Darcy Schoening was listening to conservative talk radio while picking her kids up from school one day in early September when she first encountered the man who would preoccupy her next nine months. It was Victor Marx, an evangelical pastor who runs an unorthodox ministry not far from her home, claims to hold a world record for the speed at which he can grab and unload a gun pointed at him, and purports to have been a “spiritual mentor” to Charlie Kirk, the conservative operative who’d just been assassinated at a Utah college campus event. He was now running for governor of Colorado.
“It sounds ridiculous, but the way he talked about Charlie and the way he talked about himself in this 30-second span, it was like every bad boyfriend, every horrible guy, every abusive male that I’ve ever known just materialized in this one man’s voice and I was just, revolted,” Schoening, a former Moms for Liberty organizer who chairs the Republican Party in Monument, Colorado, told the Prospect. Purely out of a sense of morbid curiosity—“because at that point I’m thinking, this guy’s really gross, there’s no way anyone’s going to actually vote for him”—she began digging into Marx, his ministry and constellation of “high-risk humanitarian” nonprofit endeavors, and the incredible life story he has shared in books, podcasts, a self-financed movie, the Christian lecture circuit, and a robust social media presence.
She watched the 2015 PBS interview in which Marx recalled being forced as a seven-year-old child to murder a homeless man his abusive stepfather had abducted. She read the 1989 newspaper clippings on said stepfather’s trial for conspiring with his attorney brother and Marx’s older brother Michael to traffic 1,400 pounds of marijuana from Jamaica to an airstrip in Alabama. She became engrossed in TikTok videos and Reddit posts about a vitamin-based multilevel marketing scheme Marx had co-founded to funnel cash into a constellation of vigilante justice, anti–sex trafficking operations he periodically gathered together for “Skull Games” hackathons sponsored and backed by some of the intelligence community’s most secretive and invasive surveillance data brokers.
She dug up the past decade in Marx’s real estate transfers, his federal firearms dealer license, the strange patents he and his wife had filed on the stuffed animal “trauma tools” they claimed to have distributed in conflict zones, from Syria to Nigeria to an unspecified disaster zone in what looks to be Southeast Asia. She perused an 86-page federal filing that suggest he might be involved in an Israeli government project to infiltrate Western state evangelical churches. And she watched a Christian Broadcasting Network clip of Marx praying with Haiti’s most feared gang leader in a bombed-out strip of Port-au-Prince, followed by some B-roll from the same trip obtained by a Haitian X account in which Marx appeared to be negotiating with another gang leader to allow an unspecified truck to pass through the gang’s territory.
And over the days that followed Kirk’s assassination, as she chased ever-wilder rabbit holes about Marx against the backdrop of a federally imposed orgy of Charlie Kirk mega-mourning, Schoening, the rare small-government Catholic in a town known in the 1990s as the Evangelical Vatican, realized she’d been wrong. Every conservative influencer, right-adjacent podcast, grassroots organization, and dark-money funding vehicle seemed to be galvanizing around the species of conservatism Marx was selling. “Everyone is trying to do this church resurgence thing, and there’s this newcomer in the race and he’s not like any other politician, he’s so interesting, he’s done all these things,” she says. “It was like, oh God, OK, this guy could win.”
She resolved to do whatever she could to halt Marx’s rise.
THREE YEARS AND 279 NEWS CYCLES AGO this Independence Day, Sound of Freedom became the most successful Christian box office hit since The Passion of the Christ. Jim Caviezel, who had played Jesus in the Passion, inhabited the role of Tim Ballard, the former Homeland Security bureaucrat who had produced the movie to sear upon the collective Christian consciousness his brand as a heroic crusader against global sex trafficking, a scourge about which the organized right had spent the past decade or so stirring up moral panic. With financing and promotional subsidies from the secretive wealthy evangelical Ziklag Group and free publicity from the conservative podcast ecosystem, the movie ultimately grossed an astonishing quarter-billion dollars, but its goal had been at once slightly less and more ambitious: Ballard intended it as a soft launch event for his political career, with a planned October announcement that he was running for U.S. Senate.
