ANALYSIS: TRUE. Every business is essential.

As Gavin Newsom dines at French Laundry and Andrew Cuomo collects Emmy Awards, small-business owners in their states are going viral for fighting back against the orders rendering their businesses not essential. That’s how the governors have justified the shuttering of thousands of businesses since March: you are not essential. As it turns out, the least essential workers happen to be the mayors of Denver, Austin, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC, New York City, San Jose and San Francisco, all of whom violated the COVID restrictions they had imposed on their own constituents. When members of our media flatter the likes of Cuomo with giant cotton swabs and late-night appearances, here’s what they should be asking: what is not an essential business?

Which businesses are not essential to people? What defines a non-essential business? Every business that employs someone is essential. Every business owned by a private citizen on personal capital is essential to that person. In Los Angeles, a woman named Angela Marsden recorded a video of her bar, Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill shut down, including outside dining, which she had paid to have installed in the parking lot. In the video she shows a catering set-up for a movie production, showing the distance to be about 50 feet away. The clip went viral, garnering over five million views in two days. Rich and powerful celebrities (or podcasters) have been deemed essential workers in Los Angeles, but a small-business owner and her employees are not.

If podcasts are deemed essential, couldn’t every restaurant with an Internet connection do a vox populi segment interviewing their guests on how they’re holding up under the lockdown, upload it daily or weekly to YouTube or a streaming service, and claim they’re now podcasters who are simply providing catering services to their guests?