When I first started writing at RedState as an unpaid lackey pumping out diaries some years ago, I needed an easy, one-word description of things that are so absurd that they mimic parody. I settled on “parodical,” and to this day, I have no idea if I made it up or if it actually passes muster as part of the English language. Google is inconclusive on that question.

Still, it fits the video I’m about to share with you to a tee, and you’ll be less than shocked to learn it involves Kamala Harris. Yes, the world’s most inauthentic, unnatural politician made news yesterday by pressing NASA on its ability to sort trees by race as part of an “environmental justice” push.

Kamala Harris interrupts a NASA presentation to ask if NASA "can measure trees" as part of "environmental justice." pic.twitter.com/POoArDzaGc

— Jake Schneider (@jacobkschneider) November 6, 2021

This is like a scene from The Office or Veep. You see the camera shake as she begins her nonsensical inquiry, followed by an awkward zoom-in. Slumped over, Harris begins to ask the presumed scientist she’s speaking with if he can sort trees by race in order to measure “tree equity” so as to promote “environmental justice.”

Regardless, putting the absurdity of the entire spectacle aside, the word “justice” has been rendered completely meaningless at this point by the left. That’s a shame because justice is actually a good and necessary thing to pursue in the world. Yet, when it becomes nothing more than a stand-in for whatever random far-left policy a Democrat wants to push, the term loses its moral standing.

The idea of “tree equity” is asinine. If we are talking on a global scale, the continent of Africa naturally has fewer trees than the Americas. That is not due to racism or a lack of equity. It’s due to the climate. But if we are talking about the United States, Harris’ question makes even less sense. Black Americans disproportionately live in urban environments. By being definitionally urban, those areas lack the same tree cover as rural areas. That also is not due to racism or a lack of equity, and there are obviously pros and cons to living in different areas of the country.

Yet, Democrats have latched onto this idea that literally every inequity, whether morally neutral or not, is due to some kind of systemically ingrained racism. Thus, you get the Vice President of the United States acting as if she’s doing a Saturday Night Live skit, asking about tree cover being racist. 10 years ago, we all would have assumed this was a joke. But it’s real, and as ridiculous as it is, the push to racialize everything is objectively divisive and dangerous.