Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro posted a video on his YouTube channel last Sunday entitled “Marxism Can’t Work In America.” He starts with a series of historical claims about race, class, Marxism, and American history.

When you have high levels of societal income mobility, when you can be born in America and become very, very wealthy, when you can be a middle-class person and you can get rich, it’s very difficult to make the case that the system is stacked against you — so the Left had to come up with another way to ram their cultural Marxism through, and what they came up with was race.

Because while the United States historically has not had massive class distinctions that are hard and fast, it has had race distinctions that were hard and fast for the vast majority of America’s lifetime, right, until the 1960s, so from 1776 to the 1960s you had hard and fast racial distinctions in law in many parts of the country and that was a serious problem.

So what the Marxists did is they glommed onto this, and they said, “Aha! What we need to do is make Americans understand that the systems are racist, and you need to tear down the systems so you can have, essentially, racial mobility. That is the only way to do this.

As he continues the story, the end of de jure segregation in the mid-1960s should have removed “any remaining excuse you have for some sort of revolution based on class.” Instead of giving up, though, Marxists invented Critical Race Theory, which claims that notionally racially neutral policies and institutions can be discriminatory in their effects.