By admin 
The defining moment in Victor Marx’s surreal quest to be Colorado’s governor came a few weeks ago, during a rare sit-down interview with a journalist. Halfway through the session, Denver TV news anchor Kyle Clark asked the candidate how many people he had killed.
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The question isn’t as outrageous as it sounds. Marx, a former Marine and the founder of an evangelical ministry, talks a lot about violence and killing. He presents himself as a globe-trotting spiritual warrior, freeing women and children from the clutches of terrorists and sex traffickers. His social media posts and podcast appearances teem with references to narrow escapes and secret missions, encrypted comms and safe houses, as well as accounts of the horrific childhood sexual and physical abuse he says he endured from his sadistic stepfather, who he also says forced him to kill a man when he was 7 years old.
After an agonizingly long pause, Marx responded to Clark’s question. First, he said that the killing orchestrated by his stepfather was the only one he committed as a child. “But I’ve been in other situations where possibly people or persons died as a result of me defending myself in other countries,” he said.
“Do you think that you’ve killed people as an adult?” Clark asked.
“Does it matter?” Marx replied.
“Yeah, I’d say so.”
Clark never got a straight answer to his question. The jaw-dropping exchange soon went viral and cast a national spotlight on Colorado’s over-the-top governor’s race. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter how many people Marx claims to have killed, since none of the three GOP candidates in the race have a prayer of winning the job in a purple state that’s getting bluer all the time; Colorado has elected only one Republican governor in the past 50 years. But the emergence of Marx, a political unknown, as the purported front-runner in Tuesday’s primary—he has raised more money than his two rivals combined, and the sparse polling seems to favor him—has alarmed party insiders and stoked fears that his campaign could imperil other Republican seats in the statehouse and Congress, plunging the fractured, marginalized party into chaos.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Dick Wadhams, a longtime Republican political consultant who has guided several key U.S. Senate campaigns. “Marx is the kind of candidate who will bring down a bunch of other Republicans if he ends up winning the primary.”
Marx’s two primary opponents have baggage of their own. State Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer is the closest thing to a moderate in the race, having worked on bipartisan legislation and joined prominent Democrats in opposing the recent commutation of the prison sentence of disgraced election official (and Trump ally) Tina Peters. But more than a decade ago, Kirkmeyer led an oddball movement by rural county officials to secede and form a 51st state. The other candidate, state Rep. Scott Bottoms, is a pastor who claims that pedophile rings are operating at the highest levels of state government—and promises to deliver the evidence as soon as he becomes governor.
Still, in the race to the outer limits of Kookyville, Marx is way, way ahead. He boasts of achieving a seventh-degree black belt in Keichu-do karate, a Cajun hodgepodge martial art developed by his biological father, Karl. (Yes, his father is named Karl Marx.) Marx claims to be the world’s fastest gun disarmer, a skill that seems to require an assailant to stick a handgun directly in your face rather than shoot you from a few feet away. He’s probably the only candidate for statewide office anywhere in the country to release an action-packed promotional video in which he and his wife Eileen, dressed in formal attire, kung-fu the daylights out of two assailants in an elevator. (One does put a gun inches away from his face.) He’s also a self-proclaimed demon hunter who says he’s freed hundreds of souls from evil influences, either in person or by phone—not exorcisms, exactly, but what he describes as “breaking strongholds” and “commanding the demonic to reveal his lies.”
Marx was largely unknown outside of Colorado’s evangelical community before Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September. But in 2024, Kirk wrote a foreword for Marx’s book The Dangerous Gentleman: A Call for Men to Be Courageous in a Culture of Fear, describing him as “a dear friend for many years” and a spiritual mentor. Days after Kirk’s death, Marx posted photos of himself consoling Kirk’s widow, Erika; he announced he was considering a run for governor at a memorial service for Kirk. A few weeks later, he formally launched his campaign.
Marx has never held public office—like most fringe candidates, he touts his outsider status as an asset—and his entry into the race took many party activists by surprise. Those who dug into his background soon found a perplexing trail of bold statements and obfuscations. His multimillion-dollar ministry has had a shifting focus, from counseling incarcerated youths to supporting military veterans to fighting child trafficking, and has operated out of multiple locations (Texas, California, and Hawai‘i) before moving to Colorado. Marx himself even seems to have a surplus of identities; military records indicate that he went by the name Vaughn Victor Kennedy at the time of his discharge. (The candidate says he resumed using his birth name, Victor Marx, after reconciling with his biological father.) And most baffling of all was Marx’s own origin story, recounted in numerous podcasts and speeches but largely unverifiable—a Southern Gothic tale of a much-abused child overcoming trauma and torture to reach for the stars.
