tried to conflate Lenin with both Marx and Communism

Leninists do that already by calling themselves "Marxist-leninists." And Lenin himself conflated his personal ideology with communism as a whole when he killed all the communists who weren't on board with him.

Marx shouldn't even be a taboo subject, but he is, purely because of how Lenin commandeered and corrupted the entire evolution of the ideas Marx first laid out. Plenty of countries had communist parties before the bolshevik revolution; afterwards, the entire west looked and said "those people are fucking crazy, I don't want them doing that here."

I'd love to be able to sit down and have an intellectual discussion on the virtues of Marx's theories, but if I bring it up anywhere I'll get one of two reactions: either I'll be labeled as a communist, get put on a watch list, and get chased out of town, or I'll wind up listening to a tankie rant for hours about how I'm not radical enough and that if I don't support the bolsheviks that I must be a fascist.

There's no fucking middle-ground, no room for nuance, and Marxism itself is barely more than a historical artifact. An interest piece on an ideal that never came to be, and now is far more widely known for being something else which didn't come until decades later.

Far better to just talk about Merleau-Ponty. At least then anyone who's heard of him is at least somewhat educated...