Manhattan Institute

Manhattan Institute logo

God, guns, and freedom U.S. Politics

Starting arguments over Thanksgiving dinner

Hurricane Katrina 1992 United States presidential election Paul Wolfowitz Jeff Sessions National Center for Science Education Kristi Noem Tom Cotton

Persons of interest

Tad Devine John F. Kennedy Beto O'Rourke Theodore Roosevelt John Tyler 19 Kids and Counting v - t - e

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.^[1] 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.

In 2013, a research paper characterized (with an analysis period of 2003–2010) the Manhattan Institute as one prominent institution opposed to action against climate change.^[2] The Institute has published the quarterly magazine City Journal since 1990.^[3]

The Manhattan Institute's City Journal have published transphobic articles authored by Christopher F. Rufo, Kay S. Hymowitz, Colin Wright and others.^{[4][5][6][7][8][9]} Similar to Quillette, City Journal is obsessed with criticizing "wokeness".^[10][11][12]

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.^[13] 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.^[14]:121

George Gilder, a Program Director for the Manhattan Institute, and also a co-founder of the Discovery Institute,^[15] has been a promoter of pseudoscientific supply-side economics and the associated Laffer curve. He wrote the 1981 supply-side book Wealth and Poverty^[16] that was considered the "Bible" for the Reagan administration's economic policies.^[17]:76

In 1994, a Manhattan Institute scholar named Betsy McCaughey (under the name Elizabeth McCaughey) wrote a scathing critique of Bill Clinton's health care plan in The New Republic 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.^[18][19] In January 1995, James Fallows 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.^[19]

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.^{[20][21]:4,29-35}

During the Trump administration of 2017-2020, the Institute was oddly silent about the crony capitalism that drove the administration's policies,^[22][23] something anathema to the Institute's free market values.^[24] 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.^[25] 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.^[25]

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 Philip Morris International in 1995.^[26]

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".^[27] 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.^[27] 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.^[28] In September 20 2020, a senior fellow named Mark P. Mills^[29] 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 Ars Technica at the time (Jon Timmer) as "pure nonsense", along with a detailed point-by-point explanation as to why it was such.^[30] Robert Bryce, 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,^[31] and also contributed several other anti-clean energy op-eds to many newspapers.^[32] According to The Intercept, the fossil fuels giant ExxonMobil contributed nearly a million dollars to the Manhattan Institute between 2008 and 2018.^[33]

DeSmog has noted that senior fellows of the Manhattan Institute are global-warming deniers notably Robert Bryce:

Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Robert Bryce regularly authors op-eds for mainstream and conservative publications advocating against renewable energy while promoting fossil fuel use. With reference to climate change, Bryce has said: “I don’t know who’s right. And I don’t really care.” In a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Five Truths About Climate Change,” Bryce claimed that the “science is not settled, not by a long shot.”^[34]

Christopher Rufo

Rufo in 2022 from a video interview with Reason TV

One of the more prominent members of the Manhattan Institute is Christopher Rufo (1984–). Rufo is an anti-LGBT culture warrior,^{[36][37][38][39]} and senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute. He is also an intelligent design advocate and former director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty.^[40][41] He has falsely claimed to have a degree from Harvard University, when he has only a degree from the open-enrollment Harvard Extension School.^[42]

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.^[43] 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.

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^[44] and The Bottomless Well.^[45] 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 John McWhorter is their go-to guy for token criticisms of affirmative action and the non-existent Cloward-Piven strategy. McWhorter loves using anecdotal evidence.^[46]

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.

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)
• Walter Olson^[47] (a member of Steve Sailer's "Human Biodiversity Discussion Group",^[48] part of his wider "Human Biodiversity Institute")
• Christopher Rufo (anti-transgender activist)
• John Tierney (journalist and anti-environmentalist)
• Nicholas Wade (hereditarian author of A Troublesome Inheritance, was also influential in promoting COVID lab leak theory)
• Colin Wright (anti-transgender activist)

Colin Wright,^[49] John Tierney,^[50] and Andy Ngo^[51] have also written for the alt-right-pandering online magazine Quillette.

External links

• Manhattan Institute for Policy Research — SourceWatch, The Center for Media and Democracy
• Manhattan Institute

Notes

References