Rod Dreher is a writer who blogs at the website of The American Conservative, the magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, Taki Theodoracopulos and Scott McConnell in 2002 to oppose the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration and more specifically the drive for war in Iraq from the right. Dreher is also the author of such books as Crunchy Cons (2006), How Dante Can Save Your Life (2015), The Benedict Option (2017), and most recently, Live Not By Lies which was released earlier this year. The last title mentioned warns small-o orthodox Christians – Dreher, who was raised Protestant, became a Roman Catholic and is now Eastern Orthodox with a large-O – about the coming “soft totalitarianism” to which wokeness, the more militant successor to political correctness, is leading the Western world. Note that there are many who would generally agree with Dreher’s assessment of wokeness but suggest that a past tense would be more appropriate than a future one.

Earlier this year, Dreher posted a piece entitled “Your Woke Breaking Point” at his blog. He began with an excerpt from an article by Megan McArdle at the Washington Post about how Donald Trump’s predictions of four years ago as to how the attacks on Confederate monuments would lead to attacks on monuments to the American republic’s founders, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were coming true. McArdle, in her editorial, referenced Dreher’s “Law of Merited Impossibility” which has been stated several different ways, the best known being “It will never happen, and when it does you bigots will deserve it”. The law satirizes, without exaggerating in the least, the paradox of the typical progressive response to conservative warnings about the direction in which left-wing causes seem to be heading, before and after the predictions are fulfilled. It is likely to end up being Dreher’s single most significant and lasting contribution to political discourse. McArdle’s article referencing it was an uncharacteristic moment of liberal self-criticism, in which she discussed the progressive side’s seeming inability to restrain its radicals and apply the brakes when they are going too far and too fast.

Dreher used the excerpt from McArdle’s article to introduce a challenge that he borrowed from mathematician James A. Lindsay. Lindsay had tweeted on the 24th of June:

Talking with a brilliant friend last night keyed me into an important idea: everybody has a Woke breaking point, a point where they can’t deny any longer the fact that it’s a totalitarian nightmare. Encourage your sympathetic friends to start naming what theirs would be.

Dreher re-posted Lindsay’s tweet and several follow-up tweets, the first of which went:

Whose statue has to come down? Seriously, whose is the last straw? Who has to get cancelled? Fired? Doxxed? Destroyed? Beaten up? Killed? Does it take a lynching? Does it take destroying the thing YOU love? Your family? Your kids? Your job? Your hobby? What is it? What’s too far?

It is an excellent question and one that we would do well to pose to any liberals of our acquaintance. What do the Social Justice Warriors – the BLM, Antifa and MeToo# types — have to do before you will admit that they have gone too far?

There is a very similar question that I would suggest we start posing to people. Or perhaps it is the same question asked in a different context.

This question I would pose to all those people who think that all the public health orders, all the restrictions imposed to control the spread of the Wuhan bat flu, are necessary and especially to those who think that even more restrictions are called for. I will note, obiter dictum, that Rod Dreher himself was certainly one of these back in the spring. Whether he still is or not I am unaware because he has written far less on that subject in recent months than in March, April and May.

The question is simply this – what is your Bat Flu Breaking Point?

Let us clarify the matter with some follow up questions.

What do our public health officials have to do for you to agree that they have gone too far? What line do they have to cross? What freedom do they have to take away? How much imposed loneliness, isolation, and misery is too much? How many small businesses have to be destroyed? How many people have to lose their jobs? How many people have to be driven to suicide, drunkenness and substance abuse? At what point is keeping us safe no longer worth the price we are being forced to pay for it?

Would curtailing to the point of eliminating our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion be going too far?

Would telling people that they have to close the small businesses that has been in their families and served their local communities for generations and which they have been struggling to keep afloat for years right in the busiest shopping time of the year, the period that they rely upon to make enough to balance their books, be crossing the line?

Would fining people thousands of dollars for acts that are not only not mala in se but are rather clearly bona in se although forbidden by some petty health order be one step too many in the direction of totalitarianism?

Would opening a snitch line and encouraging people to rat out their family, friends and neighbours be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?

Would establishing a special police force – a Gestapo, Cheka/NKVD, or Stasi so to speak – for enforcing public health orders be the limit of what is tolerable?

Everything I have mentioned so far has already been done here in Manitoba and, indeed, in most if not all of the other provinces of the Dominion of Canada. For the many who support all of these measures and say they are “necessary” it is difficult to imagine what further step could possibly be taken that would finally have these people saying that it is too much.

Would it take forcing everybody to have foreign substances, including modified RNA, injected into their bodies upon penalty of not being allowed to work, buy groceries, or go anywhere if they refuse?

Would even telling everyone that they must pledge their allegiance to Satan by having 666 tattooed on their right hand or forehead in order to stop the spread of COVID-19 finally be enough to do it?

Ask everyone you know who is in favour of the sanitary dictatorship what their Bat Flu Breaking Point is.