There are moments in American politics when the machine coughs up something so absurd your first instinct is to laugh, because laughter is the last civilized sound the nervous system makes before it starts throwing furniture.
Victor Marx winning the Republican nomination for governor of Colorado is one of those moments.
Not because Colorado suddenly became strange. Colorado has always had its weirdos. That is part of the charm. Mountains attract mystics, libertarians, endurance athletes, gun people, weed philosophers, Jesus people, van lifers, and at least fourteen men in every county who believe they could survive indefinitely with only jerky, ammunition, and a suspiciously detailed theory about water rights.
No, the strangeness here is not that a strange man ran. The strangeness is that enough people looked at the strange man and said, “Yes. That one. Give him executive power.”
Marx has presented himself as a kind of missionary-warrior-action-figure: high-risk humanitarian, Marine veteran, savior of the endangered, man of danger, man of faith, man with the sort of résumé that feels less like public service and more like a movie trailer narrated by a divorced eagle.
And apparently, this worked. That is the part that makes my teeth itch. We are no longer simply dealing with voters being fooled by polished liars in expensive suits. That would be almost quaint. That would be old-school American corruption, the respectable kind, with donors and flags and a beige consultant named Brad.
This is different.
This is the age of the obvious myth. The con is no longer hidden behind the curtain. The curtain is on fire. The candidate is standing in front of it wearing mirrored sunglasses, holding a Bible in one hand and a fog machine in the other, and the crowd is cheering because the smoke feels like proof. The lie does not need to be believable anymore. It only needs to be useful.
That may be the real shift. The old politician lied and hoped you would not notice. The new politician lies and dares you to care. The old con man wanted your trust. The new one wants your participation. He wants you inside the unreality with him, clapping along while the walls bend, proving your loyalty not by believing something plausible, but by defending something absurd.
This is where the alarm bells go off for me. Because once a political movement learns that absurdity is not a liability, it starts shopping for bigger absurdities.
Today it is the missionary-warrior with a foggy mythology. Tomorrow it is the county sheriff who says vaccines are a spell. Then the pastor who wants to replace biology with Revelation. Then the podcast goblin who believes public schools are portals for demons. Then the man who looks directly into a camera and says, “I alone can protect your children from the secret weather machine,” and a terrifying number of people say, “Finally, someone brave enough to tell the truth.” And yes, I am being dramatic.
But am I?
The last decade has taught us that the ridiculous is not a stage before collapse. The ridiculous is often the vehicle collapse arrives in. It wears a flag cape. It sells merch. It speaks in grievance tongues. It laughs at fact-checkers because fact-checking belongs to a reality it has already abandoned.
The candidate becomes a permission structure. Permission to distrust. Permission to sneer. Permission to stop feeling embarrassed by cruelty, gullibility, rage, or the nagging suspicion that none of this makes sense. Permission to trade complexity for a strongman bedtime story.
And once that permission structure works, factual details barely matter. The more outrageous the story, the more sacred the bond. “They hate him because he tells the truth,” the crowd says, even when what he tells is not truth but atmosphere.
This is why defunding education starts to look less like an economic policy and more like habitat construction. You do not get voters to believe anything by accident. You cultivate the conditions: weaken civic literacy, attack expertise, flood the zone with spectacle, turn every institution into an enemy, and then send in the myth salesmen.
By the time the candidate arrives, the ground has already been prepared.
And so here we are, watching a primary electorate choose the action-missionary fever dream over the more traditional Republican, and I am left with the uneasy feeling that this is not the weirdest thing we will see.
It may not even be close.
The future is not going to be normal politics versus crazy politics. That line has already been crossed, paved, franchised, and turned into a campaign store.
The future may be crazy politics versus even crazier politics, each candidate forced to become more mythic, more aggrieved, more untethered, more willing to stare into the camera and say the thing no functioning adult should say. The obvious myth is no longer hiding. It is running for office. And winning.