Why This Wall Street-Backed Conservative Think Tank Attacks LGBTQ Rights

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, best known as a Reaganomics champion, is using anti-LGBTQ politics to advance its broader political goals. But that wasn’t always part of its strategy.

Design by Soph Holland.

In April, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis introduced the latest move in his fight against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs when he signed a bill into law that prohibits any local government in the state from spending money on DEI-related initiatives. The restrictions could threaten nondiscrimination ordinances, local pride events and other services, leading some LGBTQ advocates to label it a “pride ban.”

The law’s definition of DEI is adapted from a model bill by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a New York City-based conservative think tank that formed in 1978. Since its model bill was released in 2023, at least 10 states have introduced anti-DEI bills that include nearly identical language. Additionally, MI has informed the Trump administration’s policy on gender-affirming care through collaboration on the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) controversial pediatric gender dysphoria report.

Prior to the 2020s, efforts to undermine LGBTQ rights were not a focus for MI. But since then, it began parroting many of the talking points of the anti-LGBTQ movement. While the shift may seem random, an assessment of MI’s history and strategy reveals how these attacks fit into its broader political goals.

“Attacking LGBTQ rights is an effective strategy because bluntly, people don’t like gay people and don’t like trans people,” says Quinnehtukqut McLamore, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Missouri. “It’s effective because it makes it really easy to get … folks who usually don’t sign on with right-wing agendas to back anti-trans positions which set precedent for greater advancement of right-wing goals.”

The Manhattan Institute Didn’t Originally Care About LGBTQ Issues

Former President George W. Bush speaking at a Manhattan Institute event (Eric Draper for the White House).

Since its founding nearly 50 years ago, MI has influenced conservative policy by crafting model legislation and publishing reports for lawmakers and lobbyists. Some of its longtime goals have included promoting libertarian economic policies, discrediting teachers unions and deregulating healthcare. Funded primarily by conservatives on Wall Street, MI has over $30 million in net assets as of its most recent tax filings.

In 1990, MI began publishing City Journal, where writers would advocate for conservative issues such as lowering requirements to get a medical license and promoting charter schools over the public system.

Robert Asen, a professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that this journal, which reports over 350,000 monthly online visitors, helps MI maintain its influence.

“The City Journal gets, comparatively speaking for a public affairs journal, a lot of engagement … certainly more than any academic equivalent,” Asen told Uncloseted Media. “There’s the power of promotion that the Manhattan Institute provides: They are well-resourced in lots of ways, and that includes finances, connections, and other ways they can promote their ideas.”

Paul Singer and Trump Ties

Paul Singer in 2013. Photo by World Economic Forum.

MI expanded its influence under the leadership of Paul Singer, who was appointed chairman of the board of trustees in 2008. Singer, the founder of hedge fund Elliott Management and a major donor to conservative causes, helped push MI further right in the 2010s, with Bloomberg later reporting he wanted it to become a “Wall Street equivalent of the Federalist Society,” referencing the right-wing legal group best known for their campaign to spot and groom potential federal judges, including all three of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees.

Initially opposed to Donald Trump, Singer cozied up to him after the 2016 election earned Singer’s firm over $42 million through a spike in stock prices for private prisons.

“I want to thank Paul Singer for being here. … He was a very strong opponent and now he’s a very strong ally,” Trump said in a 2017 press conference.

Their relationship became so friendly, Bloomberg reports, that staffers were allegedly “directed to write favorably about Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy—or not write about them at all.”

Over the next decade, members of MI would go on to be employed by Trump. And officials from the president’s first administration, including former Attorney General William Barr and former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, were later appointed to MI’s board.

The Anti-Woke Pivot

While MI didn’t originally prioritize social issues, Asen says that began to change in 2020. Public outcry and protests against the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers led many organizations to introduce changes to how they handled racism, often under the framework of DEI.

These moves drew intense backlash from social conservatives. Asen says MI played off this frustration and melded it with existing anti-LGBTQ sentiment to go all in on an ideology of “anti-wokeness.”

“These two things start to converge as what this right-wing advocacy group calls ‘woke,’” he says. “This is wokeness, and wokeness is this oppressive discourse, wokeness is a threat to what we believe to be basic American values, and so we wish to stand against it.”

Rufo during a 2022 interview with ReasonTV.