Then in a shocking plot twist, Ballard’s most powerful promoters, from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to then-Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes to Glenn Beck, all cut ties with Ballard amid revelations from a half dozen former staffers that his anti-trafficking charity Operation Underground Railroad (OUR) had functioned in no small part as an elaborate cover for his own sex trafficking ring, which systematically lured trusting female staffers into double lives as covert agents who traveled the world “infiltrating” strip clubs and massage parlors while enduring constant sexual assault at the hands of Ballard and friends, all for the supposed purpose of carrying out dramatic undercover “raids” that at best resulted in brief stints in jail for a few pimps and lasting trauma for underaged prostitutes who almost always swiftly returned to sex work. In most cases, Ballard obtained the “intelligence” used to stage a raid from a psychic.
Virtually everything about Ballard’s anti-trafficking empire turned out to be a lie: that he had “saved” 6,000 sex trafficking victims, when no one could substantiate a single legitimate example; that traffickers could “smell” pheromones, when scientists are unsure whether humans even have them; that its founding had been inspired by a five-year-old he’d saved from a trafficker who’d abducted him from Mexico and smuggled him over the border to live in a sex slave compound he maintained in San Bernardino, when the child was an American citizen who’d been groomed and victimized by his grandma’s neighbor and Ballard’s involvement in the case had been tangential. Some of the lies served his own lust and greed, and some served that of the wealthy donors who paid tens of thousands of dollars to accompany his team of operatives on “missions” that were marketed to wealthy Mormons as “experience vacations.”
Sex trafficking hysteria galvanized Trump’s base, injecting a diabolical new twist into tired battles with old foes.
But most of them also served a multifaceted political project to restore cultural relevance to the right by channeling the moral convictions of young Christians into a crusade more emotionally satisfying than banning abortion or deregulating industry. The Trump coalition was an incongruous bunch of oligarchs, Ross Perot nostalgists, doomsday preppers, Orthodox Jews, Palantir staffers, rabid Islamophobes, anti-vax moms, college edgelords, single-issue Catholics, and paleocon pacifists. Like almost nothing else, sex trafficking hysteria galvanized Trump’s base, injecting a diabolical new twist into tired battles with old foes like ISIS and FARC rebels in Colombia—the latter being the villain of Sound of Freedom—and of course Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, the febrile sexual conspiracy theories around whom were seemingly vindicated by the mysterious prison death of international sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The issue was a special godsend for Kirk, who had informally assumed the title of Evangelical in Chief after a byzantine 2020 sex and blackmail scandal involving Jerry Falwell Jr.’s pool attendant that might have broken years earlier if not for a blue Walmart bag containing $12,000 cash offered by then-Trump fixer Michael Cohen a few weeks before Falwell endorsed Trump in early 2016. Gangly and even-keeled, Kirk himself was never a natural televangelist, and after his death it emerged that he had been in the process of converting to Catholicism. But by 2022, Turning Point USA was spending more than $13 million a year cultivating and training pastors to be warriors in what its 990 forms call a “movement to fight secular totalitarianism and eradicate wokeism from the church.” At the same time, many evangelicals needed their causes to be a little bit woke, just as most college students needed theirs to be a bit conspiratorial. Ballard’s crusade against human trafficking, which he paired with hard-line wall-building border policy, was a perfect fit for Kirk’s various audiences. Ballard guested on Kirk’s podcast, joined the TPUSA speakers bureau, and even poached Kirk’s Latina outreach coordinator Anna Paulina Luna for unspecified missions before she was elected to Congress in 2022.
By the time the accumulated sex pest complaints forced him out of OUR in 2023, Tim Ballard wannabes—and some critics—had formed a long list of copycat Christian anti-trafficking organizations. There was Covenant Rescue Group in Alabama, formed by an ex-Navy SEAL named Jared Hudson who had participated in Ballard’s raids and who often orchestrated his own in a joint venture with a Michigan sheriff named Chris Swanson; there was Mission Safe Harbor, founded by a former OUR executive and Ken Cuccinelli, the former Trump DHS official credited with authoring the homeland security portions of Project 2025; the lower-key Guardian Group of Bend, Oregon, formed by a former evangelical missionary named Jeff Keith; Saprea, founded by Utah multilevel marketing magnates Derek and Shelaine Maxfield to fight child sex abuse. By 2021, anti-trafficking was such a hot sector it called for a clearinghouse or umbrella organization of sorts.
That’s when a former Delta Force operator and Guardian Group executive named Jeff Tiegs teamed up with a character he’d met on a 2017 mission in Mosul, Iraq, to launch Skull Games, yet another nonprofit that partnered with data brokers and other cyber surveillance companies to host predator-hunting contests and conferences across the country. The Iraq mission wasn’t a sex trafficking bust, incidentally, but a wild rescue of an abandoned baby from an “ISIS lair” chronicled in a series of viral posts on the website of All Things Possible (ATP) Ministries and its “seventh degree black belt” founder, Victor Marx.
