At any given instant in time, progressives and radicals are calling for lots of different things. Some of those are good ideas, and some of those are bad ideas. It's the job of conservatives to filter out those bad ideas. The fact that they oppose the good ideas too doesn't mean they're wrong when they push back on the bad ones. It's like the old trope: they laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown: https://wiki.c2.com/?TheyLaughedAtEinstein.
Criticizing "defund the police" (as in, actually defunding the police) or normalizing the use of "whiteness" as a pejorative is not a bad thing just because conservatives do it. In fact, conservatives are doing society a valuable service by pushing back on those things. I'm quite sure in the retrospect of history, those will be proven to be "bad ideas progressives tried at one point" rather than examples of real advancement.
I'm not saying that everything conservatives say is wrong nor that everything progressives want is a good idea, just that speaking of "excesses" does not actually make them so, because that's how conservatives have always talked about demands for change.
Having said that, I'm fairly certain that in the retrospect of history, conservative pushback on the change in our understanding of race would look like another incarnation of white supremacy, and would appear as horrendously wrong to the people in the future as segregation appears to us to day, so much so that the conservatives of the future will use them as an example of something that is obviously right, unlike whatever social change people call for then.
Criticizing "defund the police" (as in, actually defunding the police) or normalizing the use of "whiteness" as a pejorative is not a bad thing just because conservatives do it. In fact, conservatives are doing society a valuable service by pushing back on those things. I'm quite sure in the retrospect of history, those will be proven to be "bad ideas progressives tried at one point" rather than examples of real advancement.