Not long after extending the stay-at-home order in her state and bullying those who peaceably gathered to protest it, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer joined a horde of demonstrators on Thursday evening in Detroit to protest police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police.
Whitmer, Lieutenant Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, and other Democrat leaders in the state traveled to the Highland Park area to march with protesters down Woodward.
“As I talk to my friends in the black community, exhaustion is the predominant word used. And it’s understandable. I could not imagine being a mother of children of color and worry every time they leave the house,” Whitmer told reporters, according to FOX2. “I felt it was an important moment to show my support and show a unified leadership out of the executive office of the governor and so the lieutenant governor and I joined.”
Recent memory reveals, however, that Gov. Whitmer sings a different tune when it is her abuse of authority being protested.
Just weeks earlier, Whitmer said she was “really disappointed see people congregating and not wearing masks” following a Lansing protest of her stay-home order back in April.
“These executive orders are not a suggestion,” she said in May after a previous shutdown extension. “They’re not optional. They’re not helpful hints.”
“We know that this rally endangered people,” Whitmer said. “This kind of activity will put more people at risk and sadly, it could prolong the amount of time that we have to be in this posture.”
According to Fox News, Whitmer also extended her state of emergency through June 19. “We are not out of the woods yet,” she said in a statement tempering excitement about the state’s decreasing coronavirus numbers.
“If we’re going to lower the chance of a second wave and continue to protect our neighbors and loved ones from the spread of this virus, we must continue to do our part by staying safer at home,” Whitmer went on.
“If we open too soon, thousands more could die and our hospitals will get overwhelmed,” she continued. “While we finally have more protective equipment like masks, we can’t run the risk of running low again. We owe it to the real heroes on the front lines of this crisis — our first responders, health care workers and critical workers putting their lives on the line every day — to do what we can ourselves to stop the spread of the virus.”
That isn’t where the unequal treatment of Black Lives Matter protestors and anti-lockdown protesters ends.
On Thursday, The Detroit News reported that the Committee to Protect Medicare and Affordable Care, under orders from former Democratic congressional candidate Dr. Rob Davidson, used an app called VoteMap to track the cellphones of about 400 anti-lockdown protesters, ostensibly to track the spread of COVID-19 stemming from the protests.
They did not, the newspaper reports, track protests sparked by George Floyd’s death.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Phil Robinson, the leader of a Michigan militia group, told The Detroit News. “They’re going to track us at the Capitol but nowhere else?”
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