Victor Marx implodes

Kyle Clark gave Victor Marx an opportunity to self-destruct and Victor Marx took it

Kyle Clark will join me at 8:34 AM on Friday 5/29 on KOA radio.

I will mostly avoid asking Kyle to render characterizations of Mr Marx or judgments on the state of the GOP primary race for governor and will focus instead on what the experience was like for Kyle as an interviewer. What the “vibe” was, how he felt about doing the interview at Victor’s “compound”, how often he interviews people as evasive as Victor, were there any ground rules, etc.

Before getting to my own commentary, I’ll embed the interview here: Kyle Clark goes into the self-described “dangerous gentleman’s” den and offers an opportunity for Victor Marx to shine or to demonstrate to anyone with a vestige of an open mind that he is the grifter that so many of us believe him to be. He did the latter, bigly.

I do think this interview hurt Victor a lot, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking because even though no Republican will win the governor’s race I would much prefer a candidate at the top of the ticket who won’t be hung around the neck of every other Republican running for office. I say this as an unaffiliated voter with no particular love for the GOP but who fears and loathes today’s Democrats and sees the damage they are doing to Colorado when it comes to overregulation, over-taxation, and eroding, if not destroying, the appeal of this state for business.

On my radio show on Wednesday, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO4), who has endorsed Victor Marx for governor, said that while she thinks most candidates participate in too many debates, Victor should absolutely do “more than zero.”

Congresswoman Lauren Boebert on Trump & Massie, Victor Marx, & machine guns | KOA 850 AM & 94.1 FM | Ross Kaminsky on the News with Jeana Gondek

This has been a common refrain from, unsurprisingly, the two other Republican candidates as well as members of the media and more than a few Republican voters who would like to know more about their choices.

So far, Victor Marx has dodged every debate and these days only goes on one radio station (as far as I can tell) where a particular host seems to operate as part of Marx’s communications team (not just on the air but on social media too.) To be fair, I understand Victor’s not having interest in going on shows where hosts have publicly expressed skepticism of his truthfulness and character. I also find it interesting that at least in my building where we have multiple hosts with different opinions and who often end up supporting different candidates, the four news-talk hosts with the biggest shows (in order by time of day) — Me, Ryan Schuilling, Michael Brown, and Mandy Connell — have all reached the same conclusion about Victor Marx: we don’t trust him and strongly suspect that he’s a grifter.

Marx is currently confirmed to participate in a 9News debate on Tuesday, June 2, but I would not be surprised if he bails on that. He’s already laying the groundwork with his usual snarky comment about how the ratings for the debate will be lower if he’s not there and, given the terrible reaction to his performance talking with Kyle, he might try to use the same excuse he used to bail out on the recent Colorado Christian University debate: that one of the moderators is against him. (That would make me want to participate more if I were a candidate. It’s almost a get-out-of-jail-free card for a question you don’t like.)

Still, despite trying to “wow” Kyle with his training center and having the interview on the Marx “compound”, Kyle proceeded to unemotionally ask pointed questions and devastating follow-ups that had Marx delaying, looking anywhere but at Kyle, and eventually torpedoing his own backstory.

I won’t go through everything here; just watch the video. (Watch it at 1.25x or 1.5x and you can get through it more quickly.) But the story Marx and his supporters constantly tell — or at least strongly imply, maybe with just enough ambiguity that Marx can say ‘I never said that’ — is that Victor and his “ministry” have “rescued” lots and lots of people. His web site said 45,000 people. They took that number down and now Victor blames a third-party web designer for the error. Victor posted on social media that his group participated in the rescue of 43 children in an operation that we now know was run by the US Marshals Service in Tallahassee, FL, called Operation Northern Lights. The USMS put out a press release naming about two dozen organizations that helped/participated; no organization associated with Victor was mentioned.

So, at this point we know that he’s claimed to have rescued between 43 people and 45,000 people. I mean, the difference is really only zeroes, right? At the beginning, when Kyle asked Victor how many total people he’d rescued, Victor said that he wouldn’t put a total on it because that posed a security risk. Wait, what?!?

