My pleasure. Discussing philosophy anywhere is a rare joy.
In terms of the definition of Critical Theory, the Stanford Encyclopedia draws from Horkheimer, a German philosopher associated with the Frankfurter school. If you wish to use his definition the way that Stanford's Encyclopedia does, you'll need to read his "Traditional and Critical Theory" essay (I believe it's been translated): the concepts of 'slavery' and 'emancipation' he uses may not have the same meaning as those with which most people are familiar.
As far as it goes, the Stanford definition limits 'critical theory' to the outgrowth of the Frankfurt School. In academia (and ONLY there), that's reasonable. Politically (which is your concern), the AMERICAN concept of critical theory goes back further. Indeed, the main reason so many proponents of the Frankfurt School survived the Nazis owes to an older 'critical theory' that saw great benefit from challenging a dominant frame, and which grew separately from a rejection of an 'analytic' tradition of Anglo-American philosophy (while barely interacting with continental frames). Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis were the godfathers of that 'critical method' - both challenging a concept of law as a 'science' with a 'correct' answer to legal questions. Instead, both argued (persuasively) that law requires injecting knowledge from the real world into jurisprudence. (and politics).
I am not well-trained in the Frankfurt school; it's been some years since I read Horkheimer, and even then, it was mostly as an introduction to Habermas and other 'critics.' However, I believe you may have misconstrued the 'emancipation' Horkheimer refers to in this passage - which is clarified in the rest of 'Traditional and Critical Theory.' When he refers to 'slavemasters,' he is not using the term 'slavery' in any sense comparable with the trans-Atlantic or other slave trades, but rather, relics from Cartesian philosophy (and the failure of Kant's approach to bypass that problem, as well as issues with Hegel that idealize the dialectic, and potentially even problems with Marx, though he was himself from a Marxist tradition).
Horkheimer's reference to 'emancipation' can be read a few different ways - including, I believe, as an alternative to the Marxist frame of proletariat driven revolution and eradication of a bourgeousie (though I believe that the real meaning refers to mind/being puzzles).
I believe you, like many others, have inferred its meaning from a 'face value' reading of the word.
I hope the previous extremely lengthy reply suggests I have not. I will not say that the Stanford online definition is "wrong" - it is quite useful. But if you are offended by critical theory, well, the Frankfurt School has had significant effects on American academy (it defends many fields of study as worthwhile beyond merely STEM coursework - and asserts that other forms of study may benefit other forms of research...something most scientists who are also musicians, athletes, etc may agree with),
Thus, it interprets reality through this lens to construct a narrative of human oppression,
I'll return to this point with an old puzzle that has preoccupied philosophers for a while: if "I think, therefore I am" is "true," what else can we know about the world? Descartes himself came up with a weak answer using a bad argument (God is real, and he makes our perceptions reliable). Hume, Kant, and many other philosophers also came up with a mix of interesting approaches (the analytic school thought that use of logic might be helpful - and later, working logic with electrical circuits into some sort of a 'program' might help resolve thorny metaphysical problems...or at least, perform some calculations...).
But as for your concluding point, dogmatism and criticism are two 'methodologies' of knowledge - either 'accept what is, and try to understand it as it is, independent from anything else' or 'accept what is may be something other than what perceptions indicate, and relate it to other things.' Deception is not a way of knowledge, though assuming that deception happens MIGHT be useful to pursuing some other form of knowledge. At least, Descartes thought so.
