Former Trump White House director of strategic communication Mercedes Schlapp with her husband, CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp, on a panel titled “Columbus, the Constitution, & the Consecrated: The Left’s Destruction of History & Holiness”, per the CPAC 2021 Texas agenda.
It’s far from unheard of in academic contexts to use a writer’s name synonymously with their body of work and its impact in the present discourse, whether they are deceased or not. Like you could say “Voltaire is friggin hilarious” and no one who knows who Voltaire is and what era he hailed from would be under the impression you believe he is still alive.
CPAC is not an academic context, and as such it’s fairly certain that this dumb harridan Schlapp thinks Karl Marx is a late-Gen X or early millennial-aged pro-Critical Race Theory Substacker with a couple hundred thousand premium subscribers. The only words of a sentence that begins with “Karl Marx has been pushing…” should end with are “…daisies for 138 years now”.