When Kyle pressed Victor on it, Victor had two remarkable things to say: He and his people have not participated in any “kinetic” rescues, at least not in the US, and the number of people his group has actually “rescued” is “between 1 and a bunch.” Now I’m starting to wonder if even one is accurate. Or does it depend on the definition of “rescue”? Very Clintonian word parsing going on the Marxworld.

Throughout the conversation, Marx was evasive, frequently looking up or to the side rather than at Kyle which I, perhaps because of my suspicion of Victor’s persistent mendacity, saw as a sign of Marx thinking about just how to avoid answering.

Again, I am shocked that the Marx team agreed to do an interview with Kyle. Kyle is tough, detailed, and extremely well prepared. I say this as someone who’s been on his TV show at least 3 times and who also interviews people as part of my day job. Some (many?) of my listeners think that Kyle has a liberal bias. Maybe so, but if anything it makes it even more surprising that Marx would agree to that particular journalist as the interviewer. The only thing I can think of is that the Marx team is starting to feel the pressure even from supporters that he needs to be more transparent; after all transparency is described as a major part of the Marx promise in ads promoting his candidacy.

Although I did not see it myself and can’t find it now, I’m told that the first social media post from the Marx team about the interview was that it was tough but fair. It seems that the negative reaction to Marx (in the comments to the post) was more than they could handle, though, and the post was deleted and replaced with one that claimed “selective editing.” It is true that the full 29-minute interview was edited down to something like 7 or 8 minutes for the air but I think if you watch the entire thing (at the top of this note), you won’t find any part of it in which Marx comes across as being truthful. Seriously, none of it. A body language expert would have a field day.

Separately, the great Peter Boyles recently interviewed Denver newspaper legend Dean Singleton about Marx’s implied claim that Singleton endorsed him, including a story about told by Marx about a conversation between the two men. Singleton said that he and Marx did talk but that Marx is mischaracterizing the conversation, that Singleton never did and never would endorse Marx, and, more, that he (Singleton) is endorsing Phil Weiser (even though Michael Bennet is also a friend of his.)

See this is the thing with Marx: most often he doesn’t quite tell the full lie. He tells the first 90%, lets you infer the rest, and then says, “I never said that.”

Some folks, including maybe Mr Marx himself, believe that he has “crossover” appeal, meaning that he’ll attract a lot of unaffiliated, and maybe even a few Democratic, voters. I would expect the opposite. I suspect that if Victor Marx is the nominee, he may lose by the widest margin in the history that I can find of Colorado governor’s races. (The current record is Bill Owens beating Rollie Heath by 29 points.) That means that in other races around the state, whether for the state legislature or for various municipal or county or other races, if there’s a race that, all else being equal, a Republican might have won narrowly, that Republican will likely lose.

My son’s middle name is “Rand”. One short interpretation of that, for folks who don’t know about “Atlas Shrugged”, is that things won’t get better until they get much worse. For the Colorado GOP you might have thought that they couldn’t get any worse than the past few months. But with the arrogant and reprehensible Joe Oltmann running for state party chair and the holier-than-though grifter Victor Marx and holier-than-Marx conspiracy-theorist lunatic Scott Bottoms running for governor, I promise things can indeed get worse. And maybe that’s OK…maybe the GOP has to hit a rock-bottom so far below what anybody thought the bottom was before they can begin the inevitable long and painful, and not necessarily destined to be successful, process of rebuilding. Some folks are in this “just burn it all down and start over camp.” These three guys are the entire Molotov cocktail.

One more way to put it, it’s hard to imagine anything Democrats could have wished for more than to have these three guys dominating Republican politics right now. They can’t believe their good luck.

I encourage those who are supporting Victor Marx to watch the interview with an open mind. Pretend you’re on a jury and Kyle is a prosecutor questioning a defendant on trial for fraud. And ask yourself: if I were on the jury, would I find that defendant credible?

Finally, if you participate in the GOP primary, I encourage you to vote for Barb Kirkmeyer. We don’t agree on everything. And, frankly, she’s not particularly inspiring. She doesn’t make you want rush out to go to a rally. But she’s smart, experienced, and, most importantly for today, sane. Indeed, she’d probably be the best governor of any of the candidates, not just of the Republican candidates. None of the Republicans will be governor, but at least let’s not have a guy whose grift is finally collapsing actually represent the GOP in the race for governor.