I realise this is conspiracy theory territory but hear me out. If any theorists / thinkers have come to similar conclusions, I'd love to read about it.
Most leftwing criticisms of identity politics amount to "idpol has been promoted to distract from class issues and divide leftwing movements", which is true, but I would go a step further and say it's been promoted by capitalist and state forces to provoke a fascist reaction that will naturally allow certain capitalists, politicians, and bureaucrats to enrich themselves while allowing an ever more complete marginalisation (if not extermination) of the very minority groups being promoted by idpol ideological apparatuses. In other words: identity politics is a trojan front for fascist reaction.
I'm not necessarily saying that there's a pro-idpol cabal sitting in closed conference rooms saying "we'll get fascists in power by promoting neopronouns" or something, but to quote George Carlin: you don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. If it's a deliberate tactic then rather than a centralised cabal, all it requires is a small number of dispersed agents scattered across corporations and bureaucracies to move events a certain away. If not a deliberate tactic then it's simply good evidence of the effectiveness of the autonomous convergence of interests in a system geared towards spectacle, mystification, division, and atomisation.
Most critiques of culture wars are incredibly one-dimensional and focus on the idea that it's just rightoids going apeshit over phony cultural issues to distract from class issues and fuel fascism; again, this happens, but it doesn't take into account that liberals and leftists are more than willing partners of the right in this dance. The right-wing reaction of the last decade is largely manufactured but it's also mostly simply co-opting an entirely spontaneous and understandable reaction among diverse demographics (initially mostly among white men but now spreading to other ethnicities, LGBT, and women too) to the absolute insanity of liberal and leftist (radlib) idpol which is semi-omnipresent in political commentary, pop culture, and advertising (rather than being confined to a few terminally online extremists as is often maintained by pro-idpol bien-pasants). The idpol insanity of our era goes beyond just silly nonsense that subverts leftwing movements; it's reached the point of hysteria and psychological total war, even if it's not quite at the fever pitch it was around 2020-2024. The fact that liberal and leftwing (i.e. radlib) people / activists / parties as well as governments and corporations are all parroting the same shit is telling.
The closest I've seen anyone share this theory of mine is when leftwing conspiracy youtuber u/fleshsimulator commented on the UK grooming gangs scandal (a decades-long scandal in which many different gangs of mostly Muslim men in the UK groomed and trafficked mostly poor white underage girls, and for years the police didn't act despite having ample evidence and reports because they admitted they were nervous about inflaming racial issues - naturally this issue has become a cause célèbre of the far-right, largely because it's been totally ignored or even denied by the liberals and the left). Flesh Simulator tweeted, possibly tongue-in-cheek, that these events had been allowed to take place for so long not just because of incompetency and cowardice among the police but because reactionary technocratic elements in the British state and civil service deliberately let it happen to inflame the far-right in Britain. I find this oddly compelling, but if this is too conspiratorial, the fact that liberals and leftists have almost universally downplayed the crimes (or even denied the existence of grooming gangs like Guardian commentator Owen Jones did and London mayor Sadiq Khan has) would be evidence enough of the successful creation of an autonomously batshit ideological apparatus that can do nothing but refract idpol insanity and inflame reaction.
There are many other potential candidates for idpol as deliberate psyop to provoke reaction: the infamous Humans of CIA ad; the continued proliferation of the self-flagellating cult of the original sin of privilege (the result of which can only inevitably be the alienation and rightward radicalisation of the majority of the population); blackwashing history and media being so egregious that the majority of actors in advertising being non-white and / or mixed families is often more on the nose than the most rabid un-ironic Nazi Cultural Marxist caricature; the unrelenting insistence of drag queen story hour as some kind of sacred cow that the children MUST witness for some reason; the continued dominance of Zionism (one of the most egregious products of idpol in history) over western politics and society; and so on. It's so relentless, as if it's full-blown psychological warfare determined to provoke as nasty a reaction as possible.
In a similar dynamic to this, Jiang Xueqin has proposed that Israel is deliberately behaving as blatantly cruel and belligerent as possible to friend and foe alike in order to turn the world against them because certain religious Zionist elements of the Israeli state and military believe that the end times and the Messiah will only arrive when the world attacks Israel. The idpol theory I'm proposing doesn't seem to be half as dramatic as this. Am I crazy?