It used to be that the right to freedom of speech, something essential for liberty, was a baseline everyone could agree on.

A growing vocal minority has been "deconstructing" that to say that your freedom of speech should depend not on the fact that you are a human, but instead into which ideological, racial, biological, economic, or social groups you can put yourself.

When presented with the argument that this damages the protection of freedom of speech, and hence endangers basic liberty, the counterargument is either that a) you are identifying yourself as a member of an out-of-fashion group and therefore should be silenced, or b) that the whole concept of freedom of speech came from one of these out-of-fashion groups and is therefore inherently bad.

Neither one of these responses is reasonable. They're both ad hominem arguments, and usually arrive peppered with red herring arguments to bolster the "you are bad" perspective.

Western culture, which, to varying degrees, has protected freedom of speech as a core value, is one of the most tolerant cultures on the planet today. It is that same freedom of speech that has been a key enabler for this tolerance. It most certainly is not perfect, and can most certainly be improved, but not by removing the mechanism most responsible for improving it in these dimensions.

It often feels as though one is confronting a screaming person who is accusing one of stealing his or her glasses, while said screaming person is wearing those very same glasses during the outburst.

I can understand how that would feel like the screaming party is "insane".

Granted, that may not be at all what the other poster meant.

Absolutely, because critical theory is a phenomenon of the Left. The right has its wackos too, but both the sane Left and the sane Right are quick to distance themselves from them. Critical theory lunacy seems IMHO to get a pass from otherwise sane persons on the Left even if they don't embrace it themselves.