What it is ain’t exactly clear.

PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West) has grown rapidly since its inception in October, a peaceful ‘strolling’ movement opposing the exceptional violence seen in street battles between Salafist Muslims and ethnic Kurds seen in many German cities this year and enormous immigration. Now on it’s tenth ‘evening stroll’, it has grown from a couple of hundred people, to 15,000 last week, to more than 17,500 last night.

In addition to the hundreds of banners with slogans such as ‘Against Hatred, Violence, and the Quran’, ‘Against Religious Fanaticism’, and ‘No Sharia in Europe’, the thousands attending brought song sheets which had been distributed online and sang favourite Christmas carols.

Despite the essentially ordinary character of many of the people taking to the streets for the peaceful strolls, and the admission by senior government and police figures that a great many of those joining in are families bringing their children, the organisation has come in for stiff criticism and rejection by the heights of the German elite.

I think it’s time we stop.
Children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s goin’ down.

There’s battle lines bein’ drawn.
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.
Young people speakin’ their minds
A-gettin’ so much resistance from behind.

Chancellor Merkel has suggested the leadership of PEGIDA have an ulterior motive, despite their focus on non-violent protest and apolitical principles. She even went as far to warn people thinking of going on the weekly stroll to “watch out that they are not instrumentalised by the organisers”. The SPD, Germany’s Labour-party equivalent have gone as far as calling PEGIDA “Nazis in pinstripes”.

This is despite a report by the German police that there are significantly more known troublemakers in the counter-protest movements, than in PEGIDA itself.

It is not only German politics which is putting its weight behind the counter-PEGIDA movement. Apparently dismayed that 17,500 people had turned out in bad weather to sing Christian carols, the Protestant Bishop of Dresden said PEGIDA were trying “to exploit a Christian symbol and a Christian tradition” for political ends.

Germany’s art elite also showed their disapproval last night. The directors of Dresden’s Bavarian State Opera house, outside which the protests take place turned off the lights on the building, cloaking it in darkness during the stroll. Colossal 50-foot banners were draped in front of the building reading “humanity, respect, and diversity”.

The irony of it all. The people peeping outside their office windows, cursing the people in the streets used to be the people in the streets. Now they are pigs on two legs.

When Barry Soetoro was elevated to Primate of the Cult of Modern Liberalism, many people outside the faith thought it was a good sign. Maybe putting a black guy in the White House would close the books on America’s race history. After all, how could guys like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson get any traction when the leader of the free world was a living rebuke to their agitations? Jacksons discomfort with Obama winning election seemed like proof of the concept.

I was always skeptical of it. I remembered the last Chocolate Jesus to come along and that guy was brighter and more sensible than Obama. If Kurt Schmoke could not resist the call of the past, this jug-eared clodhopper from the academy was not going to do it. I know too many black people to think that most do not harbor a fair number of revenge fantasies. I also know a fair bit about post-colonial African history. If blacks can think that the CIA invented crack, they can certainly believe there is a conspiracy to kill black people.

My hope for Obama was that he would be a dreary scold that largely followed the policies set in place by his predecessors. While not a big fan of the Bush-Clinton policy, I could live with it for another decade. Letting a nitwit like Obama try his hand at public policy sounded like a bad idea, but Obama seemed like a guy perfectly willing to do nothing but give speeches. That and I was sure the Cult knew it was insane to try and start a race war. That failed in the 60’s and nearly ended their cult, making “liberal” an epithet for two decades.

But, here we are. The Cult has black mobs harassing white people at suburban malls. They have members of the Black Guerilla Family “executing pigs” on the streets. The Black Guerilla Family, by the way, is a creation of the New Left forty years ago. Fay Stender, a radial lawyer, helped create the BGF while she was working for the Black Panthers. The BGF rewarded her efforts by shooting her five times in front of her son. That should have been the lesson all of them learned from the last liberal awakening. Radicalizing blacks leads to death and the monster will always destroy its creator.

It’s natural, of course, to look the other way and just hope this is a temporary fit of madness. I suspect that’s why bright guys like Ross Douthat put so much effort into looking away from the truth that is staring them in the face – even while they are writing about it. There’s fear of losing a way to earn a living, but there’s also the hope that things are not what they appear to be, even when the facts are so clear.

For a while the media has assumed that this kind of identity-based politics inevitably favors the left, because 21st-century America is getting less white every day.

But that’s too simplistic, in part because the definitions of “white” and “minority” are historically elastic. If a “white party” seems sufficiently clueless and reactionary, it will lose ground to a multicultural coalition. But as African-Americans know from bitter experience, “whiteness” has sustained itself by the inclusion of immigrants as well as by the exclusion and oppression of blacks. That history suggests that a “multicultural party” may always be at risk of being redefined as a grievance-based “party of minorities” that many minorities would prefer to leave behind. (And leadership matters, too: A protean figure like Barack Obama can put together a genuine rainbow coalition, but it’s not clear how many other politicians can do the same.)

The fact is you can’t built a political party around black identity. Everywhere it has been tried the result has been a bloodbath. If you’re going to build a party out of the dispossessed and disaffected, that party has to preach revolution and it has to promise vengeance. You can pretend otherwise, but the servants will never forgive their masters and the master will never trust their former servants. One side has to win completely, which is why violence is the logical end of what Obama and Democrats are doing.

