The propaganda against universities started as early as the 1950s when the whole 'communists have overtaken academia' narrative got started. You know on how they always say 'in the past 20 or 30 years the leftists have overtaken X' is a common talking point they have? It isn't new, and neither is the timeframe. It is always within the past 20 or 30 years, always. In the early 2000s when I first got online and discovered right-wing content they were saying that, meaning the beatniks and hippies of the 1960s grew up and took over academic positions in the 70s and 80s. Now it is the 90s and 2000s that they are saying it. In the 1970s it culminated with the Kent State massacre that, at the time, was actually seen as a necessary measure that needed to be taken (this is even though most of the people killed weren't even protestors or had a history of protesting. They were bystanders who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time).

In the 1950s they said that universities were predominantly communist since the 1920s and they needed to be purged. This is despite the fact that the early 1920s had the First Red Scare in US history that was arguably worse than the Second Red Scare of the 1950s that we are more familiar with. You know how bad the first Red Scare was? There were police officers (yes police!) who argued for some socialist values and the response from the city was to fire entire police departments in one fell swoop and replace them with entirely new people who never interacted with the fired group. I need to mention that these are the people who insist that society would collapse and people would tear each other apart like animals without police... but if they're showing any socialism? Yeah fuck em'!

You need to remember just how static republican arguments are. They aren't new or original. They've been repeating the same shit for more than 100 years. I've seen anti-socialist bashing of Scandanvian countries predating WW1 (even before the modern Scandanvian welfare state even existed). The wording and tone were identical. Even anti-trans and drag queen arguments existed at least since the 1970s, before transgender people were known to the public. I learned this by reading the horrific Turner Diaries novel that was written at the time, where they mentioned drag queens and gay people in the exact same hateful terminology that is mentioned now.