It has come to this.
Over the past two weeks, as it became clear that the racist lie Donald Trump amplified about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio was patently false—it came from one ludicrous Facebook post whose author later denounced it—Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and famed right-wing troll, decided that he must uncover the “the truth”: He offered $5,000 to anyone who could provide “hard, verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield.”
Not surprisingly, Rufo didn’t find any evidence. But that didn’t stop him from sharing an “EXCLUSIVE” video last week that showed African immigrants in Dayton … barbecuing chicken. The video was from 2023.
It was really the high-water mark of an absurd and disgusting affair—and even some of Rufo’s own think tank colleagues seemed to think so. On X, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Brian Riedl ripped into migrant-maligning hoax peddlers who “don’t care about the truth and [have] already moved on to inventing 5 more fake stories to demonize other vulnerable communities.” Manhattan Institute graduate fellow Daniel Di Martino proclaimed “the fake news has to stop,” citing “threats against the city leaders and Haitian migrants” in Springfield. (He later denounced “some leaders [who] continue to smear people” in the town.) Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jason L. Riley boosted tweets from an NBC reporter that offered historical context for the fearmongering: reports of racists in the 1980s who similarly weaponized unfounded pet-eating claims against refugees.
Still, none of these fellows mentioned Rufo by name, and it’s unclear if any soul-searching occurred inside the Manhattan Institute’s offices. On X, Rufo’s preferred soapbox, commentators of varying ideological leanings called upon the institute and its president, conservative author Reihan Salam, to answer for Rufo’s persistence in hatemongering and Salam’s tacit approval of the damaging crusade.
But Rufo has only gone further since then, claiming that all the bomb threats reported in Springfield—which occurred after the daily lives of nearly 60,000 people there were upended by the online hate campaign Rufo was part of—were foreign-origin hoaxes. Never mind that a student from a neighboring high school had been arrested for making one of these online threats; that Springfield’s Haitian residents have reported instances of their cars getting broken into and doused with acid; that members of the racist Proud Boys militia have themselves marched upon Springfield in response to the hoax; and that even Ohio’s governor’s office confirmed to Rufo that some of the threats were indeed from domestic sources. Rufo is now essentially harassing the governor of Ohio on X.
Salam has so far been silent on Rufo’s crusade, although he’s defended J.D. Vance’s amplification of the pet-eating lies on CNN. He did not return a request for comment for this story. (This is also probably a good time to say: He used to be a columnist for Slate.)
To focus the ire on Salam may seem odd, since Rufo didn’t publish any of this commentary on the Manhattan Institute’s website (where at least a couple of contributors have referred to the rumormongering about Haitian migrants as “distasteful” and “undisciplined”). But Salam brought Rufo into the Manhattan Institute fold in 2020 and he has eagerly spotlighted him in the organization’s public materials over the years. And this isn’t the first time this year that Rufo has amplified baseless claims about a minority group that led to a crisis for an American town: Misinformation Rufo published about “Venezuelan gangs” “taking over” Aurora, Colorado, was featured prominently on the Manhattan Institute website despite being debunked by local police, residents, and even the very officials who’d fueled those misleading claims. (In a Tuesday piece for the institute, Rufo alluded to “tensions resulting from large-scale Haitian migration in Springfield,” sans any mention of his own role in stoking said tensions, and hedged his previous rhetoric on Aurora by referring to Venezuelan gangs “apparently” taking over apartments.)
Perhaps more poignantly, Rufo’s ceaseless demonization of others goes against so much of what Salam was known for earlier in his career—and what he said he would do with the Manhattan Institute.
A conservative think tank co-founded in 1978 by Nixon administration alum William J. Casey, the Manhattan Institute has been instrumental in laying out influential policy blueprints for slashing welfare spending, sowing doubts about human-caused climate change, and pushing for aggressive law enforcement in cities; Republicans from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Rudy Giuliani eagerly took to the institute’s work and implemented its recommendations. Yet the think tank also built bridges across the aisle, working with onetime Newark Mayor Cory Booker to establish job programs for newly freed prisoners and promoting the YIMBY ideal of building more (and denser) apartments in order to solve big cities’ housing crises.
In other words, the Manhattan Institute was always conservative, and it certainly has a history of pushing social scholarship that disproportionately targeted minority communities (for example, its relentless support for now-debunked “broken windows” policies). Still, it could at least make a plausible claim to some policy independence from the GOP.
Over the past couple of years, though, quite a few Manhattan Institute affiliates have progressed from hand-wringing over diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to arguable expressions of full-blown bigotry. The openly misogynistic professor Scott Yenor, who’s still a City Journal contributor, was revealed earlier this year to have run an Idaho website that employed openly antisemitic and racist writers and targeted local Pride activists as “groomers.” Institute senior fellow Ilya Shapiro has a lengthy history of smearing distinguished jurists of color—most pointedly Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson—as “lesser” judicial appointees and as examples of “identity politics” over merit. Heather Mac Donald, the institute’s Thomas W. Smith fellow, has lamented that “white civilization has decided to engage in the Great Replacement Theory,” claimed that anti-Asian hate crimes are “overwhelmingly committed by ghetto blacks,” and written, in leaked emails, that the “nannies of color” in her Manhattan neighborhood came from “the low IQ 3rd world.”
And then there is Rufo, who has boosted eugenicist writers, and whose latest “reporting” on the Dayton chicken grillers was carried out in collaboration with the online magazine IM-1776, which has previously platformed the French white nationalist Renaud Camus and praised the Unabomber. (More recently, the website ran a piece defending the “historian” Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper, who recently claimed on Tucker Carlson’s show that Germany’s concentration camps were “humane.”) Rufo, of course, came to prominence by framing virtually all institutional pro-diversity efforts as “anti-white” discrimination, and his other initiatives—like his relentless, successful push to oust Harvard president Claudine Gay, nailing her on plagiarism charges after failing to frame her as an unqualified “diversity hire”—won him notoriety and, seemingly, no guardrails.