As the anti-woke craze started taking over the Republican party, Christopher Rufo, a contributing editor at the time for City Journal, began writing articles with headlines like “Teaching Hate” and “Against Wokeness.” This advocacy led him to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show to urge President Trump to end racial sensitivity trainings for federal employees, calling them “critical race theory” trainings. Days later, Trump signed an executive order doing just that after retweeting the Fox News segment, and Rufo has since been widely credited with starting the national movements against critical race theory and DEI.

“That kind of direct influence is something that is pretty remarkable about this network,” Asen says.

Attacking Universities

Seeing the potential of this new rhetorical strategy, MI hired Rufo as a senior fellow and the director of the initiative on critical race theory in 2021. And by 2023, the institute released its model legislation, which Rufo penned, to ban DEI at public universities.

Language from that bill would be adopted, often verbatim, in bills introduced in Florida, Texas, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Arizona. For example, several states use the verbatim definition of DEI from MI’s model legislation, describing it as “any effort to promote differential treatment of or provide special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, color, or ethnicity.”

According to University of Michigan-Flint sociologist David J. Luke, this is a distortion of what the programs are actually about. “If I don’t know what DEI is and someone is telling me that it is some policies that give Black people an unfair advantage, then I’m not gonna like that,” Luke told Uncloseted Media. “They are really designed to try to make things more fair, but groups that are advantaged by the status quo don’t want things to be more fair.”

Rufo has remained the face of the anti-DEI campaign, which has been most successful in Florida. Documents obtained by American Oversight show that DeSantis’ office communicated directly with Rufo about his model legislation. In one email, a third party introduces DeSantis’ director of external affairs to MI as a “friend of the movement.” And in 2023, as part of his efforts to root out “woke” ideology at the New College of Florida, DeSantis appointed Rufo to its board of trustees.

Joanna Wuest, a political scientist and professor at Stony Brook University, says that going after so-called “woke” or “DEI” programs at universities allows MI to push its ideological opponents out from institutions where younger generations learn new ideas.

“[It’s] attacking anyone who is providing a counter-narrative to their idea that free market principles should undergird every part of American society,” she told Uncloseted Media.

In an article for City Journal, Rufo boasted that his efforts at the New College of Florida, including abolishing the school’s gender studies department and reworking the core curriculum, had led 36 left-wing faculty members to resign in just the first few months of his leadership.

“Through a combination of cultural incentives and good fortune, many of the most ideological, left-wing faculty members … have left the university … clearing the way for a large number of new hires interested in pursuing the great human questions rather than maintaining a stifling, left-wing echo chamber,” Rufo wrote.

Luke warns Rufo’s efforts are contributing to existing social disparities.

“The people that are losing their jobs are disproportionately people that hold marginalized identities … who are in these roles trying to help create these environments that support all students and their success,” Luke says.

Even in states that haven’t seen direct attacks, the hostile environment towards DEI and so-called woke policies has led many to fear speaking up about diverse topics. Asen says one of his graduate students, who was teaching a class that discussed demagoguery, approached him with concerns that they could be targeted if right-wing groups learned about the class.

“The issue about this discourse is that it creates a chilling effect regardless of whether there are formal laws or policies in place,” Asen says. “People feel more measured and more inclined to self-censor, and that’s the point.”

The Proxy War Against Public Schools

MI’s attacks on education also target K-12 schools. Starting in 2022, it began frequently demonizing schools for teaching “radical gender” ideology and “transitioning kids without parental consent.” Wuest says this is because disparaging public schools supports its longtime policy goals related to school choice. She cites a 2022 speech by Rufo at Hillsdale College.

“To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust,” Rufo said in the speech.

In another instance, Rufo has labeled teachers unions “the enemy,” calling them “inherently corrupt” and calling on Americans to “lay siege to the universities, abolish the teachers unions, and overturn the school boards.”

MI’s opposition to public schools in favor of the charter model is part of a longtime battle against teachers unions, which it claims have a “death lock on education policy in the Democratic Party.” Charter schools are rarely unionized, which MI has cited as a benefit.

By fearmongering about teachers putting kids in danger through LGBTQ-friendly policies, Wuest says MI is able to use anti-LGBTQ sentiment to help with its broader goal of discrediting the public school system.

