Joy Reid

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison joined MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Saturday to discuss the protests against stay-at-home orders that have popped up in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina, Maryland, Texas, California, Utah and other states in recent days.

Reid: 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. 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: It says to me that the President is willing to risk the lives of people who believe in him 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. 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.”

Reid and Ellison, like all of their leftist cronies, would like to see the U.S. economy fall into a deep, sustained recession, which they can then pin on President Trump this fall to prevent his reelection. Since they can’t actually admit their real motive, they must find an acceptable argument. Most liberals have defaulted to their “deep concern” for Americans’ lives, an obvious lie, but at least it can be defended.

Memo to MSNBC’s Joy Reid and Keith Ellison:

The protests against stay-at-home orders have absolutely zero to do with racism or the Confederacy. Their attempts to make it so are unjustifiable and spurious.

They’re both hoping that if they sound hip enough and smart enough, they just might be able to convince blacks that Trump is working against them.

Allow me to remind them of the facts.

First, Democrats were the party of slavery, the Confederacy and Jim Crowe. Republicans were the party of Abraham Lincoln.

Second, Democrats’ biggest fear is that blacks actually will succeed, because then there’s no need for race hustlers like Reid, Ellison, and the Al Sharptons of the world. Up until the shutdown, blacks were prospering more than ever before in the robust Trump economy. Rather than keeping blacks stuck on the “liberal plantation,” the never-ending welfare state, Trump’s strong economy had expanded opportunities for all Americans including blacks and minorities.

Third, I know you try to connect everything and everyone associated with Trump to racism, but there is simply no connection here. Your saying it will not make it true. Trying to portray the protests as racist and telling viewers they are paid for by activists for the super-rich, as if this lie is a fact, is dishonest and manipulative. Reid and Ellison could find a way to tie a five-year-old white girl’s birthday party to racism.

The protests are a fight for the freedom and civil liberties that all Americans once cared about and fought to protect. Sadly, the left no longer believes in those principles. They’d rather tear up the Constitution and adopt a socialist government, as long as they’re in charge of it.

By all means, the elderly and those with suppressed immune systems can and should maintain their self-quarantines. For the rest of us, this quarantine is starting to feel like house arrest and we are anxious to get on with our lives.

It was put in place to slow the spread of the virus until we could “flatten the curve” so as not to overwhelm hospitals and health care personnel, which has been achieved. It was never meant to continue until the last case of coronavirus had been eradicated.

The stay-at-home orders have turned many governors and local officials into little tyrants hungry for power, none being more transparent than Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, whose missteps have made her the poster child for Lord Acton’s oft-repeated quote, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

That’s what the protests are all about.

.⁦@keithellison⁩ on Trump wanting to reopen the economy: “He’s literally willing to sacrifice the lives of Americans for personal gain, and that’s deeply disturbing to me.” pic.twitter.com/EGX4paO3Zn

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) April 18, 2020