest bills currently under consideration by the Arizona state legislature, including the proposed laws, which serve to warn people of imminent arrest as a felony, add “disturbation” to the state legislation on extortion and escalate obstruction of lawful arrest into a felony. The Citizen Terrorism Bill and Utah Anti-Damp legislation were introduced in January at the height of the Minnesota protests against the Department of Homeland Security ' s deadly surge in immigration. “In Arizona, the debate focused on the anti-ICE demonstrations, and there was a natural link between the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and these repressive protests,” Hill said.

In response to a question from the magazine Connect, Catherine Miranda, Senator of Arizona and Democrat 2 of the Arizona House of Lords, described HB 2136 as “an attack on all our rights under the First Amendment - the right to assembly, the right to freedom of expression, the right to petition the Government”. It is intended to have a chilling effect on our public opposition to the suppression of our civil rights and to the rights of states or federal governments that espouse dictatorship.” Miranda also stated that if the “Citizen Terrorism” Act was passed into law, the blocking of public access by two or more persons to pedestrians or vehicles would be considered a felony.

When asked how “citizen terrorism” would violate the constitutional rights of Americans to freedom of expression, protest and assembly, Fukuoka stated that allowing unrestricted civil disobedience would “take over our lives by subjugating the legitimate interests of others to escalating demonstrations”.

Republican Congressman Michael Way from the suburbs of Phoenix cited President Donald Trump's controversial violent immigration law enforcement raids throughout the country as justification for the codification of “citizen terrorism”.

Way did not respond to a request for an evaluation from Connect.

Recently, authorities in Arizona and Utah have attempted to use problematic laws to suppress progressive and left-wing movements. In 2020, in a protest against the murder of George Freud by police officer Derek Shawan of Minneapolis, prosecutors of Salt Lake City and Arizona accused anti-police violence demonstrators of serious crimes under gang regulations. In Phoenix, the Malikopa district prosecutor misled the grand jury about the existence of the AACAB (all police officers are assholes) gang, after which 15 protesters were accused of involvement in street criminal gangs. The charges were eventually dismissed by the judge, and the Chief Prosecutor was suspended for two years for fabricated charges.