The fact that the party of opposition, the White Party in Douthat’s parlance, is unwilling to face this reality just guarantees the result. The Black Party may hold delusions about a peaceful revolution of the fringe, but they seem perfectly willing to accept a violent result. The White Party just refuses to accept those choices. To the Black Party, it is a sign of weakness and that’s what guarantees the violent conclusion.

We need someone willing to speak to and for the silent majority or we will end up in the same place we landed the last time this lunacy was allowed to play out.

The following news story is an example historians will use in the future to note the general madness that has afflicted our age.

A divided federal appeals court in Boston on Tuesday overturned a lower court’s ruling that a transgender Massachusetts prison inmate, convicted of committing a domestic murder, was entitled to taxpayer-funded sex change surgery.

The ruling by the First US Circuit Court of Appeals came after a 2012 ruling by US District Judge Mark Wolf, who ordered the surgery after finding that the state’s failure to provide it violated the inmate’s Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

In January, a three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld Wolf’s 2012 decision, but the state of Massachusetts then asked for an en banc, or full bench, review, which led to Tuesday’s ruling.

The ruling came in the case of Michelle Kosilek, who was born Robert Kosilek. Kosilek is serving a life sentence for killing her wife, Cheryl Kosilek, in 1990.

The court ruled 3-2, with Judges O. Rogeriee Thompson and William J. Kayatta Jr. filing separate dissenting opinions.

“We are faced with the question whether the [state Department of Correction’s] choice of a particular medical treatment is constitutionally inadequate,” the court said in the majority opinion.

“After carefully considering the community standard of medical care, the adequacy of the provided treatment, and the valid security concerns articulated by the DOC, we conclude that the district court erred and that the care provided to Kosilek by the DOC does not violate the Eighth Amendment,” said the opinion, which was written by Judge Juan R. Torruella.

Kosilek and the DOC — under successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican — have battled in the courts for decades over what medical treatment, clothing, makeup should be provided to deal with Kosilek’s gender identity disorder.

Wolf ruled in 2012 that the only medically appropriate treatment for Kosiliek’s condition was the surgery, which would be paid for by the state since Kosilek is a state prison inmate.

But the appeals court ruled Tuesday that Wolf had wrongly substituted his own judgment for the medical professionals, who did not unanimously endorse the surgery as the only appropriate solution for the condition that all sides acknowledged contributed to a depressed mental state and suicide attempts by Kosilek.

Wolf also went too far by “circumvent[ing] the deference owed to prison administrators’’ under federal laws when the issue is the safety of prison inmates, Torruella wrote.

“The prison administrators in this case have decades of combined experience in the management of penological institutions, and it is they, not the court, who are best situated to determine what security concerns will arise,’’ Torruella wrote.

The ruling said the DOC made a valid argument when it expressed concern about the safety of Kosilek and women prisoners he potentially could be housed with once the surgery was done.

“The DOC’s security report reflected that significant concerns would also arise from housing a formerly male inmate — with a criminal history of extreme violence against a female domestic partner — within a female prison population containing high numbers of domestic violence survivors,’’ Torruella wrote.

In a statement, Public Safety Secretary Andrea Cabral said the DOC accepts as true that Kosilek suffers from gender identity disorder diagnosis, and added that was not the issue that the latest round of Kosilek litigation was resolved by the courts on Tuesday.

“The First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the medical and mental health care provided to Kosilek by the DOC did not violate the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constituion,’’ Cabral said in the statement.

“While we acknowledge the legitimacy of a gender identity disorder diagnosis, DOC’s appeal was based on the lower court’s significant expansion of the standard for what constitutes adequate care under the Eighth Amendment, and on substantial safety and security concerns regarding Ms. Kosilek’s post-surgery needs,’’ Cabral said in the statement.

In a statement, the Transgender Rights Project of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) noted that it had joined the legal battle on Kosilek’s behalf.

“I am appalled by this decision, which means that Michelle Kosilek will continue to be denied the life-saving medical care she needs and has been seeking for years,’’ Jennifer Levi of GLAD said. “This decision is a testament to how much work remains to be done to get transgender people’s health care needs on par with others in the general public.”

In a passionate dissent, Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson compared the majority’s conclusions to those drawn by the judges who upheld the constitutionality of the separate but equal doctrine for African-Americans in the late 19th century and the judges who approved internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Like the rulings in those cases, Plessy v. Ferguson and Korematsu v. United States, the Kosilek ruling will not stand the test of time, she wrote.

The majority, Thompson wrote, ruled the way they did, in part, because the surgery Kosilek seeks is considered “strange or immoral. Prejudice and fear of the unfamiliar have undoubtedly played a role in this matter’s protraction.’’

“The precedent the majority creates is damaging,” she added. “It paves the way for unprincipled grants of en banc relief, decimates the deference paid to a trial judge following a bench trial, aggrieves an already marginalized community, and enables correctional systems to further postpone their adjustment to the crumbling gender binary.’’

Kayatta, writing separately, said, “Scientific knowledge advances quickly and without regard to settled norms and arrangements. It sometimes draws in its wake a reluctant community, unnerved by notions that challenge our views of who we are and how we fit in the universe.”

“The notion that hard-wired aspects of gender may not unerringly and inexorably correspond to physical anatomy is especially unnerving for many,” Kayatta said.