Weekly Writers Round-Up: How Endless War Undermines our Military, California’s Internet Policy Overreach, and Rising Campus Antisemitism

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? Apply now for the Spring 2020 class!

Endless wars are corrupting our military and distracting the U.S. from bigger global threats by Gil Barndollar (Summer 2018) in the Chicago Tribune
Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer was fired last month, a consequence of President Donald Trump’s foolish decision to pardon three servicemen who were either convicted of or awaiting trial for crimes committed in combat. The president has been rightly excoriated for these pardons, which dishonor the U.S. military and may degrade good order and discipline. But amid this uproar, Americans should note the bigger lesson: Endless wars, especially endless counterinsurgency or counterterrorism wars, slowly chip away at both a military’s ethics and its critical war-fighting skills…

California Legislature Passes Bill To Dictate National Internet Policy by Andrew Wilford (Spring 2017) in the Daily Caller
Federalism seems like it should be a fairly straightforward concept: states set public policy that affects their state alone, while the federal government handles policy choices that transcend state borders.

Most states, generally speaking, are able to grasp this concept. Most states except for California, that is. The Golden State’s recent passage of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is the latest in a series of moves by California legislators seeking to effectively dictate national policy. That’s a problem for more than just constitutional scholars — it risks businesses and individuals being forced to navigate overlapping and often conflicting laws that creates compliance burdens and harms economic growth…

What To Do About The Increasingly Vicious Anti-Jew Campus Protests by Beth Bailey (Fall 2018) in The Federalist
On November 20 in Toronto, Canada, York University’s Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) tried to shut down a school-approved event featuring a panel of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) veterans from Reservists on Duty, a group that travels to college campuses to provide facts about antisemitism and the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

SAIA attracted around 600 protesters representing students as well as entities outside the school. According to Reservists on Duty CEO Amit Deri, this was the first protest where the group encountered “a BDS and Antifa collaboration.” What resulted was antisemitic violence colored with calls for genocide as protestors attempted to intimidate, demonize, and disenfranchise Israelis, Zionists, and Jews…