Researcher Heather Mac Donald marshals facts and figures to make her case about America’s diversity obsession in her new book, but Friday on “The Laura Ingraham Show” she offered her personal experience with discrimination.

That is to say, lack of experience.

“I’ve never been discriminated against as a female in my life,” she told host Laura Ingraham. “On the contrary, I know that I’ve been the so-called beneficiary of gender preferences more times than I would like to admit. It’s insulting, and I don’t need it.”

Mac Donald’s book, “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture,” came out earlier this month.

A fellow as the conservative Manhattan Institute, Mac Donald (pictured above) said America’s hyperfocus on race and gender — particularly on college campuses — is destroying higher education.

Mac Donald pointed to a phalanx of diversity officers and ethnic studies programs on college campuses across the country. She said they teach students that they either are oppressed or oppressors.

“It’s teaching students to hate the legacy of Western civilization,” she said. “They hate each other and … see phantom racism and sexism where it simply does not exist. But this is poisoning our culture.”

What’s more, Mac Donald said, the diversity mentality has extended beyond the campus.

“We are reintroducing group tribalism. We are destroying merit,” she said. “Not only is there no actual diversity at Google and the other big tech firms, but if you challenge the reigning left-wing orthodoxy, you lose your job, as happened to James Damore in August of 2017, when he was fired for writing a fact-based, reasonable memo challenging Google’s feminist orthodoxy.”

“The premise of this entire diversity delusion is that America is profoundly racist and sexist, and that absent racial and gender preferences, we are going to have a discriminatory world.”

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Damore wrote that internal memo after Google executives themselves solicited thoughts from employees as to why women were underrepresented in the field. The company objected to Damore’s argument that gender differences play a role, and it fired him.

Mac Donald and her book challenge the underlying assumptions that fuel the multimillion-dollar diversity industry on college campuses across the country.

“The premise of this entire diversity delusion is that America is profoundly racist and sexist, and that absent racial and gender preferences, we are going to have a discriminatory world,” she said.

Mac Donald said that the “specious and dangerous diversity delusion” holds that discrimination must be the explanation for any institution that does not have rigid proportionality with the population at large.

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“You’re not allowed to take into account differences in preferences that groups have, different skills, differences in cultures,” she said. “We have to fight back against that key ides, because as long as that idea remains lodged in the Establishment — that America is endemically racist and sexist — you’re going to have the demand for quotas that are destroying, now, the sciences.”

The Left is changing the very nature of America, Mac Donald said.

“Culture matters. Assimilation matters,” she said. “And what we have on the Left now is a desire to absolutely change the culture of this country into group rights, into an attack on meritocracy.”

(photo credit, homepage and article images: Heather Mac Donald, CC BY-SA 2.0, Cut Out/Collage, by Gage Skidmore)