It's also the mainstream, now that millennial graduates are seeping into the institutions. I'm sure some important people knew phrenology was dumb when it was big, didn't make it less dumb 70+ years later.
This has been kind of a content-free thread. Could you explain more? Critical theory itself is almost a century old, in terms of who originally talked about it, and today the idea of critical thinking and critical reading is not just mainstream, but part of public education; meanwhile, nothing bad seems to have actually happened as a result of critical theory.
Edit: I don't like the phrasing I used in this first paragraph. To be more clear: The fact that the government publically funds an effort to teach children to examine the government's official declarations, question their authorities, and study the power structures which control them, is a surprising success of critical theory.
Phrenology is roundly countered by basic genetics; pedigree collapse directly implies that humanity forms one single race. Similarly, we have studied skulls enough to be confident that phrenology has no predictive power. What sorts of similar "showstopper" evidence do you have against critical theory?
The best criticisms against critical theory are listed on Wikipedia [0], but I don't think that you are talking about either of them. (Those criticisms are that critical theory is insufficiently Marxist, and that it lacks praxis.)
Modern critical thinking definitely owes a lot to critical theory. The ability to look at statements from the government and think about the ways in which the statement might mislead or outright lie is directly tied to the original climate of the Frankfurt School.
Typically, we refute philosophical positions by some sort of evidence. Without evidence, there's only opinions, and those are cheap and limitless. Indeed, in this very thread, basically all of the links and evidence have come from only one side. The only claims you've made with any substance are about phrenology and "millenials" in "institutions". I tackled the former; the latter is easily handled by remembering that critical theory started as an academic endeavor, and never really has been foreign to higher education. Although, as I describe this latter position, I'm reminded of the belief in the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. I don't know why people believe this; Marxists are pretty open about studying labor and power, and the fact that critical theory is a decades-long multidisciplinary research movement rather than a single meeting would suggest that it is not hiding some cryptic agenda.
It sounds like you think that critical theory ought not exist at all, but we would have to remove an entire score of history and philosophy from our discourse in order to do so; you'd have to prevent the First World War somehow. See [0] for a reasonable introduction to the Frankfurt School and critical theory. You might also like the second and third videos from the playlist [1].
