I don't think it's theater, I think it's ideological napalm. Christopher Rufo said "Yes, we are going to crush the academic Left, abolish DEI, and salt the Earth beneath it", and I think this is an example of that mission.
These people will burn down their own house and wealth to make sure others don't feel welcome. How hard is it to just learn to live with people that don't agree with you?
Yes
It also doesn't even matter. The Trump situation will end. At that point MAGA people won't be gone, and it'd be a pretty sad outcome if they were or felt repressed, or we'll simply end up right here again. The point is not to win, the point is to make things better.
You do it by defining 'success' as 'people in the top get complete control, everyone else gits nothing'.
The right has plenty of very strong hard right institutions of its own. Very very strong. But they're very rarely academically or scientifically notable, across the whole world (with notable exceptions of the Koch brothers & Federalist Society funded George Mason School of Economics). The right has enormous influence, their own schools & control within schools that they pay for! https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mas...
I think we find very few examples going the other way, having such large scale divisional control & top down left control.
Its because of who the right is, what their priorities really are, and how they bias themselves against science, how they let their efforts be steered explicitly by money & funding that they are largely irrelevant: they are not, imo, unfairly denied opportunity or the chance to do their work. There's opportunity abundant, if they want to do genuine & reasonable research, they could do it in real universities. But as comedian & faux-conservative Stephen Colbert polemicizes, the right is sworn to forever fight 'reality's well known liberal bias', in the name of defending winner takes all amassed capitalism & pro monarchy pro feudal ideology, that alas is well represented by loud voices in Silicon Valley.