Your post advocates for false equivalence, in a somewhat indirect manner. We get to "all science is politicized". And then the muddling of the waters is complete.
There is only so much labor we have as society. We need to make choices as to what we do. If everybody was willing we could dedicate society to just math. People can sleep under their desk at work, eat the mass produced cafeteria food, never watch sports, just work eat sleep. A lot of mathematicians could be funded with the leftover money (remember they are living the same life so their cost of living is tiny - more than half our population could produce more theorems).
The above is obviously Reductio ad Absurdum. However it brings out the point: we as a society have already decided math isn't the most valuable thing. We are already drawing limits, the only question is where.
Right now I'm doing all sorts of work studying risk in financial networks, studying public health, all using math that was considered "pure" just 20 years ago. Actually, at the moment I'm looking up papers on the tropical geometry of deep learning.
Certainly I realize society has decided math is not the most valuable thing, which is why I'll be seeking to do "machine learning" instead in the next year or so, rather than education & research (useless for anything in the real world!). I'm sure I'll add more to humanity when I'm optimizing for ad clicks :)
Something might be useless now, but further mathematics based on it might be worth billions.
- Fast Fourier transform (Gauss discovered and didn't publish it b/c he thought it wasn't very useful. Others rediscovered it later.) - Number theory was considered useless for a long time, now it's used for cryptography
No, just the science that's fashionable to politicize. You can't pretend that this article isn't at least more biased than the people they're supposedly warning us about.