"Corrupted by political activism" is probably going too far. It's not controversial to acknowledge that lots of historical attempts to measure intelligence have been pretty biased in favor of English speaking white men. Many of those attempts were biased just because of unexamined biases (the kind everyone has). Unfortunately some were also very deliberate spins (one notable example being the book The Bell Curve).

I think it's reasonable to conclude that measuring intelligence isn't valuable enough for all of the negative externalities attached to it given how the world currently is. But then from there it's easy to make the easy jump to saying it's impossible to measure intelligence without those negative externalities, which is probably not true. But if you can't measure intelligence without significant bias, you aren't really measuring it at all, you're just measuring your biases.