This appeared in one of those posts: “K-9. Check. Diapers. Check. Guns. Check. Body Armor. Check. Bottle of Powdered Formula. Check. Axe. Check. Soothing Stuffed Lion & the Lamb Healing Toy. Check.”
VAUGHN VICTOR KENNEDY MARX IS THE BIOLOGICAL SON of Karl William (Janssen) Marx of Welsh, Louisiana, who left his teenage wife to join the Cajun mafia and ultimately become a world-famous karate master and evangelical pastor not long after Victor was born. Victor ended up following in his father’s footsteps and ultimately joining him as an instructor in his karate studio north of Santa Barbara, California, but not before enduring three years in the Marine Corps at San Diego’s Camp Pendleton, and before that a horrific childhood full of whippings, electrocutions, and sexual abuse at the hands of his stepdad Gloyce Kennedy, a drug trafficker Marx claims had worked previously in military intelligence.
Both Karl and Victor Marx would end up using their redemption stories to sell a Karl-invented form of “Cajun Karate” they called “Keichu-Do” to kids and teens; one of Victor’s most popular forms involved grabbing a gun being pointed at him so rapidly it seemed like a magic trick. A demo of the move, which he claims holds a world record for fastest gun disarm, has 17 million views on YouTube. At some point along the way, father and son Marx also became ministers through the Calvary Chapel, an ostensibly decentralized “movement” of nondenominational churches founded in Southern California in the 1960s by a salesman’s son named Chuck Smith famous for converting hippies, predicting the world would end by 1981, and acquiring a string of AM radio stations to spread his word.
Though Smith could be dictatorial and controlling, even excommunicating his own son at one point, he also empowered individual congregations to establish their own ordination processes and criteria, turning the Calvary Chapel network into a magnet for charismatic evangelists who disdain bureaucratic oversight—and headlines for the long string of abuse, pedophilia, and financial predation scandals that particular governance model invites.
The one dogma that seems to unite all Calvary chapels was a controversial theology called the New Apostolic Reformation, which promotes integrating expensive licensed Christian pop songs into Sunday services and waging seven-front “spiritual warfare” in the service of Christian fascism, the most literal manifestation of which manifests itself as a fanatical devotion to supporting not just the state of Israel, but its most violent and expansionary goals. In the 1970s, Smith began bringing congregants to Israel to be rebaptized in the Jordan River; by the 1980s, he was one of the most prominent Christian members of the American Jewish Temple Forum (AJTF), a nonprofit devoted to replacing the Al-Aqsa Mosque with a recreation of Solomon’s Temple. Smith laughed to one reporter that a fellow AJTF member had been planning “to take sticks of dynamite and some M-1s and blow up the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosques and then just lay claim to the site,” but when questioned about whether he was bothered by the bloodbath that would inevitably ensue, he said: “Frankly? No, because it’s all part of Biblical prophecy.”
Many Calvary Chapel pastors have a schtick. Smith was the hippie converter; other congregations specialize in pop musicians or athletes. Individual congregations are given almost total discretion over the ordination process. Father and son Marx used karate chops, gun disarms, and kickboxing as their spiritual tools.
After a few years at a church in Southern California, Victor Marx married a drop-dead gorgeous aerobics instructor and took the show on the road to Honolulu, where they opened a Christian martial arts and kickboxing studio and were frequently the subject of newspaper feature stories on fitness trends. In the early Bush administration, the couple was detailed by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, where Marx claimed to have worked as an assistant, to launch a Christian self-help-themed juvenile detention center in Waco, Texas—though NIMBYs quickly forced the couple to downgrade its ambitions to something more along the lines of a summer camp.
Around 2007, ATP relocated again to southern Riverside County, California, where the ministry produced a semi-hagiographical documentary, The Victor Marx Story, in 2008; moving again to Focus on the Family’s hometown of Colorado Springs around 2015. For most of this time, his “day job” appears to have involved touring churches, prisons, and schools, with a focus on at-risk kids, as a relatively sought-after motivational speaker.
