Election day 2022 is fast approaching and Michigan must choose its next Governor. Republicans and Independents in the state must turn out to elect candidate Tudor Dixon to return sanity to the Executive Branch as well as to vote NO on the extremely problematic proposals on the ballot, especially Proposal 2 and Proposal 3.

The most important consideration in this election however ought to be Whitmer’s record regarding her COVID response. Looking at the big picture, it is the issue that overshadows all others in this election cycle. How people vote in this election will have a huge impact on how our state handles similar situations in the future. As I have indicated before, Republican chances of winning would be maximized if the election were made to be a referendum on Whitmer’s COVID response and the people were sufficiently reminded of how badly Whitmer acted. An unfortunate political reality is that voters sometimes have short memories and they must be made to again understand the magnitude of Whitmer’s error in order to reject her on those grounds. Republican primary voters chose a slightly less fiery candidate than may have been ideal for this task, but given Dixon’s positions on the COVID response in Michigan, she would be a dramatic improvement over Whitmer. Dixon is not alone; how well Republicans do making voters remember the pain Whitmer caused and the missteps she made during the COVID era may very well decide the election because nobody ought to want to go through that again.

What Whitmer (and many other governors) did during COVID was nothing short of tyrannical. It was antithetical to our entire American ethos. Her use of fear, the continued unwarranted threat of potential danger, and punishment to enact arbitrary and confusing top-down coercive orders is contrary to our concepts of fundamental rights, Constitutional protections, and the Rule of Law. It was a cowardly, emotional response to a potential threat when a cool head and a reiteration of our rational principles was needed. While she is content to try to ignore this topic during her reelection campaign, her best defense if pressed is merely, “Other Governors did the same,” “I had the legal right,” “it’s for the public health,” “it could have been worse,” or “we saved lives,” etc. These are lame excuses and can be easily dismissed. Leadership is not merely executing the advice of others, (the CDC, the Federal government, and other “experts” that got everything wrong from the original IFR, to the accuracy of the testing, to the vaccine) but exercising good judgment given a set of principles and the facts at hand. We cannot allow our leaders to get tunnel-vision and act with one goal in mind, we must consider all aspects of a policy; their moral justification, their legality and their impact on other important interests, namely liberty and fundamental rights. Whitmer failed in this task.

Whitmer’s compliance and unquestioned actions ultimately served the interests of Big Government and Big Pharma while protecting the people that likely created the virus, covered it up, and propagandized everyone in the first place. We were taken for a proverbial ride during the COVID era, and politicians like Whitmer helped facilitate the transport. Evidence suggests Whitmer held out on failed policies longer than most other governors and decision-makers too, and she failed to change when presented with evidence contrary to her positions. States and entire areas of the world that acted much less strict than Whitmer’s Michigan had similar or better results. The proper course of action was to recognize rights and the necessary limitations of government and craft a reasonable and practical plan within this structure. Totally disregarding it (even helping demonize valid alternatives) and insisting on top-down coercion was immoral, illegal, and impractical. The missteps were too numerous to list here, but run the gamut from neglecting to properly utilize resources and overflow facilities at the beginning of the pandemic, to her irresponsible nursing home policy, to her ridiculously coercive plan to reopen the state regionally based on uptake rates of the failed and dangerous vaccine.

In sum, Whitmer was wrong on all accounts. Has she admitted fault? Of course not. In fact, she has double-down on the idea her actions were appropriate even as evidence has shown most of her policies were unnecessary and caused long-term harm. Courts have ruled some of her justification for her unilateral actions unconstitutional, and her alternative actions committed after her justification was struck down suffered from the exact same errors as those deemed illegal. Even if you are content to give her the benefit of the doubt on the legality of her actions (via improperly delegated authority to the Executive and vaguely written laws and loopholes for example) the fact she would choose to exercise such authority on her own without consulting the legislature or listening to independent voices is damning enough. Her actions are a threat to our system of government and should not be normalized. Just because you “can” does not mean you “should,” and if you do and the situation is made worse, you ought to pay the price for it.

What’s more, Whitmer’s “Executive Orders” were arbitrary, complicated, confusing, and disproportionally harmful around the state. While her minions were harassing pizzeria owners and others, she and her own people violated these orders on several occasions. In one instance, she was caught violating her own masking and distancing dictates in a restaurant. When she was caught, Whitmer said, “In retrospect, I should have thought about it. I am human. I made a mistake, and I apologize.” The best (or worst) part is that what she was apologizing for is backwards. As she pointed out, she is human and she was acting like a human. She should have been apologizing for her anti-human policies and “orders” that have had, and will continue to have, far worse implications for all of us than her revealed hypocrisy has caused to her own image.

The preponderance of the evidence now shows Whitmer’s lockdowns did not work and were harmful. Some of us knew this would happen and tried to warn against it. For those that need to learn the hard way, Steve Hanke, Professor of Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University published a comprehensive meta-analysis on the impact of the COVID lockdowns and concluded, “While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”

Mask mandates too were misguided and Michigan under Whitmer was one of the most stringent and confusing places to be masked because she was so eager to try to follow the unscientific, politicially-based CDC guidelines. I detailed the problem with masking and its political origin here. If you personally want to wear a mask, go for it, but to mandate it is a violation of the fundamental right to bodily integrity/autonomy and it likely does more harm than good.

Whitmer’s record on school closures and COVID restrictions is equally atrocious, even compared to other restrictive Democrat governors. In the last debate between Whitmer and Dixon, Whitmer blatantly lied about schools being closed for only three months in Michigan. Michigan residents know schools were closed throughout the state for much longer and when pressed on it after the debate, Whitmer attempted to blame others for the additional closings despite her veto threat and her preferred policy being responsible for the legislation that allowed local authorities to continue to keep schools closed. Evidence now shows that these school closures were unnecessary and caused more harm than good.

There must be some consequence for being so wrong, for listening to the wrong people, for overreacting, for refusing to admit fault. The least we can do as citizens of Michigan is to vote Whitmer out of office so she cannot do the same again.

If you are a Michigan citizen and eligible voter, vote Tudor Dixon for Governor on November 8th!