Much of populist conservative punditry supports President Trump and the Trump agenda for the sole reason that it infuriates liberals. Or “triggers” them. Or “owns the libs.” It’s depressing, but it’s a natural outgrowth of what’s been happening to the conservative movement on college campuses for years.

For all the headlines about how uninterested in policy and discourse the modern college Left is, the college Right has been poisoning the discourse for a long time. The incentive structure on college campuses combined with the underdeveloped political conservatism of teenagers has created a feeding ground for outrage culture — and it was only a matter of time before it seeped out into the adult population.

Being a politically-active conservative on a modern college campus is a lonely life. Every structure and institution is controlled by the ideological Left, liberal student groups outnumber conservative ones 20 to one, and many fellow students who will eventually grow up to be Republicans are uninterested in political activism. Serious conservative ideas are given short shrift in the classroom and ignored outside of it. The whisper network on my own college campus warned of a particular professor who thanked a student’s in-class defense of a flag-burning constitutional amendment for offering “the redneck perspective”; another wrote an article for the student newspaper defending academia’s distaste for conservatism by analogizing it with flat-eartherism as a legitimate theory.