But by 2014, Marx was spending more and more time on overseas “missions.” That December, he traveled to the Burmese jungle with an armed Christian humanitarian group called Free Burma Rangers for the purpose of “training good men to do bad things to bad men.” Before long, he was joining the group in Iraq to rescue the baby boy from the “ISIS lair” and deliver his wife’s patented stuffed animals equipped with tiny speakers inside them that play “soothing music” to traumatized children. In an interview last week with the YouTube outlet of Grace and Truth Magazine, Free Burma Rangers founder Dave Eubank said that the group had originally expanded its efforts to the Middle East on Marx’s initiative and with $60,000 in funding he personally procured, adding that Marx had traveled to Iraq “many times without us,” though it’s not clear exactly why or how; those earlier trips are not chronicled on Marx’s slick YouTube channel.
ATP posted on its site about its bold rescue of a sex worker in “southeast Asia,” and another pair of posts suggesting it was doing the same in Iraqi Kurdistan. Weeks after October 7th, Victor and Eileen were in Israel distributing “trauma tools” in schools and blogging about the bravery of the Israeli people, and the following spring when TPUSA held its annual $6,300-a-head “life changing” tour of Greater Israel led by Calvary Church pastor-podcaster Rob McCoy, Marx was one of the featured guests. Marx was later referenced on a federal lobbying filing detailing a $4.1 million campaign to promote pro-Israel messaging among evangelical Christians in California, Arizona, Colorado, and other Western states. Then that summer, Marx was featured on the Christian Broadcasting Network praying with the notorious gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier in Haiti, in the service of protecting an unspecified orphanage.
At some point, ATP began making a bold claim: that Marx had “physically rescued over 45,000 women and children from sex trafficking” in war-torn nations. (Marx was not the sort of guy even his most devoted followers take literally, but that one would come back to haunt him.)
On September 10, 2025, though, Marx posted a genuine, 100 percent truthful scoop to his X account: Charlie Kirk was dead. Instagram posts soon depicted Kirk’s widow Erika sobbing into his embrace, and Marx later recalled during a tense interview with Candace Owens attempting to comfort her with the words “You’re safe, you and the kids; no one’s coming to get to you. They just wanted Charlie.” Within a day or two, his friend Pastor Jeff Schwarzentraub posted that he would be hosting a memorial service for Kirk and that mourners would need to register with their email addresses and phone numbers to attend; attendees report being immediately spammed by the Marx campaign, which would go on to raise nearly $3 million with the help of Marx’s claim to have been a “spiritual mentor” to Kirk and an out-the-gate endorsement from Lauren Boebert. (The Marx campaign has disclosed paying $98,622 to an email fundraising company called Active Engagement, which lists The Charlie Kirk Show, the Sound of Freedom Foundation, Hillsdale College, and The Daily Wire among its clients.)
THE WHOLE THING SMACKED OF BLACK-BELT GRIFT, it goes without saying. And within a matter of months, Darcy Schoening’s investigative website, given the name VictorMarx4Co.com to maximize eyeballs of those looking to learn about this candidate, had prompted just about every local media outlet to give side-eye to Marx’s eye-popping tales about his life as a grade-school murderer, industrial-scale child prostitute savior, and so-called “pastor.” Earlier this month, CBS News even covered some of the campaign’s more absurd expenditures, including nearly $120,000 on clothes; more than $100,000 on bodyguard services, namely provided by an agency founded by a Dagestani former military intelligence official; $42,400 for the consulting services of a popular Colorado Springs pastor, Trent Langhofer, and $20,000 for those of a couple who became a conservative cause célèbre serving in Benghazi; and nearly $60,000 on the services of three former intelligence and/or law enforcement officials who were also listed on a 2024 roster of the All Things Possible operations team.
Some of Marx’s contributors were even bigger head-scratchers: Schoening found one alleged $2,000 donor who died in 2022, 151 more who contributed in excess of the $1,450 statutory limit, and no obvious motivation behind a $400,000 cash injection to a Marx-aligned super PAC from a local infrastructure construction firm.
But Schoening, who has filed dozens of formal campaign finance complaints stemming from her findings, suspects Marx is more than a simple con man. A former disciple named Corby Hall, an independent gun manufacturer who invented an AR-15 rifle called the “Fold AR” that folds into a backpack, claims that Marx used faith—and specifically, an exorcism-like exercise he calls the “retooling prayer”—to insinuate his way into his life and break up his marriage in an attempt to acquire his company for pennies on the dollar, for the purpose of illicit gun-running. In a two-hour interview with Candace Owens in May, Hall said that Marx attempted to order 50 Fold ARs and also boasted that he intended to assassinate Jimmy Barbecue when he traveled next to Haiti, a plan Hall told Owens he attempted to talk him out of.
