This is an interesting take, but from Phyllis Schlafly's marriage of convenience with the elements of the anti-abortion movement who thought death for the women and doctors was a suitable punishment that killed off the ERA to Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers... https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1300964211858833410

that effectively killed off the power of unions, I would make the case that this long predates Tucker Carlson's reign in the College Republicans. Perhaps you could credit how well Bircherism plays on Fox for the spread of ideas that "other" half the population...

but you can't honestly argue that those ideas were new or that they weren't used by ambitious Republicans at the national level to turn out "the rubes" (as Nichols refers to certain members of the party) every year since at least Roe v. Wade. /fin

P.S. I made an assumption in this thread that I shouldn't have: that it is widely understood how the switch of the Southern Democrats to the Republican party in the wake of Johnson's signing Civil Rights legislation was the beginning of the Bircher wing of the party taking over.