“The Manhattan Institute and other libertarians are extremely opposed to labor unions, and so going after the public education system for being a bastion of woke indoctrination is a way of going after public sector teachers unions, which provide higher wages, benefits, protections for those workers,” Wuest says. “But also the teachers unions are an important political mobilizing arm of the Democratic party, and so it’s also a way of going after liberal/progressive politics more generally.”

Anti-Trans Attacks Fuel Healthcare Goals

In addition to opposing DEI, MI began establishing itself as a key player in the fight against gender-affirming care in 2022. Over the next two years, billionaire Joseph Edelman, the founder and CEO of healthcare-focused investment firm Perceptive Advisors, donated $500,000 to the group to provide support for a “gender identity initiative.” MI has not publicly identified the mission of the initiative.

The same year, MI hired Leor Sapir, a political scientist who wrote his dissertation in 2020 about how trans activism had gone too far. Sapir began writing for both MI and City Journal about the alleged excesses of trans activism. He penned articles including “Transgender Confusions” and “Don’t Say ‘They.’”

Colin Wright. Photo by Elekes Andor.

The institute also hired Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist who joined Sapir in leading what MI calls its “global effort to end pediatric sex-trait modifications,” referring to gender-affirming care for kids. Wright was previously an academic advisor for the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group.

Since then, they’ve helped steer the Trump administration’s trans policy. Sapir led the HHS report on pediatric gender medicine, which health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cited in a thwarted attempt to cut federal funding to hospitals providing gender-affirming care to minors. Sapir later said that the Trump administration approached him directly for this role.

And MI claims that two of Trump’s executive orders that prohibit federal funding for transition surgeries for minors and that reject trans identities by defining “biological sex” were inspired by Sapir’s and Wright’s work.

“The original strategies that [MI] articulated were basically what is happening in blue states right now—basically, intimidate the clinics out of offering the care in the first place,” Quinnehtukqut McLamore says.

Wuest says anti-LGBTQ healthcare policy gives MI and its funders an avenue to attack medical professional organizations, which has been a goal of the organization since its inception.

For example, the American Medical Association (AMA) aims to improve the quality of U.S. healthcare by holding medical schools to certain standards of rigor to obtain accreditation and by lobbying the government for more regulations. MI, strong proponents of an unfettered free market, have come to blows with the AMA numerous times, arguing that these regulatory measures hold back progress.

“[MI] has been especially concerned with these associations’ role in crafting healthcare regulations that protect patient health and safety while boosting licensed healthcare workers’ wages,” Wuest says. “Licensure and other healthcare regulations, Manhattan writers have often argued, are an undue and inefficient imposition on the free market.”

She adds that MI’s entry into anti-trans policy allows them to capitalize off of souring public sentiments on gender-affirming healthcare. This helps them leverage new attacks on the credibility of the AMA and other organizations like it. Susan Lebovitz-Edelman, an MI trustee and wife of Joseph Edelman, has said that to fight wokeness in healthcare, the industry must “hold accreditors [like the AMA] accountable and end their stranglehold on medical education.”

“Attacking the AMA’s role in buttressing gender-affirming care … is part of their larger effort to show that these groups are ideologically captured and that they’re otherwise abandoning their duty to guide Americans in finding evidence-based care,” Wuest says. “The gender-affirming care stuff is a way of de-legitimating the AMA’s role in guiding best healthcare practices.”

The Impact

MI’s advocacy has helped undermine institutional support for trans healthcare, which most major medical organizations support and has been described as life-saving.

A 2023 article by Rufo covered details from the leaked personal healthcare records of trans kids at the Texas Children’s Hospital and sparked an investigation that forced the hospital to stop providing gender-affirming care to minors and open the nation’s first “detransition clinic.” And Sapir’s lobbying through the HHS report helped influence the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ decision to recommend against gender-affirming surgeries for people under 19.

In higher education, Luke says that while some of Trump’s anti-DEI attacks on universities have been legally dubious, universities have been quick to comply anyway. More than 300 colleges and universities have rolled back their DEI policies under Trump’s second term, and schools like Texas A&M have fired professors for allegedly teaching gender identity concepts in class.

“[MI’s] attacks have aligned successfully with policy goals, as various states have passed anti-trans laws and the federal government has adopted an anti-trans posture,” Asen says.

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for an interview or comment for this story.

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