The notion sounded plausible enough to Zeke Petrie, an Ohio-based home health aide who worked for Marx as a translator on the mission, according to a phone call between Hall and Petrie recorded by Schoening with Hall’s permission. “I didn’t totally understand their objectives or their narrative,” Petrie told Hall, adding that Marx had “abandoned” him in Haiti after just two days in the country. But about a year later, when Trump’s FBI indicted Chérizier and announced a $5 million bounty for information leading to his arrest, Victor began messaging the gang leader to feel out whether he would be interested in giving himself up. “So one night Barbecue calls me at 2 in the morning, [and] went off. He says, Zeke, you think Victor fucking gives a fuck about me? He just wants the $5 million,” and, the gang leader suspected, the bounty was what Marx had been after all along. After he watched the Candace Owens episode, he told Hall, he concluded that Barbecue’s suspicions were “not so farfetched.”
But the much bigger order Marx dangled, Hall claims, came a few months after the Haiti operation, when he told him he needed 50,000 rifles for Israel. Hall, who pitches the weapon on conservative media as the best way to prevent school shootings, told Owens that he asked Marx why Israel, a country with just 3,000 schools, would need 50,000 ARs, and Marx said the army needed them for “Gaza, and Syria and Lebanon.” Hall refused to sell him the weapons, for which Petrie commended him on the call. “Victor treated me well but I have some problems with his Zionism,” he told Hall.
Petrie refused to return calls from the Prospect, but in a brief text message exchange he said Marx’s evangelical Zionism had rubbed him the wrong way in part because the richest man in Haiti, Gilbert Bigio, is an arch-Zionist who “has fucked Haiti harder than anyone.” (Marx, for his part, has repeatedly refused to answer Hall’s allegations but has accused him of attempting to assassinate him.)
Petrie and Hall are far from the only business associates who say they were burned by Victor Marx; another high-risk humanitarian entrepreneur named Bryan Stern whose Grey Bull Rescue nonprofit orchestrates donor-funded “rescues” of people in peril, from María Corina Machado to a Las Vegas couple stranded in Israel during the Twelve-Day War, told one of Schoening’s volunteer sleuths in an email that Marx owed his group “tens of thousands of dollars” for an unspecified mission; Stern did not respond to inquiries from the Prospect about the precise nature of the mission. And even Eubank of the Free Burma Rangers, a prolific booster of Marx’s for years, told Grace and Truth he had never witnessed him pull off anything he defined as a “rescue,” adding good-naturedly: “You know why journalists scare us?”
“Why is that?” replied reporter Charista Snell.
“They might find out our sins, and tell people about them, and we won’t look as good as we thought we were.”
DESPITE ALL OF THIS, VICTOR MARX MAY VERY WELL win the Republican primary today and become the party’s gubernatorial candidate for Colorado. There’s literally been only one public poll, it’s more than a month old, and in it, Marx was leading by 29 points over throwback moderate Barbara Kirkmeyer. What the last several weeks of bad press has done to Marx’s hopes is anybody’s guess.
But the volunteer crowdsourced effort to investigate his wild claims and lurid past, which has taken place almost entirely within the ecosystem of conservative podcasts and local talk radio, is a testament to a massive Trump 2.0 vibe shift in conservative circles. While Schoening does not consider herself part of the “dissident right”—she doesn’t listen to Tucker or Candace regularly, has no opinions on the Kirk assassination, and remains defensive of Trump—something about the blatant nature of Marx’s blending of Christianity and capitalism, and reading the Foreign Agents Registration Act filing detailing the Israeli government’s plan to woo worshippers in part by geofencing churches, makes her woozy. And a few Marx supporters have switched sides; one named Cori Kennedy even became one of her most dogged investigators.
The team says they have taken Hall’s allegations and rafts of other research to law enforcement authorities and that some investigators have shown interest in their evidence of ATP’s self-dealing—the ministry purchased a property owned by Marx and assessed at $557,000 for nearly $3 million in 2025—and any potential gun sales to Haiti, which has been under a blanket arms embargo since 2022. But another anti-Marx GOP operative said one law enforcement official told them there was one thing they knew federal agencies wouldn’t be scrutinizing. “Look, anything to do with Israel is off the table,” the official said.
