You didn't read the line you stopped at. ToastedPlanet said 'suspend' critical thinking which is frequently encouraged in our society. Kind of like this, carpenters are by definition good wood workers. If you corner our carpenter while he is out shopping for food at the grocery store and demand he chisel you up a dovetail joint he's going to tell you to get bent, he doesn't have those tools with him and is in fact actively discouraged from working wood at the grocery store.

Nobody said the smartest people lack critical thinking skills, ToastedPlanet is correctly observing that even the smartest people will occasionally choose to disregard those skills for other contextual reasons.

Beyond that some of the smartest people are unabashedly self centered, amoral and terrible people. You're redefining 'smartest' to encompass a lot more than raw intelligence and it's just not the right word for this.

Werner Heisenberg worked for the Nazis during World War II. I don't think he chose to be amoral because if he had he probably would've worked on nuclear bombs. And yet he worked for the Nazis.

Critical thinking is a skill. Anyone can learn it. We can measure a person's ability by giving them tests and throwing a wide array of problems at them.

Smartest implies general intelligence which we do not know how to measure. There is no test. IQ tests are a cultural knowledge test designed to marginalize and ostracize Black people masquerading as general intelligence tests.

Regardless it is not even a case of not having critical thinking skills in all cases. But refusing to apply those skills in certain contexts.

The smartest people can effectively have blind spots where they suspend these critical thinking skills for personal, moral, or ethical reasons that allow them to support amoral, unethical, and rapacious practices or outcomes without consciously choosing to embody these qualities themselves.

edit: Also, even with what you read it should be evident that your critique of my argument is a straw man.

The smartest people DON’T lack critical thinking skills.

My argument is not that they lack those skills, although they could in theory.

My argument you claimed to have read is this:

They demand that you suspend critical thinking.