I was recently reading an article by a libertarian who used the phrase "Post-Marx Marxism, which is mercantilist." It's a good thing I wasn't drinking coffee. Since this was the internet, I went to make a snide comment below the article which included "Everything Bad = Marxism."
As if to prove my point, someone replied to my comment with, "Marxism mixed with globalist banksterism/oligarchism/corporatism will get you to mercantilism."

It's not a secret that the right-wing in America doesn't actually know what the words "Marxism", "Communism" or "Socialism" means. After all, if anyone that they knew ever caught them reading Das Kapital they would be subjected to ridicule. Reading the cliff notes of the Communist Manifesto is about as daring as 99% of American conservatives will go.
When all of an ideology that you've been exposed to is a few phrases, and everyone you know, plus every media outlet that you listen to, says that the other side is beyond crazy, is it any surprise that "Everything Bad = The Other Side"?

These are some of the things that I've learned that conservatives believe from reading way too much right-wing articles and comments (note that Marxist, Communist, and Socialist are used interchangeably):

Marxists want people dependent upon the state. (Marx wanted to liquidate the state)

Some billionaires are openly communists.

White collar workers are not part of the working class, and they despise working class people. (class isn't determined by the color of your shirt)

Places like California are beyond saving.

Companies like Blackrock are too leftist.

So how did the right-wing arrive at a set of beliefs that even a casual reading of Marx/Lenin, or a decent knowledge of history, or just a good dictionary would disprove? I believe that it starts with the sneering classism of wealthy liberals.

Have you ever wondered why you can say "white trash" in any crowd without fear of social consequences, but you can't say "[insert any other racial group] trash"? If you talk to a liberal, it's OK because whites have it so good. But then five years ago we started seeing reports that life expectancy for working class whites was declining.
Now if the life expectancy of any race, gender, species, or genus began to decline, any scientist studying that group, let's say harbor seals, would immediately conclude that the species was under stress. What no scientist would ever do is assume that the harbor seals were asking for it. Yet that's what the media concluded in this case. A quick Google search will give you results like "Deaths of Despair: A Toxic Side Effect of Racism for Whites?"
Conservatives noticed this cultural elitism from wealthy liberals. I say wealthy because when is the last time you called wealthy people "trash" or "redneck" and associated racism with them?

An important inflection point was the passing of NAFTA, which everyone knows Clinton was responsible for. Except that is a half-truth at best.
The reality is that NAFTA was negotiated by the Reagan Administration. It was labor unions that kept it from passing Congress, until the "moderates" took over the Democratic Party. Even then a majority of Democrats voted against it ("pro-union" Biden voted for NAFTA), while Republicans were universally in favor.
I focus on NAFTA because if Free Trade Agreements aren't globalism, then what is?
One thing that conservatives absolutely hate is globalism, and the left loves it. Except that in reality it was labor unions that fought against shipping our jobs overseas for decades, and leftist groups protested against the WTO in Seattle and the IMF everywhere else, while conservatives never said "boo" until these last few years.

Right-wing antiglobalism tends to argue that globalization is an ideology advanced by Zionism, Marxism, and liberalism. Globalization is presented as a worldwide conspiracy against national identity, Western culture, or the white man...
Supporters of left-wing antiglobalism argue that the capitalist logic underlying globalization results in asymmetrical power relations (both domestically and worldwide) and in the treatment of every aspect of life—including health, education, and culture—as a commodity.

Globalism is the best example I can think of the differences between the modern right and modern left. Globalism is above all a political issue driven by capitalist economic forces. Right-wingers oppose globalism for strictly cultural reasons. That means the right has no real answers to the problems of globalism, because they don't even address the forces behind it. Modern conservatism sees virtually everything through a cultural lens. Equally important, modern conservatives think that the left is just as obsessed with culture.
To arrive at that conclusion required two things: a) taking the out-of-touch virtue signaling of wealthy liberals and recasting it as the "far-left", and b) re-inventing an obscure and mostly ignored branch of leftist thought and calling it "Marxism".

