THERE'S NO DEMOCRATIC EQUIVALENT OF VICTOR MARX AND THERE PROBABLY NEVER WILL BE ONE

I'm pleased to see Michelle Goldberg writing in The New York Times about Victor Marx, the wackaloon who just won Colorado's Republican gubernatorial primary. You know, this guy:

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 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.

Wonkette's Robyn Pennacchia also notes Marx's claim "that, when he was three, that same stepfather forced him to behead a cat and then wear the dead cat on his head in some capacity."

I believe that more attention should be drawn to crazy and extremist Republicans who aren't named Trump, so I'm pleased to see this coverage of Marx. (There's also a despairing op-ed in The Washington Post from Republican columnist Jim Geraghty.) But Goldberg, who's usually more astute, looks at the rise of Marx and, for some reason, feels compelled to bothsides it:

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. ...

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.

Some of Avila Chevalier's policy positions are fairly extreme, and Galindo, whom I wrote about in May, did call for the castration of pedophiles, "which will probably be most of the Zionists" -- but they aren't self-promoters pretending to be real-life superheroes, with obviously fake biographies.

Goldberg adds:

... 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.

But voting for an iconoclastic outsider is one thing. Voting for an iconoclastic outsider whose life story is obviously complete bullshit is another. (And no, the fact that Platner wasn't genuinely working-class is not comparable, because he didn't try to conceal the facts about his background.)

Republican voters want to believe in phony narratives like Victor Marx's life story for the same reason they want to believe the right-wing social media portrayal of Donald Trump as a lean, youthful, muscular superhero who selflessly fights for goodness and truth while Jesus looks on over his shoulder.

The right-wing press reduces every story to a battle of good (right-wingers) vs. evil (everyone else); coexistence among people of differing views is impossible because Republicans believe their opponents want to kill the good people (themselves), destroy America, and ban their Christian churches. And since right-wingers regard collective action as suspect, the job of fighting all this evil has to fall to lone-wolf men with powers greater than those of mere mortals. AI-slop Trump is one of those lone-wolf (or "sigma male") heroes, and so is Victor Marx as portrayed by Victor Marx.

Democrats might make heroes of politicians -- Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, even Platner -- but they don't see them as cartoon superheroes. Whereas Republicans ... well, check out the opening scene of a documentary film Marx made about himself:



We're told that the film includes "reenactments." That's a polite word for this. As the kids say, of all the things that never happened, this never happened the most.

Maybe Democrats will be as gullible and credulous as Republicans someday. But for now, they're nowhere close.