Supervillain Richard Marx breaks into The Late Show feed to mock Rand Paul's Twitter accusations
Recently, senator and legacy hire Rand Paul (R-KY) came out strong against one of the most pernicious and powerful forces plaguing this nation (and Paul’s Twitter feed), taking to the airwaves to denounce one Richard Marx. For those not known to hum along to power ballad karaoke standards in decades past, the “Now & Forever” singer is currently making waves as Paul’s unlikely boogeyman. You see, Marx’s tweet noting that he’d like to give a hug and some free drinks to the neighbor that notably beat up the conservative lawmaker in 2017 has been laser-targeted by Paul as the reason some unhinged jerk sent him a threatening letter recently.
The letter, containing one of those alarming unidentified white powders favored by cowardly postal harassers since 2001, was undoubtedly an illegal, threatening act by someone not named Richard Marx. (The powder turned out to be harmless, thankfully.) But for the perpetually butthurt Paul, the blame for this undeniable dick move rests squarely on the 57-year-old singer-songwriter, whose side-project is sending snarky tweets to his 300,000 or so followers about people like Paul who, just to pick one example, vote against the Violence Against Women Act. It’s an interpretation of farfetched circumstantial evidence and cause-and-effect as shaky as contrarian Paul’s noted lack-of-logic concerning everything from vaccines, to whether or not 9/11 first responders should receive funding, or whether there should be a federal hate crime law against lynching. That’s the farcical mess that Stephen Colbert was preparing to wade into on Tuesday’s Late Show when his remote feed went to static, only to be replaced with the stern and decidedly supervillainous visage of none other than Marx himself. (See 7:35 in Colbert’s monologue for the signal interruption.)
“All I want is world domination,” Marx complained concerning a sitting U.S. senator’s scapegoating of a not-at-all original twitter joke about nobody in the world liking Rand Paul. With Colbert helpfully exclaiming, “Grammy-winning artist who’s topped the charts in four different decades, Chicago’s own Richard Marx!,” Marx himself defiantly blasted Paul’s laughingstock of an accusation, but did make a pretty convincing case that someone should be keeping a close eye on the singer’s self-professed plans for global conquest. Correcting Colbert’s assertion that his Twitter army are called “Marxists” (they’re “The Richards,” thank you very much), Marx went on to detail his nefarious plot—which mostly entailed steering viewers to his website for merch, tickets, and his upcoming memoir.
But that’s not all the latest staple of Fox News conservative victimhood fantasies had up his sleeve, as The Late Show opened with a repurposed, anti-Paul anthem, sung by Marx himself and set to the tune of former number one hit “Right Here Waiting.” Calling out Paul’s perpetual wrongness, his dangerous anti-vax nonsense, his habit of getting publicly owned by actual infectious disease expert (and not sketchily self-certified ophthalmologist), Dr. Anthony Fauci, and his “pubic head-hair,” just for good measure, Marx happily covered his own song into a repurposed, Colbert-promoted musical slam. (Marx even compared Rand Paul unfavorably to Paul Blart, which has to sting.)