Victor Marx reflects the unsettling nature of today politics
When Victor Marx was 3 years old, he was forced to undergo a voodoo ritual that involved a cat being beheaded. He killed a man when he was 7 years old.
Or so says Marx.
But he wasn’t just a precocious child.
As an adult running a “high-risk” Christian ministry, Marx says he rescued 45,000 women and children from bondage and abuse. As a civilian, he allegedly led a US military airstrike that killed 70 ISIS fighters. He says he exorcises demons and can do it over the phone if necessary.
True or more likely false, these absurd claims and tales of heroic courage are not the strangest thing about Marx.
The strangest thing is that Marx Republican candidate for governor of Coloradoit’s a real part of the United States of America.
Marx, a political newcomer, won by fewer than 2,500 votes out of more than 520,000 in a three-way race. (It took almost nine days to declare the winner, but you probably already knew that, given the national outcry about how long it was taking Colorado to count ballots. Oh, wait. Never mind.)
Although weak, Marx’s victory made a powerful statement: about the dire state of mainstream Republicanism; About the increasing embrace of eccentricity and extremism by a deeply disaffected segment of the American electorate; about the unstable and unsettling nature of today’s politics.
“It’s almost cult-like,” former Colorado GOP chairman Dick Wadhams said of Marx’s support. “You talk to some of these people and there’s no doubt in their minds that he’s going to be governor because God has decided he’s going to be governor.”
This has a great chance. (Please don’t hit me.)
Colorado has only elected one Republican governor in the last 55 years, and that was in 2002. It’s been 10 years since a Republican won any statewide office. Democratic candidate Atty. Gen. Phil Weiser is close to entering November after defeating U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet in the primary.
But Marx, 61, a former Marine and martial arts expert, is anything but swaggering. His role model, of course, is the political subversive and arch storyteller who currently occupies the White House.
Like President Trump, Marx relies heavily on personal charisma, a strong social media presence, and a deliberate eschew of campaign norms that speak to the politically alienated about his independence from the establishment and offer a welcome break from the same old, same old.
Presents himself as a problem solver and negotiator excellence. He was skimpy on politics and skipped most of the preliminary debates; At the concert he attended, Marx brought his dog, a Dutch shepherd, on stage. Marx offered a prayer instead of a closing speech.
He did not back down from his fantastic claims when asked. But Marx didn’t do a very good job of verifying them.
He says that when he was a young boy growing up in Louisiana, his abusive stepfather, who allegedly involved him in a demonic cat decapitation, took him to rural Mississippi, where Marx shot and killed a man. Police told Colorado Public Radio there was no record of any unsolved homicides at that time.
“How many people did you kill?” Kyle Clark, anchor of 9News in Denver, asked the candidate this question: a persistent and revealing sit-down interview.
“I don’t think it matters,” Marx replied. “That’s actually a weird question for me.”
Not really.
(Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer (second-place), who accepted the Republican race, blatantly refused to support Marx and urged voters to vote. ““Choose the best path for Colorado in November,” he said. “For the record,” he added, “I still haven’t killed anyone.”)
Marx is a mainstream conservative Republican in many respects. He founded All Things Possible Ministries, a Christian nonprofit organization that helps refugees and other trauma survivors. His focus on law and order, tax cuts, small government, and deregulation are standard GOP fare.
But his flamboyant stories about youth murders, telephone exorcisms, personal interceptions of human smugglers at the US-Mexico border – not so much.
Many voters will likely have a hard time getting over these autobiographical excesses, which could spell trouble (low GOP turnout, guilt by association) for other Colorado Republicans, including freshman Rep. Gabe Evans, struggling to hang on to a tightly contested congressional seat in the north-central part of the state.
This is a loss Republicans cannot afford as they desperately try to maintain their bare majority in the House of Representatives.
Despite its preference for Democratic governors, Colorado was a competitive two-party state until recently. As recently as 2012, it was a presidential battleground. As recently as 2018, Republicans had a majority in the state Senate.
But the state GOP’s MAGA construct has accelerated Colorado’s evolution from political battleground to deep blue castle.
“The Colorado Republican Party is impotent and irrelevant right now,” said Wadhams, who unsuccessfully fought against a takeover of the party by Trump-worshiping zealots. “The irony of this story is that polls over the last several months have shown voters growing uneasy about what they see as Colorado’s decline in education, energy, roads and transportation.”
Just last week, the annual Colorado Health Foundation released its annual Pulse Survey, a grim report card on the state of the state; It found that three-quarters of those surveyed were concerned they might not be able to live there in the future.
But don’t expect Democrats to lose their dominance anytime soon.
This is what happens when a party and its voters stop competing seriously and give in to their passions and fever dreams. There are candidates and political cartoons like Victor Marx.
God help us.
