Is State Police Captain Ann Assumpico the most qualified person on the planet, or even among the Rhode Island State Police, to take the reins of the department at this point in time?  I don’t know, but I’m sorry to say the appointment strikes me as unavoidably tainted.

According to Providence Journal reporter Katherine Gregg, Assumpico is (or was) the seventh in command in the department.  That seems like a rather large jump.  That seems like a rather significant number of professionals who’ve put in years of dedicated service to the state who were skipped over.

Even then, I probably wouldn’t say anything, but the person doing the appointment, Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo, annually conducts an official, unconstitutional, and sexist contest that discriminates against boys in Rhode Island schools.  She’s a politician who actively supports an astonishingly corrupt presidential candidate explicitly because she’s not a man.

Imagine the outrage we’d be hearing from all quarters if a male governor who hosted a no-girls-allowed contest and told voters they should pick the man running for president because of his maleness proceeded to skip over six higher-ranked women in the State Police to appoint a man.  This imaginative exercise is rated “too easy even to bother.”

All the journalists on-hand for Assumpico’s appointment as I write this just tweeted her statement that “she didn’t have any female role models in law enforcement growing up.”  That’s an unfortunate remnant of our societal evolution, but it’s one that our current cultural trajectory would likely eliminate within a few generations even without putting thumbs on scales.

Even so, in order to accelerate the process (and give powerful politicians credit for breaking the cultural speed limit), is it worth sending boys growing up now the message that they have no chance because of past history?  That they have to be seven times better than any girl in order to get any breaks?  Because the evidence suggests (see here, here, and here) that that’s the message they’re getting.

As for identity politics (seen in today’s earlier post, too), one gets the feeling that the people in charge, like our governor, don’t actually think that the jobs that we’re hiring people to do are the most important considerations, but rather the employees’ demographic qualities — which we used to be encouraged to see as superficial.  And if that’s the case, let’s just get government out of all of these apparently unimportant activities and pay people to be female or to have dark skin.