It's not a coincidence that Identity Politics has become prominent on universities at the same time that college tuition has become unaffordable to working class students. Working class people are often more concerned with economic issues. Upper-class people have more time to virtue signal.
What right-wing media did brilliantly was to take the excesses of this upper-class pastime and portray it as some sort of organized ideological project.
An example of this effort is this headline from the Heritage Foundation: Cancel Culture Is Helping Marxists Achieve Their Revolution in the West Without the Bloodshed
That may sound bizarre, because it is. It all comes down to something called Cultural Marxism.

Another name for the neo-Marxism of increasing popularity in the United States is "cultural Marxism.” This theory says the driving force behind the socialist revolution is not the proletariat—but the intellectuals. While Marxism has largely disappeared from the workers' movement, Marxist theory flourishes today in cultural institutions, in the academic world, and in the mass media.

This “cultural Marxism” goes back to Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and the Frankfurt School. The theorists of Marxism recognized that the proletariat would not play the expected historical role as a “revolutionary subject.” Therefore, for the revolution to happen, the movement had to depend on the cultural leaders to destroy the existing, mainly Christian, culture and morality and then drive the disoriented masses to Communism as their new creed. The goal of this movement is to establish a world government in which the Marxist intellectuals have the final say. In this sense, the cultural Marxists are the continuation of what started with the Russian revolution.

There are just a few things wrong with this theory. Number One: It's batsh*t stupid. Number Two: It's the opposite, not the continuation, of the Russian Revolution.
This moron goes on to say,"The Russian Revolution was neither Russian nor proletarian." Which even a bad reading of history would disprove.
It's what you see when you are a right-wing culture warriors looking into a carnival funhouse mirror. Lyndon LaRouche first began pushing this conspiracy theory in the 1970's, but it never got picked up by the mainstream right until after the fall of the Soviet Union, coincidentally when the right was searching for another enemy.

The theory of cultural Marxism is also blatantly antisemitic, drawing on the idea of Jews as a fifth column bringing down western civilisation from within, a racist trope that has a longer history than Marxism. Like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the theory was fabricated to order, for a special purpose: the institution and perpetuation of culture war. We can even nominate an author for this lunacy: William S Lind, a polymath of the American hard right, who sought to put rightwing activism on a new footing as the cold war drew to a close...
When the Berlin Wall fell, it was time for Lind’s strategy of “cultural conservatism” to become a central strategy for US Republicans: it identified a new kind of social enemy for the right to mobilise against. The changing parameters of economic debate and the beginning of American decline demanded that conservatives embrace a politics “centred more, not less, on cultural issues” – the family, education, crime and morality. The fairytale of cultural Marxism provided a post-communist adversary located specifically in the cultural realm – academics, Hollywood, journalists, civil rights activists and feminists. It has been a mainstay of conservative activism and rhetoric ever since.

While Lind has recently become a more marginal figure, his story of cultural Marxism has proved durable and useful across the spectrum of right-wing thought because it offers so much.

If cultural Marxism really was a powerful force at universities, we would expect to see academic publications on Marx, Gramsci and critical theorists crowding out libertarian, liberal and conservative voices.
We don't.
Conservatives pushing the idea of Cultural Marxism, a term that the right-wing invented, frequently point to the scholars of the Frankfurt School like Erich Fromm, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin.
To which leftists will respond, "Who?"
How is it that the founders of this Leftist Colossus which is on the verge of overturning the very fabric of America, are largely unknown on the left? Quite simply what we have with Cultural Marxism is a strawman, but a very useful one.
It's the missing link that binds together all of the various actors and interests on the right.
That's how you can accuse the Left of opposing free speech, while the right are the ones banning books and suppressing history taught in schools.
That's how capitalist billionaires can be accused of being leftists, even while they crush labor union and fund the Republican Party, simply because their marketing division tells them that virtue signaling for the environment is good for business.