If you want to anger a stock conservative intellectual, just try arguing that Karl Marx might have something worth saying. Or worse, suggest that a man who wrote numerous volumes on everything from German philosophy to the standard assumptions of classical political economy might have a more nuanced theory than “rich people bad, poor people good.”

Yet several decades after the Cold War, plenty of right-wing pundits still can’t be bothered to offer rebuttals to Marx that go beyond glib denunciations. Jordan Peterson has described Marxism as an evil theory and made his name bashing “postmodern neo-Marxism,” despite admitting during one debate that he hasn’t read much more than the Communist Manifesto in the past few decades.

In his latest opus, Don’t Burn This Book, Dave Rubin lumps in socialism with Nazism and fascism by claiming Benito Mussolini was “raised on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital” — ignoring Il Duce’s later efforts to imprison and silence Marxists and other “enemies of the nation.” And most recently, Ben Shapiro’s How To Destroy America in Three Easy Steps recycles old tropes about the “nonsense” of Marx’s labor theory of value, while ignoring the irony of praising John Locke for “correctly point[ing] out that ownership of property is merely an extension of the idea of ownership of your labor; when we remove something from the state of nature and mix our labor with it and join something of our own to it, we thereby make that property our own.”