Put Minnesota Back to Work!

If you have been following Scott’s “Coronavirus In One State” series, you know that the shutdown in Minnesota is an extreme case of the overreaction to the virus that has been general across the country. Our governor has turned what might legitimately be a crisis in the state’s nursing homes into an economic disaster that so far has unemployed more than 500,000 Minnesotans. The state now has an unemployment rate of 20%, the highest since the Great Depression.

My organization, Center of the American Experiment, has swung into action to try to persuade our governor to lift his extreme order when it expires on May 4. We have set up the web site Back2WorkMN.com, where you can send an email to Governor Tim Walz asking him to end the disaster that his shutdown order has caused. If you live in Minnesota and enter your zip code, emails will also go to your state senator and representative.

The web site features this simple video, in which Minnesota small businesspeople explain how Walz’s order is destroying their livelihoods. I shot one of the segments:

The web site is being promoted on social media and by digital ads targeting Minnesotans across a broad range of web sites. We are testing a number of Facebook ads, including this one:

We also have bought electronic billboards at the ten most heavily traveled highway locations in the Twin Cities:

If you live in Minnesota, please hurry over to Back2WorkMN.com and sign the letter to Governor Walz. Even if you don’t live in Minnesota, I encourage you to do the same. A shutdown that devastates one state’s economy hurts us all. Likewise, the courageous governors in Tennessee, Georgia, and Colorado who are letting their citizens resume their lives (not to mention states like South Dakota, where the governor never imposed a shutdown order at all) are benefiting all Americans, not just those states’ residents.

Let’s put Minnesota, and America, back to work.

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