Yesterday tornadoes devastated Nebraska and Iowa.  To date, thankfully, no deaths reported, some injuries and hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed.  And no one seems to care.  It is not even on the NYTimes landing page and a good bit down on WaPo.  (Please know, both links are “live” and contents likely to change by the time you get there.)  Campus unrest (he said, putting it mildly) continues at many of our most prestigious educational institutions, and neither of those venerated newspapers lead with that story either.  Nope, they lead with the NY Trump trial. Seriously.  The perfect opportunity to lecture us, again, about “climate change” and leftist activists doing leftist activist things both “trumped” by a nonsense show trial.

On Wednesday Rick Lowry wrote comparing the 2017 Charlottesville rally with the current antisemitic activism on campuses around the nation.  Here is the heart of what he noted:

As Phil Klein has noted, there is a gross double standard in how progressive opinion regards antisemitism depending on who is peddling it. The antisemitism of the Right is considered morally abhorrent and inherently threatening. The antisemitism of the Left is very often ignored, explained away, or viewed as a regrettable excess….

What accounts for the double standard? Some of it is pure tribalism and hesitancy to rebuke one’s own side. Some of it is a sympathetic understanding of the protesters — sure, some of them have gone astray, but most are good kids — and a shared opposition to the Gaza war.

More fundamentally, through the perverse prism of the woke Left, alt-right antisemites are the victimizers while pro-Hamas antisemites are the victims. Put another way, devotees of the alt-right are racist antisemites, while supporters of Hamas are “anti-racist” antisemites, and that makes all the difference. All the other forms of “anti-” of the Columbia protesters and their ilk — anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Western, anti-colonial — redeem their antisemitism.

Of necessity, that really tortures the language.  But in the end it says two things about how the Left currently thinks.  One, motive matters more than action.  Two, the only measure of good and evil is in the oppressor/oppressed narrative.  This is how we get to the point that Trump is the greatest evil mankind has ever faced and therefore deserves the newspaper placement this morning.  One, “just look at his personality, that has to mean evil motive.”  Two, “he thwarts our agenda and is therefore, by definition, an oppressor.”

Only problem is motive is only ever know by implication from action and circumstance, and the storyteller can weave the narrative the way they want onto any situation.  Witness the death of objectivity and therefore the death of anything resembling genuine justice.

Where this observation leaves us is with the absolutely execrable notion that to a Democrat objective evil is tolerable if it aids their political objective and justice is likewise subject to that same objective.  Charlottesville was intolerable and unacceptable because they were Trump voters, but Columbia, composed of Biden voters, well, that’s just fine, so let’s all go back to piling on Trump.

Which brings me back to Lowry’s comment about “pure tribalism.”  If there is not objective standard for justice, then that is where we are, just competing tribes.  I thought we were smarter than that.