IT IS NEITHER CRITICAL NOR THEORY.

It is a faith tradition, and Samantha Harris shows the way to undermine it.

The bottom line is that our future as a free society depends on fighting back against the pall of orthodoxy that has descended over our educational institutions. But we must resist the temptation to fight back with the traditional tools of our ideological opponents — censorship and repression — and instead stay true to the freedoms we are fighting for.

That institutions of higher education can be accused of harboring orthodoxies illustrates just what sort of craven, cringing careerists are in charge these days.

The battle against these identity-based ideologies needs to be waged in the marketplace of ideas, not through censorship. Proponents of [Critical Race Theory], critical feminist theory, postcolonial theory, etc. have every right to argue for the validity of their positions, just as we have the right to argue for the validity of ours. We must recognize their rights even as we try to convince the world of the dangers of their arguments.

That does not mean, however, that they have the right to indoctrinate our children, or to create a hostile environment in which students or teachers are continually treated as “less than” on the basis of skin color. When these things happen — and they are happening — then we must fight back hard not only in the court of public opinion, but in courts of law as well.

Most people know that the First Amendment protects freedom of speech. But it also protects freedom of conscience — that is, the right to hold our personal thoughts and beliefs free from government intrusion

These are two separate arguments, aren't they?  I doubt, to engage the last paragraph, that anyone is arguing in defense of holding a white-supremacist view on the basis of freedom of conscience.  I suspect, though, that the proponents of empirically empty critical theories would rather hide behind the Critique of Pure Tolerance or any other useful appeal to their sole authority to speak, than to defend the evidence they offer in support of their assertions of systemic racism, let alone be required to contemplate what sort of evidence might move them to revise their priors.  Anyone who refuses to engage that sort of a question ought be viewed, presumptively, as engaging in indoctrination, and ignored, mocked, or disrespected accordingly.