Manhattan Institute



The Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research is a neoconservative think tank founded in 1978 by neoconservative William Casey, later to become Reagan's CIA director, and UK libertarian Antony Fisher. Economic analyses by the Institute tend towards the Austrian school of libertarianism, particularly those of Friedrich Hayek. David Frum, who coined the Axis of Evil term, came to the Bush administration from the Manhattan Institute in 2001. Several neocon icons such as William Kristol are on their board of trustees. The Institute has published the quarterly magazine City Journal since 1990.

The Manhattan Institute's City Journal have published transphobic articles authored by Christopher F. Rufo, Kay S. Hymowitz, Colin Wright and others. Similar to Quillette, the City Journal is obsessed with criticizing "wokeness".

Christopher Rufo, an anti-transgender activist and senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute is an intelligent design advocate and former director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty.

Conservative crankery
Fellow George L. Kelling introduced the broken windows theory of policing along with James Q. Wilson (of the American Enterprise Institute) in 1982. Rudy Giuliani received considerable backing from the Institute during his failed 1989 campaign for New York City mayor as well as his successful campaign in 1993 when he used the broken windows theory as part of his campaign.

George Gilder, a Program Director for the Manhattan Institute, and also a co-founder of the Discovery Institute, has been a promoter of pseudoscientific supply-side economics and the associated Laffer curve. He wrote the 1981 supply-side book Wealth and Poverty that was considered the "Bible" for the Reagan administration's economic policies.

In 1994, a Manhattan Institute scholar named (under the name Elizabeth McCaughey) wrote a scathing critique of Bill Clinton's  in  magazine. The article claimed that Clinton had proposed a system that would lock people into government-run care, and raised fears that jail time would result for violating this. This "factoid" was immediately picked up and reprinted by conservative commentators like George Will. Some commentators feel that this article was a major reason why the plan failed to pass Congress. In January 1995, wrote a scathing report in The Atlantic regarding the failure of this health care plan, and specifically addressed the large amount of disinformation about it. Among many other points, he pointed out that McCaughey's article was complete and utter bullshit.

The Manhattan Institute was a favorite source used by Dubya's team during his 2000 presidential campaign. Many of Bush's proposals floated during the 2000 presidential debates came from the Manhattan Institute.

During the Trump administration of 2017-2020, the Institute was oddly silent about the crony capitalism that drove the administration's policies, something anathema to the Institute's free market values. Longtime City Journal writer Sol Stern was dismayed by both Trump's election and the unexplained censorship of any writing critical of Trump within City Journal. Stern surmised that the censorship was due to the Institute's chair, Paul Singer, changing from anti-Trump to becoming a major donor to Trump ($1 million just to the inauguration), as well as Institute trustee Rebekah Mercer also becoming a late Trump supporter and donating $450,000 to him.

Denialism
Anti-tobacco activists have documented that the Manhattan Institute received funding from tobacco companies from the 1990s until at least 2015, and had consistently supported campaigns that supported tobacco industry stances. The Manhattan Institute even hosted a meeting on junk tobacco science organized by in 1995.

Fellow members from the Manhattan Institute have been criticized for spreading misinformation about climate change and shilling for the fossil fuels industry. In March 2018, the Manhattan Institute published a paper by Oren Cass called "Overheated: How Flawed Analyses Overestimate the Costs of Climate Change". Cass, whose climate science "qualifications" include a prior career as a management consultant and a policy director of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, asserted that "temperature studies do not offer useful predictions of the future costs of projected human-caused climate change". He justified this position using undocumented assertions about Americans migrating to warmer climates in the southern US, and insisted that people will adapt to a warmer climate using air conditioning. This was seen as a laughable argument (which over-focused on rich individuals that could afford to adapt) by outlets that reported on climate change news and misinformation. In September 20 2020, a senior fellow named Mark P. Mills posted a video to PragerU that complained about purported problems wind and solar energy. In March 2021, these arguments that Mills made in this video were lambasted in an article by the senior science editor of at the time (Jon Timmer) as "pure nonsense", along with a detailed point-by-point explanation as to why it was such. who was a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute from 2010 to 2019, wrote several articles during this period attacking wind energy with wildly exaggerated claims, and also contributed several other anti-clean energy op-eds to many newspapers. According to the fossil fuels giant  contributed nearly a million dollars to the Manhattan Institute between 2008 and 2018.

Critical race theory
The manufactroversy of critical race theory was spearheaded by a current senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute named Over the course of 2020, the former documentary filmmaker turned conservative activist gathered curricula and documents from anti-bias training sessions in the city of Seattle. From these, he postulated (using cherry picking, according to critics) that the anti-racism seminars did not just merely represent a progressive view on race, but that they were purportedly expressions of a distinct ideology — critical race theory — with purported radical Marxist roots. This despite Rufo not completely understanding (or even caring to understand) the actual intellectual underpinnings behind critical race theory. Rufo initially reported his findings on both his and the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Rufo's "theory" later gained huge amounts of currency in conservative politics after Rufo was featured on Tucker Carlson's show. Later in early 2023, Ron DeSantis appointed Rufo to the board of as part of an effort by DeSantis to replace the board of the small college with conservative firebrands and DeSantis-aligned stooges, remaking it in the model of the private conservative Christian    Under Rufo's direction, professors have been terminated merely for having left-wing political views and being publicly critical of the DeSantis board takeover.

