I see the irony. BUT there's a distinction: nobody wants to censor CRT, they don't want it banned from Twitter or YouTube, nobody's gonna riot in protest at the next critical theory conference on a campus They just don't want it pushed on them at the workplace or on their kids in K-12 education. Shoot, hostile work environment lawsuits are already starting to stack up. Why wouldn't they? From the article:
"This sounds, ironically, a lot like the arguments people on the left make about de-platforming right-wingers. To Crenshaw, attempts to ban critical race theory vindicate some of the movement’s skepticism about free speech orthodoxy, showing that there were never transcendent principles at play."
This is a BS argument. Nobody cared about CRT until it started showing up at mandatory work trainings and as K-12 curricula. It's like when the creationists wanted equal representation in biology textbooks without doing that whole scientific evidence thing.
Here's CRT in its own words from an introductory text on the subject:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qg9h2
"Unlike traditional civil rights, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law."
Like it or not, CRT IS based in some not so grand traditions: Marxism, postmodernism, and race essentialism. These things are fine and dandy to exist and believe in and proselytize in your free time or study as a profession. Again, please leave them out of the workplace, and hands off the kids. Teaching about racism, sexism, slavery, colonialism, homophobia, etc --learning from unvarnished history-- is a good proposition that is entirely different from teaching critical race theory.
If you really dig deep can you see why maybe some people might object to having this taught to their kids as gospel, or being forced to agree with it at work? I've been to enough trainings and read enough critical theory to place it in the same category as pushing religion on employees or students. Also, with the situation at Evergreen State University we got to see what happens when you apply these theories to the real world and push them to their conclusion. Nothing good my friend. Do your homework on this stuff and make sure you really believe in it before you use it to score partisan points.