Joy Reid
Americans across the nation have had enough of the stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders that have been handed down by state governors as a means of mitigating the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. They're antsy. They're restless. People want to get back to work and back to "normal," or at least as normal as possible.

President Donald Trump has talked about reopening the economy. As it is, more than 20 million Americans have filed for unemployment because they have had to stay home. They have been prevented from working. We went from having the strongest economy with a record-low unemployment rate to an unemployment rate not seen since the Great Depression. All of this happened practically overnight because of the Wuhan coronavirus.

According to MSNBC's Joy Reid and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D), if you're someone who wants to see the economy reopen and get back to work, you must be some sort of Confederate racist.

"Black people are being left in a situation where they're more vulnerable by default: less health care, jobs that are hourly, jobs where you're closer to people, stuck working near to each other," Reid said. "When you hear Donald Trump talking in this sort of faux-Confederate language about these lockdown orders - which are meant to save lives - and you see people with these instaprotests, paid for by activists for the super-rich, egging on this kind of activity that could get violent, what does that say to you?"

Ellison said Trump is willing to put his supporters' lives on the line "so that he can have advantages like re-election and things like that."

"He's literally willing to sacrifice the lives of Americans for personal gain and that's deeply disturbing to me. It's not new," Ellison explained. "How many people who fell on the Confederate side owned massive plantations? Not that many. They bought themselves out of having to fight for their slavocracy, that poor whites died for them and so, you know, it's not a new story, right? It's disturbing. It's sad. And I pray for those people because, even though I disagree absolutely with these protests, I think they're completely and entirely inappropriate, I know that they and their loved ones will pay an awful price."

What does a stay-at-home order have to do with the Civil War or the Confederacy for that matter? Absolutely nothing. It's rather amazing that the left always goes to the extreme and say everything is racist. Trump was called a racist when he shut down flights from China to protect Americans from the virus. That turned out to be a good decision, even though he went against the grain.

If every single state had an entire lockdown, with absolutely nothing open, people would have a meltdown. The left would say Trump is somehow propping up the wealthy because low-income people can't afford to have months and months of savings in their bank accounts. If no one was allowed to work because it was deemed necessary for the health of the public, that too would be considered racist.

No American is being "sacrificed." People are tired of sitting by, watching their families struggle. They're scared for their communities, their farmers and their neighbors. They're seeing our entire economy and their livelihoods flushed down the toilet. This isn't an issue that is black versus white or Democratic vs Republican. This is an American issue. This is about people being able to take care of themselves and their families. These lockdowns go against everything America was founded on, especially the idea of rugged individualism.