Playing both sides
According to Brian Doherty, in Radicals for Capitalism, the rule of thumb around the Manhattan Institute is don't ever use the "libertarian" label around here because it will alienate conservative supporters. Yet despite this and their neoconservative orientation they keep a foot in the libertarian camp as well, mainly through work with the network of laissez-faire think tanks funded by Koch Industries, and such libertarians as eugenicist Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, who was with the Manhattan Institute when he wrote his first book, Losing Ground. The Manhattan Institute receives Koch funding as well as the other usual sources: Richard Mellon Scaife, the Olin and Bradley Foundations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (no, really), and the tobacco industry.

On immigration: one of the leading voices in support of a "path to citizenship," Tamar Jacoby, and one of the leading voices against same, Heather Mac Donald, are both from the Manhattan Institute.

Likewise, they play both sides on environmentalism, where they eschew the overt denialism in favor of some truly wonky think tank work. The Manhattan Institute sponsored two books by Peter Huber, Hard Green and The Bottomless Well. The former book proposed that conservatives adopt a partially pro-environment position by claiming the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt while opposing the "soft" environmentalism of Al Gore. The latter book is a slick but confusing snow job on energy — essentially trying to make a case that waste is a virtue and the more energy wasted leads to greater energy independence — with such chapters as "Saving the Planet with Coal and Uranium" and numerous charts and graphs which would be a field day for someone to deconstruct.

They even court Democrats; linguist is their go-to guy for token criticisms of affirmative action and the non-existent Cloward-Piven strategy. McWhorter loves using anecdotal evidence.

All in all, Manhattan Institute is a confusing and often contradictory think tank, but perhaps symptomatic of the contradictory makeup of American conservatism. It's no wonder that Bush and Giuliani liked them.

Cancel courts come for Cancel Watch
On 5 July 2023, a far-right "Cancel Watch" published a bizarre article claiming that Oliver D. Smith (User:Aeschylus), an ex-editor of RationalWiki, was actively involved in manipulating the site to cancel race and intelligence researchers. This despite Smith having been banned from RationalWiki since 2019, and any known edits of dubious nature by Smith having been scrubbed. The Cancel Watch article accused Smith of creating attack pages against various white nationalists such as Emil Kirkegaard, Edward Dutton, John Fuerst, and the London Conference on Intelligence. The article also accused Smith of being responsible for Emily Willoughby's Lanzendorf award being revoked and the sacking of Noah Carl and Bo Winegard. Two days later, the City Journal published an article about Smith copying most of the text from the Cancel Watch article with the same unsubstantiated allegations. At least one of the allegations made against Smith is demonstrably false: the individual who contacted Winegard's employer was a Twitter user called "AfroSapiens."

The City Journal article on Smith cited numerous unreliable sources: for instance taking most of its information from the troll website Encyclopedia Dramatica; Joshua Conner Moon's stalker forum Kiwi Farms; Moon's website Lolcow Wiki (also deleted) and white supremacist, neo-Nazi forum Stormfront. It is is evident from this that the editor did not properly check sources of the article before publishing it. The article also only cited archived versions of the RationalWiki webpages showing Smith's work, rather than the current scrubbed versions, possibly indicating (in the most generous interpretation) some ignorance by the author about how wikis actually work. The article was ultimately removed from City Journal less than two weeks after publication; this happened a few days after Smith sued the publisher.

There is evidence City Journal coordinated with Cancel Watch to try to compel Smith to remove RationalWiki content, with the threat of the publication of the City Journal article if he did not comply. The author of the Cancel Watch article may be associated with Emil Kirkegaard, as the article contains personal information about Kirkegaard such as claiming that customs authorities searched his laptop for child pornography when he travelled between Europe and the United States.

The City Journal article on Smith was also copied to various far-right and white nationalist websites including VDARE, 8chan, Steve Sailer's blog at The Unz Review and has also been promoted by far-right eccentric Edward Dutton who advocates an irrational conspiracy theory that "every scholar seriously associated with evolutionary psychology has a defamatory Rational Wiki page".

City Journal
Contributors to this include:
 * Victor Davis Hanson (classics scholar)
 * Kay Hymowitz (anti-feminist)
 * Andrew Klavan (also with Pajamas Media)
 * Heather Mac Donald (conservative atheist and Ferguson effect "researcher")
 * Andy Ngo (anti-feminist and Islamophobe)
 * Christopher Rufo (anti-transgender activist)
 * John Tierney (journalist and anti-environmentalist)
 * Nicholas Wade (racialist, was also influential in promoting COVID lab leak theory)
 * Colin Wright (anti-transgender activist)

Colin Wright, John Tierney and Andy Ngo have written for the alt-right-pandering online magazine Quillette.