Weekly Writers Round-Up: Economic Recovery, Campus Racism, and Better Presidential Debates

Each week, we’ll be featuring opinion pieces from the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. Do you dream of having bylines like these? Learn more about how the Writing Fellows Program can help boost your writing career!

How to Recover Americans’ Livelihoods by Vance Ginn (Spring 2019) in RealClearPolicy
Congress should scrap what’s currently being discussed in the next round of COVID-19-related recovery efforts. Instead, it should focus on getting businesses operating and workers working again after governments’ lockdowns severely disrupted the lives and livelihoods of Americans.

This can be done with the [Texas Public Policy] Foundation’s proposal of the Rehire America Workplace Recovery Act that includes the essential component of the free enterprise system: private property rights…

Universities won’t defeat racism with censorship by Marcus Maldonado (Summer 2019) in The Washington Examiner
Amid a revival of resistance to racial injustice, progressives at Tulane University in New Orleans should have taken great pride in a campus event featuring award-winning author Edward Ball and his new anti-racist book Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy. The work has been highly praised as an important story about the history of white supremacy in the South by scholars such as Ibram X. Kendi and Saidiya Hartman. The event was even to be moderated by University of Kentucky professor of African American and Africana Studies Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, whose research areas include “racial capitalism” as well as prison abolition and feminist and queer politics.

Rather than praise Tulane for tackling the tough subject of white supremacy in the South, more than 500 students revolted in the comments section of the (now deleted) Instagram post announcing the event. Students insisted that the event was “harmful and offensive” and would advance white supremacy. Tulane’s student government (in which I served one uneventful semester) released a statement calling the event “violent toward the experience and work of Black people” and demanding that it be canceled…

Open up the presidential debates to everyone on ballot by Conner Drigotas (Fall 2019) in The Washington Times
With less than 100 days until the general election, the first presidential debate is just weeks away. The televised argument will unfold against a backdrop of contentious social strife and some of the worst polarization in American political history. But despite many Americans’ desire for options outside the two major parties, there will likely only be two podiums on the debate stage.

For an America that is becoming increasingly politically fractured, that’s not good enough anymore…