The right-wing preacher turned politician Victor Marx has said that he first killed a man when he was 7. He’s not sure how many deaths he’s been responsible for since. Marx has been arrested at least twice for disorderly conduct and has described terrorizing a psychiatrist with talk of murdering him. He told the Colorado journalist Kyle Clark that he can perform exorcisms by phone. On Thursday he was declared the winner of the Republican gubernatorial primary in Colorado.
Marx is the sort of character Carl Hiaasen might have conjured if he took mushrooms and wandered into a Pentecostal church. He’s the son of a man named Karl Marx — really — who invented a form of “Cajun karate.” (Victor apparently holds a seventh-degree black belt.) The younger Marx calls himself a “high-risk humanitarian,” and tells stories of charging into war zones to perform acts of Christian rescue. At one point his website claimed he’d saved over 40,000 women and girls from sex trafficking, though under scrutiny, he amended that figure to “more than one and less than a bunch.” Reporters have also been unable to find evidence of his purported childhood homicide, which he says he committed at the insistence of an abusive stepfather.
These discrepancies haven’t stopped Marx from building a brand out of action-movie evangelicalism. Charlie Kirk wrote the foreword to his 2024 book, “The Dangerous Gentleman.” Marx’s website reportedly used to sell a $99 guide to spiritual warfare, teaching users how to cast out demons. He and his wife were involved in what appears to be a multilevel marketing company hawking vitamins. And now he has become the latest political outsider to catapult past party gatekeepers and win a nomination for an important office.
Marx’s close victory in a three-way primary has some Colorado Republicans despairing. Given how blue the state has become, the G.O.P. never had much hope of winning the governorship, but Republicans told me that having Marx at the top of the ticket could put some statehouse and congressional races in danger. “He’s going to do absolute destruction to all the candidates down ballot,” said Darcy Schoening, a former Moms for Liberty activist and a state party delegate who runs an anti-Marx website. His campaign has divided the Colorado right, leaving relationships in tatters. “This election season, most people probably lost more friends than they ever have in any other cycle,” said Schoening.
The elevation of Marx is, in part, a story about the right-wing revolution eating its own. Two years ago, I wrote about the schisms among Colorado Republicans as MAGA forces took over the party, making the fanatically anti-gay Dave Williams party chair. When I first learned about Marx, I assumed he was part of the same faction as Williams, but I was wrong. Jimmy Sengenberger, a conservative columnist for The Denver Gazette, told me that much of Williams’s camp lined up behind Scott Bottoms, a hard-right state legislator who is, like Marx, a pastor, though one with a lower profile. “Those who are involved in the party, they really want to have control over the party,” said Sengenberger. But they seem to have lost it; in the primary, Bottoms came in third.
It’s easy for liberals like me to feel smug about this Republican fiasco. But the ridiculous rise of Victor Marx is the product of trends that, having transformed the Republican Party, are beginning to show up in Democratic primaries as well. When I asked Republicans how Marx had won, they described his charisma and social media reach, as well as voters’ contempt for professional politicians. “Victor Marx did a very good job of marketing himself as an outsider, as an answer to some of the angst Republicans have in Colorado,” said Chuck Broerman, a Republican official in El Paso County. “He has a great social media following,” Broerman added, and there was a bandwagon effect online. Marx, he said, “created a vehicle for people to focus their emotional energy.”
Speaking to Broerman, it was hard not to see at least faint parallels to emerging dynamics in parts of the Democratic Party. In Texas, the antisemitic sex therapist Maureen Galindo made it into a runoff for a congressional seat and, even after she proposed imprisoning Zionists, got more than a third of the vote. The New York socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier beat out the aging progressive Adriano Espaillat, and though not nearly as toxic as Galindo, other Democrats still had to answer for her outré positions, including her refusal to say that murderers should be imprisoned.
Schoening said some in Colorado are comparing Marx to Graham Platner. I would never go that far; Platner’s faults required digging, while Marx’s unfitness should have been evident from his public pronouncements. Still, Marx demonstrates what can happen when voters, feeling apocalyptic, disdain concerns about expertise and electability and let themselves be guided by their id. Many of us have welcomed the rise of a Democratic Tea Party, in no small part because the Tea Party was very effective at moving the country in its ideological direction. But once started, the process of voter radicalization isn’t easy to modulate.
If Democrats have taken a step or two down this road, Republicans have been racing down it for years. That’s part of the reason Marx hasn’t received as much national attention as his eccentric biography might warrant. It scarcely counts as news when Republicans nominate a con man who claims to have God on his side while fetishizing violence. In “The Dangerous Gentleman,” Marx emphasizes that despite all his escapades, he’s just an ordinary guy. “In the very near future, there will be thousands of people like me around the world,” he wrote. You might take that as a warning.
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