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.
“Arizona’s legislature has a history of targeting protesters, dating back to the movement against SB 1070 circa 2010. That’s when the state’s demographics began to change and there was an increasing use of the political process to target communities of color,” Darrell Hill, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, tells WIRED. “It’s part of a narrative that the Trump administration is pushing, trying to equate left-wing protest activity with extremism and terrorism based simply on the viewpoints or the expressive activity that’s taken place,” he says. “The people passing these laws have a very biased worldview, and they never expect that these powers will be used against them.”
The Manhattan Institute–backed “civil terrorism” bill is part of a raft of anti-protest bills currently in front of Arizona’s legislature, including proposed laws that would create felonies for warning people of an imminent arrest, adding “rioting” to the state racketeering statute, and upgrading obstruction of a lawful arrest to a felony. The civil terrorism bill and Utah’s anti-protest legislation were introduced in January during the height of protests in Minnesota against Homeland Security’s lethal immigration surge. “In Arizona, the tenor of debate is around the anti-ICE demonstrations, and there’s a natural linkage between Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s killings and these efforts to stamp out protest,” says Hill.
In response to questions from WIRED, Arizona state senator Catherine Miranda, the second-ranking Democrat in Arizona’s upper house, called HB 2136 “an attack on all our First Amendment rights—the right to assemble, to free speech, to petition our government. It is meant to have a chilling effect on our right to speak out against a state or federal government that is repressing our civil rights and embracing authoritarianism.” Miranda also noted that if passed into law, the “civil terrorism” bill would make it a felony for two or more people to block a public thoroughfare for either pedestrians or vehicles.
When asked about how “civil terrorism” would infringe upon Americans’ constitutional right to freedom of expression, protest, and assembly, Fortgang says that allowing unchecked acts of civil disobedience would “subordinate everyone else's legitimate interests to ever-escalating demonstrations that take over our lives.”
Representative Michael Way, a Republican state representative from a Phoenix exurb, cited intense protests over President Donald Trump’s controversial and violent immigration enforcement blitzes throughout the country as justification for codifying “civil terrorism.”
Way did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Authorities in both Arizona and Utah have attempted to use questionable laws to suppress progressive and left-wing movements in the very recent past. During the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, prosecutors in Salt Lake City and Arizona charged anti-police-brutality demonstrators with felony offenses under gang statutes. In Phoenix, 15 protesters were charged with participation in a criminal street gang after Maricopa County prosecutors misled a grand jury about the existence of an “ACAB (all cops are bastards) gang.” The charges were ultimately dismissed by a judge, and the lead prosecutor was suspended from practicing law for two years over her role in fabricating the charges.
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