Born in Lafayette, Louisiana, in 1965, Marx says his father Karl was a drug dealer and pimp who “never claimed me.” He has spoken of being molested by a man at age 5 and left to die in a commercial cooler, and of being taken at age 7 to a house in Mendenhall, Mississippi, where his stepfather forced him to pull the trigger of a gun, killing a man. Marx states that he reported the incident to law enforcement years later; the local sheriff’s office has denied having any cold case, missing persons case, or other report that supports Marx’s story. But Marx says the horrors inflicted on him as a child had a deep impact on his psyche; in high school he was “spiraling, using drugs, fighting, and stealing,” and after graduation he joined the Marines to avoid a jail sentence for theft. He never saw combat during his three years of service, but he credits the experience with building his confidence and setting him on the path that would eventually lead to his ministry and his work as a “high-risk humanitarian.”
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Now under intense public scrutiny, Marx has dialed back some of his more grandiose claims. Denver radio personality Peter Boyles, a longtime student of karate, got Marx to admit on air that several of his alleged martial arts achievements, such as a black belt in “weapons,” reflect his father’s raging Cajun ranking system and no other. After Clark and other journalists challenged his assertion of having “rescued” 45,000 women and children, that language was removed from Marx’s campaign site; the candidate blamed a web developer for the mistake. The site now states that his teams have “served” more than 45,000 women and children, “some of whom needed to be rescued from captivity and given a second chance at life.” At least one other high-risk humanitarian has confirmed that Marx came under fire on one or two occasions while assisting aid workers in Iraq, but the type of assistance his group provides kids in battle zones typically involves less dramatic interventions: donations of food, water, and stuffed animals. Lest you get the wrong idea about his intentions, there is an evangelizing element at play: “The toys have recorded prayers that play when a paw or hoof is squeezed,” the Denver Post noted in a recent editorial denouncing Marx as a huckster.
No one has stepped forward to vouch for Marx’s claim that he called in an airstrike (as a civilian!) that killed 70 ISIS fighters. There is ample evidence, though, that Marx called 911 in 2023 after his brother-in-law shot at him from a trailer on Marx’s property in Colorado Springs; a five-hour standoff with SWAT officers ensued. Marx told his social media followers that someone had tried to kill him—but he was reluctant to disclose that the assailant was his wife’s brother. Charged with attempted murder, the brother-in-law posted bail and is suspected of murdering his girlfriend six months later. “Demons make people do crazy things,” Marx commented in a post about the homicide. (The Marx campaign did not respond to a request for comment on several issues arising from his gubernatorial run.)
In another time and place, Marx’s candidacy would have been over before it really began. But in this most peculiar election in a most peculiar year, Marx’s bid for governor instead keeps sparking new controversies. What’s perhaps most interesting about this race, though, is that the state’s Republican Party might have finally found a candidate too brash even for MAGA. Some of the fiercest pushback against Marx’s candidacy has come from conservative talk radio hosts and podcasters; even far-right conspiratorialist Candace Owens has squabbled with him over his anti-trafficking work and his ties to Charlie Kirk. The Marx critics within the state’s GOP have not only challenged the credibility of the campaign’s financial reports; they say that Marx isn’t the front-runner he claims to be.
According to its latest filings, the Marx campaign has burned through more than 90 percent of the $2.8 million it has raised to date, leaving barely $200,000 in the bank two weeks before Tuesday’s primary. A detailed analysis by party activist Darcy Schoening indicates that the campaign has spent $1.3 million trying to raise more money, a whopping $865,000 on consultants, and another $112,000 on clothes. But Schoening also found many anomalies in the reports that she believes amount to serious violations of campaign finance laws: more than 100 donations above the legal limit and thousands of what appear to be straw donors—small contributions coming from the same name and street address but listing different cities and states.
The campaign has characterized the suspicious donations as clerical errors that are easily corrected with an amended finance report. The Colorado secretary of state’s office has declined to open an investigation. Schoening, though, sees the anomalies as part of a larger pattern of deception by the campaign, one that also involves the use of bots to create phony social media accounts and make Marx’s support seem more grassroots and far-reaching than it really is.
“You can’t rely on these figures at all,” Schoening says. “I know [Republicans] don’t have a chance in Colorado, but he affects everybody downticket. I believe if Victor Marx becomes the nominee, it will be the biggest blowout we’ve ever seen.”
Political consultant Wadhams is still hopeful that Kirkmeyer will prevail as the party’s nominee, making the general election less of an embarrassment than it would be with Marx on the ticket. “There’s nothing real about this guy,” he says. “There’s always kind of a kernel of truth in what he says, but he goes way beyond it and has all these outlandish claims.”
It’s possible, he acknowledges, that Marx started his run as a way to raise the profile of his ministry. But if that were the impetus at the beginning, it’s not the case now. “I think he’s decided,” Wadhams says, “that he will be the next governor of Colorado.” While everyone who is grounded in reality seems to acknowledge how unlikely this is, we all know a former presidential candidate who followed a disturbingly similar path.
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