Evaluating Governor Whitmer During Covid-19. Can Americans Have a Rational Conversation About this Topic? Or Will We Just Cancel Each Other Out?

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Whitmer was prepared to govern her state, but the pandemic required something of a different order: minute-by-minute, seat-of-the-pants, lives-in-the-balance decision-making for which there was no model or precedent. She soon realized that the only people who could relate to what she was going through were her fellow governors. In March, she created a group text chain with a few of them. They were all Democrats, but with different political profiles and instincts. As they started comparing notes, Whitmer was simultaneously dismayed and relieved to see that their notes were the same: Here they all were, in charge of getting millions of people through this crisis without much more information than your average, cable-TV-watching citizen." This paragraph comes from a New York Times article by Jonathan Mahler.  The article is titled: "A Governor on Her Own, With Everything at Stake." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/magazine/gretchen-whitmer-coronavirus-michigan.html Zac and Don discuss the job that Governor Whitmer has done leading Michigan through the Covid-19 Crisis.  They also talk about whether Americans can be rational when talking about and evaluating the job performance of their political leaders.  They discuss the topic of Cancel Culture. Another Best Paragraph I've Read: "The people of “Today’s cancel culture — erasing history, ending careers — is inflicted by people experiencing an orgy of positive feelings about themselves as they negate others. Instead of elevating, their education produces only expensively schooled versions of what José Ortega  called the “mass man.” In 1932’s “The Revolt of the Masses,” the Spanish philosopher said this creature does not “appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. . . . He will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes.” Much education now spreads the disease that education should cure, the disease of repudiating, without understanding, the national principles that could pull the nation toward its noble aspirations. The result is barbarism, as Ortega defined it, “the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.” A barbarian is someone whose ideas are “nothing more than appetites in words,” someone exercising “the right not to be reasonable,” who “does not want to give reasons” but simply “to impose his opinions.” The barbarians are not at America’s gate. There is no gate." This paragraph comes from an editorial in the Washington Post by George Will.  The editorial is titled: "Must of Today's Intelligentsia cannot think." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/most-of-todays-intelligentsia-cannot-think/2020/06/25/987cf0c4-b714-11ea-a8da-693df3d7674a_story.html Zac and Don connect Mr. Will's ideas to evaluating our political leaders and to the concept of Cancel Culture.  They discuss whether Cancel Culture is a good or bad thing for society.  They finishing their discussion talking about whether limiting speech on the platforms of social media companies is a good idea for the short and long term.