Republican politicians started strategically calling all accurate historical information about racial inequality "critical race theory" and a lot of media outlets are just uncritically running with the phrase now

Even the Guardian is doing it:

"Critical race theory" is a real thing, of course, but the political strategy here is concept stretching and, well, it appears to be working.

To clarify this last point a bit: I& #39;m an academic who studies racism in American political history, but I don& #39;t think people doing critical race theory work would see me as a critical race theorist. But a lot of these laws would ban even extremely obviously discussions of racism.