The only institute affiliate who seems to have received any sort of retribution for racism, in fact, is Diane Yap, who stopped contributing to the institute after posting a tweet where she referred to a Black user’s “ancestors” as “farm equipment.”
In June, Bloomberg News reported that Manhattan Institute chairman Paul Singer, the hedge fund billionaire and Republican megadonor, has recently directly intervened to stop the institute from publishing critiques of Trump’s tax cuts and had raged against an article one fellow wrote in favor of gun control. Singer is also a hugely influential donor, according to the reportd, which notes that his foundation has donated at least $4.5 million to the institute.
Such donor pressure predates Singer, to take it from Sol Stern, a former affiliate with the think tank who once wrote for the institute’s flagship publication, City Journal, about private education and other topics. In a 2020 reflection he published in Democracy Journal, Stern wrote that the Manhattan Institute’s nominally independent board of trustees and outside donors had come to exercise much more power over the think tank’s editorial content. A 2008 article Stern penned on the failures of the school-choice movement earned the ire of donors as well as extra top-down pressure from then-president Lawrence Hone, Salam’s predecessor. Another critique of the school-choice movement was spiked in 2009, and when Stern wrote a book in 2014 that took a shot at friend-of-the-institute George Will, he was told by institute executives to change the offending passage. When he refused, Stern lost his fellowship.
After Singer became chairman, Stern wrote, “some staff writers were told that they had to submit articles intended for publication in other outlets for review by [Manhattan Institute] management first.” One staffer told Stern, “Every word is now parsed by committee before being published anywhere.” Stern added that when Salam was appointed president, he’d hoped for “overdue changes”—but that they never came. Stern saw City Journal’s uncritical coverage of Trump’s decisions during the COVID pandemic and the 2020 racial justice protests as “an act of intellectual betrayal that further damaged the cause of principled conservatism.”
The irony is the fact that Salam, the New York–born son of Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants, had—before his advancement to president of the Manhattan Institute—long enjoyed a reputation as a “reasonable” and “smart” conservative. Once identified among the intelligentsia as a “reformicon” hoping to shift a neoconservative GOP toward a pro-working-class direction, Salam had long curried liberal affection as “literary Brooklyn’s favorite conservative.” He, along with Ross Douthat, also argued for Republicans to embrace policies on health care and wage subsidies that, they claimed, would appeal to women, the working class, and “upwardly mobile minorities.”
During the mid-2010s, Salam was a columnist for Slate, where he espoused conservative-to-moderate tacks on various issues: supporting the end of birthright citizenship and inveighing against a $15 minimum wage, but also defending Mexican Americans and other immigrants from racist attacks (while still advocating for an immigration “slowdown”), and laying out a “conservative” blueprint for law enforcement reform following the 2014 police killing of Eric Garner.
While he was dismayed with Donald Trump’s GOP coronation—and even hinted that “white identity politics” could become a hallmark of Trump’s influence—Salam stuck with the Republican Party as the home for small-government champions like himself.
In 2019, when Salam took the reins at the Manhattan Institute, he told the Wall Street Journal that the think tank should become a “big, open tent” and that he wished to act as a “coalition builder” with fellows who would “identify compromises and pragmatic accommodations” on policy priorities. Notably, he added that he was “deeply concerned” about “punitive multiculturalism—a cultural politics that revolves around the demonization of putatively privileged groups.” Or, as he put it in the Atlantic, much less academically: the scourge of “anti-white rhetoric.”
To behold what the most prominent fellows at the Manhattan Institute do today is to realize that this onetime “reform conservative” has let the latter become the priority. And that’s probably in large part thanks to the money.
Per the Bloomberg report, Singer’s goal appears to be to turn the Manhattan Institute into a sort of Federalist Society for Wall Street, where the tax-dodging wealthy can pour their dollars to further the quest against “wokeness.” Under Singer’s reign, the Manhattan Institute has drawn in millions and millions of dollars in donations from firms familiar to those with knowledge of the right wing’s elaborate dark-money network: the Searle Family Trust, the Walton Family Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Koch-backed DonorsTrust, among others.
The institute is also backed by ultraconservative funders Rebekah Mercer and Harlan Crow—whose wife also sits on the board of trustees, alongside plenty of other prominent Republican financiers. Even though Crow and Singer have notoriouslycultivated close relationships with Supreme Court Justices Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, the institute often submits amicus briefs to the court, regarding issues of particular importance to both those billionaires. HuffPost also reported last year that the Edelman Family Foundation, co-chaired by Manhattan Institute trustee Susan Lebovitz-Edelman, “donated $400,000 to the Manhattan Institute to support, in the foundation’s words, a ‘gender identity initiative,’ ” just one among many anti-trans causes the Edelmans have funded since 2021. Rufo, alongside other fellows, has been smearing transgender Americans and their advocates as “groomers” for years now.
Another such example: Bloomberg pinpointed the Thomas W. Smith Foundation as the Manhattan Institute’s single largest donor from 2019–22, outstripping donations from even Singer’s own foundation. The Smith Foundation, headed by the Florida-based hedge fund manager who gave it his name (and who also serves as a Manhattan Institute trustee), has funded several conservative organizations that have led disingenuous attacks framing racial consciousness and diversity initiatives as “critical race theory” Marxism that supposedly subjugates white people.
In other words, Rufo is prized at the Manhattan Institute for a simple reason: The biggest donors are obsessed with his agenda, too. If Trumpist bigotry is where conservatism is to go, then the Manhattan Institute is going to travel that direction, no matter who’s at the helm. It’s what the people with the dollars want.
