This story itself — about a far-left-wing humanities professor with obvious mental illness behaving badly toward another far-left-wing humanities professor and receiving a ludicrous, histrionic, and identity-based defense of both her actions and her mental state from some of her students and colleagues3 — is not terribly important. But the manner in which del Valle’s supporters have convinced themselves to stand with her — by looking away from all the facts that conflict with their pristine moral worldview about who’s oppressed and who’s the oppressor — bears resemblance to a much more consequential form of left-wing moral idiocy that we’ve seen on college campuses in recent weeks: the willingness of many students and faculty to excuse (or even in some cases celebrate) Hamas’ terror attack that killed over 1,400 Israeli civilians.

Obsession with structural factors has led people on the identity-obsessed left to discard the idea that people are individual moral actors with responsibility for their actions. Instead, they rely on a moral framework that looks solely at a person’s or group’s position within a hierarchy of oppression, awarding culpability in any conflict to the person who ranks as less oppressed, regardless of actually existing evidence about who did what and why.