Because the American right has made itself so unappealing to the majority of young people, it has only been able to reproduce itself by creating a massive infrastructure that elevates mediocrities to positions of great influence. See D'Souza, Dinesh, for example.

This is why people like Wari Beiss can't tell the difference between people finding them mediocre and undeserving of the positions they hold, and being unfairly cancelled for supposedly espousing brave and bold, dissenting views.

It's basically a distorted market mechanism working as you'd expect it to. Dump a ton of money into institutions designed to appeal to the most unimaginative, reactionary young people...reward and elevate those who most effectively internalize the ideology...expel dissenters.

I know many people who have had direct contact with that world of right wing think tanks and institutes. Many of them enjoyed the intellectual engagement and the financial support. They also understood that the gravy train only continued if they agreed to toe the party line.

There was a conservative student newspaper at Brown in the late 1980s when I was there. The approach it took is now quite familiar, though it was innovative at the time. A) Invent a supposed consensus which you bravely contest. B) Say a bunch of offensive shit to get attention...

C) Claim that you are being oppressed by groupthink when people speak out about how intentionally offensive you're being.
D) Use that badge of victimhood to garner financial support from wealthy donors who also feel oppressed.
E) Rinse and Repeat, only now with even more funding.

This is the same culture of 1980s Ivy League right wing outrage that produced D'Souza and Ingraham at Dartmouth, by the way. The fact that most of their classmates found them to be appalling idiots is what gave them cache with their wealthy right wing benefactors.

In the late 1980s, universities were in the very earliest stages of beginning to hire professors who weren't straight white men. If that is the historical moment when you think universities became bastions of oppressive groupthink, then...well...I don't know what to say.

And here's a 1990 story from the Chronicle of Higher Education about the funders who bankrolled the scores of conservative newspapers that popped up on college campuses in the Reagan Era. https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-National-Network-Helps/67136

TPUSA is just the latest iteration of a dynamic that's been at work on the right since Buckley formed the Young Americans for Freedom in 1960. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-conservative-nonprofit-that-seeks-to-transform-college-campuses-faces-allegations-of-racial-bias-and-illegal-campaign-activity