Whitmer defends her authoritarian impulse to ban gardening supplies – Washington Examiner

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) has finally acknowledged that some of her authoritarian COVID orders were ridiculous. Unfortunately for her, everyone else knew this three years ago, when she first put those orders in place.

Speaking with Chris Wallace, Whitmer acknowledged that “there were moments where we had to make some decisions that in retrospect don’t make a lot of sense.” For example, her restrictions on gardening supplies. “You could go into the hardware store, but we didn’t want people all congregating around the gardening supplies,” Whitmer said. She tried to downplay it, claiming that “people said, ‘Oh, she outlawed seeds.’ It was February in Michigan. No one was planting anyway.”

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“That being said, some of those policies I look back and think that maybe was a little more than we needed to do,” Whitmer concluded. You could say that again.

Whitmer’s meek attempt at defending this is wrong because it was not February in Michigan. The orders were put in place in March and stretched into April, while planting season in Michigan is “usually late March or early April,” according to Michigan State University. Whitmer also went further than just banning seeds, forcing the closure of garden centers and nurseries and banning landscaping work, which she justified at the time because the weather wasn’t good.

But, more importantly, her decision was clearly anti-science and authoritarian when she made it in March 2020. Kaylee McGhee White detailed how ludicrous this was for the Washington Examiner on March 13, 2020, explaining that you could buy chalk from Lowe’s but not paint and buy a brand new TV from Walmart but not a couch. “At both stores, home gardening supplies were completely off limits,” she wrote.

Whitmer’s logic of not wanting people to “congregate” around the gardening supplies should be laughable. Michigan residents were free to enter these stores and buy multiple other things, but Whitmer was apparently worried that they would throw block parties in the gardening section of Walmart. Michigan residents apparently swarm garden tools at Home Depot like fans of a boy band.

But it is not laughable. Whitmer is so flippantly authoritarian that she barged forward with this and several other overreaching, unscientific COVID restrictions without even thinking about it. She was only able to admit that she “maybe” did “a little more” than was necessary, and even then, she defends herself by misrepresenting the facts of what happened. Her attitude belongs nowhere near any level of governance, let alone the governorship of a state of 10 million people.

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Add to that her clear national ambitions, and you have a wannabe tyrant on the level of Vice President Kamala Harris.

There must be electoral consequences for the authoritarians that wielded power the way Whitmer did during the pandemic. Michigan Republicans evidently weren’t (and won’t be) competent enough to pose a threat, but Whitmer’s national career should be ended by her pandemic actions and her inability to acknowledge how absurd and overreaching they were.