And Now Rand Paul and Richard Marx Are Fighting

All of us at Jezebel love a good low-stakes, high-drama Twitter dude fight—especially when one of the combatants is Senator Rand Paul and the other is Grammy Award-winning recording artist and soft rock star Richard Marx.

Their online spat comes after Paul received what Politico described as a “suspicious package containing white powder” in the mail on Monday, a day after Marx wrote in a tweet, “I’ll say it again: If I ever meet Rand Paul’s neighbor I’m going to hug him and buy him as many drinks as he can consume.” This was, as the word “again” makes obvious, not the first time that Marx, a committed member of the Resistance and noted shitposter, has showered warm wishes and the promise of a fun time onto Paul’s neighbor, who as you may recall, beat the shit out of him in 2017.

The package, according to other reporting, also came with a death threat, featuring a photo of an injured Paul along with the message, “I’ll finish what your neighbor started you motherfucker.” Paul is right to be concerned about threats made against his life, and the FBI is investigating who sent the package.

This could have just ended there—a senator receives a troubling threat, which is then investigated—but Paul decided to link that fairly innocuous if eye-roll-inducing joke tweet by a beloved hitmaker to the package that was delivered to him. “I take these threats immensely seriously. As a repeated target of violence, it is reprehensible that Twitter allows C-list celebrities to encourage violence against me and my family,” Paul wrote in a statement to Politico, adding, “Just this weekend Richard Marx called for violence against me and now we receive this powder filled letter.”

Interestingly, Paul refuses to acknowledge that Donald Trump incited people to violently storm the U.S. Capitol, yet here he is claiming that someone else’s words did exactly that. Huh. It’s a headscratcher.

Marx, for his part, seems to be unfortunately loving the attention he’s now getting from the rightwing trolls that Paul has directed his way, and is happily tweeting through it.