She has been quite strict in policies and enforcement overall. As far as denouncing protesters, this is what she was saying on May 13th about the shutdown protesters, and yet was herself participating in densely populated BLM protests yesterday [2];
> Question: Governor, you said this morning in The View that the protests that we’ve been seeing at the capital could be potentially adding to the spread of COVID-19 as people not listen to the stay at home orders and congregate. What proof do you have to show that that’s happening? And as well as … have to show that that’s happening and as well as COVID-19 spreading into rural areas because of that.
> Governor Gretchen Whitmer: Yeah. So I think that I saw one report. I don’t have proof. I’m not following everybody home and taking their temperatures and watching them for two weeks. But here’s what we know. When COVID-19, the way that it spreads is person-to-person contact, that it can stay in the air for a while, that it is when you’re closer than six feet, not wearing masks, it is when you’re touching one another. We saw a lot of that at these protests at the Capitol. That’s how COVID-19 spreads. We know it’s incredibly contagious and there are a lot of people who get COVID-19 who are asymptomatic and so they’re conducting life as though they’re healthy because they honestly think they’re healthy, but they’re carrying it and spreading it. That’s the insidious nature of this virus.
> So that is always been a concern. When people congregate, they take it back to their communities. We’ve seen that over and over again. There was a group that did a report that they had put up a geo fence around the Capitol and then monitored cell phone data and that it translates where we are seeing hotspots in rural parts of Michigan. I don’t know the group, I have not vetted the data. I can’t vouch for it, but I think that that would not be a surprising outcome if that was the case.
> That’s why I think it’s so important that, if people are determined to protest, I ask that they do right on their own, by themselves, by their own health, by everyone who lives in their household, everyone that they are around and take precautions to protect themselves, wear the mask, stay six feet away from other people. And that they do it on behalf of our first responders too, the police that are onsite, the nurses and doctors who are stressed out because they’re treating COVID patients, their local hospitals, which if they are from a more rural community do not have capacity to meet the need of an outbreak.
Now that she agrees with the aims of the protestors, she not only does not denounce them for violating social distancing orders, she actively participates.
This is not to say anything about the relative merits of the individual protests themselves, which I think should be irrelevant when it comes to public health orders that claim to be necessary to control the spread of a dangerous pathogen.
If mandatory health orders can be suspended, or in fact actively defied by the head politician who has enacted them, based on the particular cause being deemed worthy or not, I think this is a breach of the public trust, which sacrificed 40 million jobs and trillions of dollars in the name of these shutdown orders.
[1] - https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/michigan-governor-gretc...
[2] - https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2020/06/04/gov-whi...