How poisonous is identity politics to post-American society? - today's edition

This poisonous:

. . . the thing that worries me worries the most, Mark, is what this is doing to our scientific advantage in the so-called STEM fields. This is the science, technology, engineering and math. For a while, people who were optimist, thought, "Well, okay, you've got the gender studies here, you've got the women studies there, you've got the Chicano studies there," it's all going to stay put.

Science will be the one realm that remains committed to meritocracy because we all understand, of course, that there no such thing as female physics. There is no such thing as Iranian physics. There is physics. There is math. This is the accomplishment of human reason that is open to everybody. Well, that was a false hope.

Anybody that knew anything about university would have known, it is not safe, and now, you have nothing less than the National Science Foundation, a Federal agency that is the premier funder of basic research on college campuses that has itself been columnized by this poisonous identity politics.

The National Science Foundation is spending billions of our taxpayer dollars funding gender theorists on college campuses to study so-called intersectionality and micro-aggressions in the STEM fields on the assumption that the only possible explanation for why we do not have 50/50 gender parity in our engineering departments and math departments must be by definition the result of sexism, that is the diversity delusion. That is the fundamental lie that we've been fed that any disparity in a representation whether it's a gender disparity or race disparity must be the result of discrimination, and so our STEM fields now are obsessed with gender equity and race equity.

Our ability to discover the inner workings of the physical universe we inhabit is now hobbled by a scramble to find "acceptable" people to do the discovering.

Here's the essence of why identity politics is so ruinous to our civilization: It is central planning on a scale Mao could only have dreamed of. A self-appointed cabal of pointy-headed arbiters of what is fair and just is assuming control of human inquiry itself.

Given the swirl of current events impacting the immediate course of our nation and world(Mueller fingering Cohen and Manafort, Judge Lamberth reopening the Hillary email matter, Israel battling Hezbollah on its northern border and Hamas on its southern border, French riots, a newly discovered massive NorthKorean missile base), could the argument be made that focusing on identity politics is a rather tangential expenditure of observational energy?

Not when you consider exactly how the Democrats are going to approach the selection of a 2020 presidential candidate. It's going to be all about qualification by virtue of demographic classification. It's going to take precedence over everything else. And if the candidate they finally select wins, judicial appointments will be approached the same way.