Republican Iowa gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn accused the establishment press of helping Americans forget the past and what’s at stake in the upcoming midterms, speaking Wednesday at a Make Iowa Healthy Again rally in Clive, a Des Moines suburb in Polk County.
MAHA PAC hosted the October 28 “Get Out the Vote Rally” ahead of the November 3 midterm elections. Speakers included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Lahn, Steak ‘n Shake Chief MAHA Officer Michael Boes, and a lineup of Republican candidates, elected officials, and health, consumer, and agricultural advocates. A Breitbart News reporter at the event counted at least 500 people in the front of the room with many more in the back.
Boes, a former HHS senior adviser, told the crowd the media has never fairly covered what he witnessed inside the Trump administration.
“So when I went into the admin, I watched Secretary Kennedy fight for the health of Americans and the health of American children every single day. We are taking on the most powerful special interests that you can imagine, with our backs against the wall.”
He added that President Trump “empowered us every single day,” crediting the administration with overhauling federal dietary guidance: “We flipped the damn food pyramid. It was pretty remarkable.”
Lahn Blasts ‘Fake News’
Lahn opened his remarks by calling out “the fake news here,” though he conceded, “There’s a couple of good ones.” He drew a loud response from the crowd, who stood, cheered, and chanted his name while waving MIHA and MAHA signs, when he declared: “The fight to pull the COVID vaccine off the market is a pro-life issue.”
Lahn recounted being asked earlier that day by a reporter whether his speech would focus on culture or on health and MAHA. His answer: “You don’t get it. They’re the same thing.”
He tied clean water policy to the pro-life cause as well, arguing both protect the ability of people to “live long, healthy lives” and preserve what he called “human wisdom.” “You cannot know where you want to go if you forget where you’ve been,” he said.
Lahn rejected efforts to reduce the movement to partisan politics. “There’s no way to put this group in a box that doesn’t exist,” he said. “It’s way deeper than politics. It’s about the next generation.”
‘The Sin of Forgetting’
Lahn recalled attending a funeral where the deceased woman’s son said “one of the greatest sins is the sin of forgetting” — forgetting where you came from and the responsibilities that come with it. He applied the idea directly to the media’s coverage of current events: “I think the media likes to help us have amnesia about what’s at stake and where we’ve been.”
He also referenced his late friend Charlie Kirk, whose organization endorsed him in the primary alongside MAHA PAC. “13 months ago, my friend’s life was taken from us. It was just 13 months ago,” Lahn said.
With six days left before the election, Lahn urged attendees to push undecided voters to the polls. “We have six days to make sure the people that might be thinking, sitting out this midterm, decide to get into the race,” he said, adding that while everyone wants lower prices and an end to wars, “there’s some things that are so much deeper” — namely, a battle over cultural institutions that he said the left has waged for years while conservatives are only now recognizing it.
“I believe on November 3rd of this year, in the state of Iowa, we are going to send a message that Iowa is not for sale,” Lahn told the crowd. “That we are here for the next generation, and we are going to prioritize them over these groups that seek to exploit and extract from the state of Iowa.”
Context
Lahn’s health-and-culture framing matches remarks he made in a recent gubernatorial debate against Democratic Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand, where he warned of an “attack on many of the institutions of Western culture” and called for protecting girls’ sports, keeping age-inappropriate material about transgender topics out of elementary schools, defending unborn children, and supporting trafficking victims. Sand had opposed a February 2025 bill defining sex as “either male or female as observed or clinically verified at birth,” calling it a measure that would “legaliz[e] discrimination.”
Lahn’s remarks also followed an October 7 address by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Greece, where Rubio called on Western nations to recover “the virtues, the courage, and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time.”
