Advocate and Activist Zach Wahls Announces Bid for Iowa State Senate
“Ask not what your country can do for you; but rather, ask what you can do for your country!” -John F. Kennedy
After a glowing introduction, the very tall young man steps forward to the podium and announces his candidacy to replace a retiring State Senator in a style and physical appearance reminiscent of the sixteenth President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Yet this 26 year old more accurately embodies President Kennedy’s request of Americans from nearly 58 years ago.
In his announcement earlier in the day on his Facebook page, Zach Wahls noted:
“This afternoon, I will launch a campaign for Iowa state Senate District 37, which is where I grew up and the place I call home. The incumbent, Democrat Senator and leader Bob Dvorsky, announced in August he would not be running for re-election. This is an all hands on deck moment for our state, and I am stepping up to do what I believe is the most good I can do. I am running to protect Senator Dvorsky’s legacy and to fight for every single Iowan who feels left behind or left out.â€
For those who know Wahls or have followed his advocacy and activism since his bursting onto the Iowa political scene as a 19-year-old University of Iowa engineering student, this is a logical next step in his political journey which launched with a speech he gave on February 1st, 2011.
Wahls stood before Iowa legislators that day, urging them not to pass a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage and civil unions. His reasons were deeply personal, as the final decision by the lawmakers would impact his his two mothers, Dr. Terry Wahls and her wife Jacqueline Reger. His moms were married after the Iowa Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2009.
Introducing himself as a “sixth-generation Iowan,” Wahls said he had achieved the Boy Scouts’ highest rank of Eagle Scout and attained a 99th percentile on his college aptitude test.
“If I was your son, Mr. Chairman, I believe I would make you very proud,” he testified.
Then he addressed the core issue. “In my 19 years, not once have I ever been confronted by an individual who realized independently that I was raised by a gay couple,” said Wahls. “And you know why? Because the sexual orientation of my parents has had zero affect on the content of my character.”
“I’m not really so different from any of your children,†said Wahls. “My family really isn’t so different from yours. After all, your family doesn’t derive its sense of worth from being told by the state, ‘you’re married, congratulations!'”
The video of that speech on YouTube and Facebook went immediately viral propelling the young university student into national prominence that included an appearance later that month on television chat show host Ellen DeGeneres’ widely popular program and then followed with a nationally-televised speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2012, which saw Barack Obama re-nominated for a second term as President of the United States. Wahls thanked Obama for his support of marriage equality.
Wahls also became a moving force in advocacy and activism for the LGBTQI community. In particular, he—along with Jonathan Hillis and Justin Wilson—founded Scouts for Equality in June of 2012 to actively overturn the ban on gay scouts and leaders by the Boy Scouts of America.
Then, on July 27, 2015, nearly three years after reaffirming its ban on gay members, the Boy Scouts of America’s National Executive Board voted to end the organization’s decades-old national ban on gay adults, while affirming individual units’ ability to select leaders in line with its religious principles. For Wahls, Hillis, and Wilson, it was no small victory.
Wahls and Scouts for Equality went on to launch a vigorous advocacy on behalf of 8-year-old Joe Maldonado, who the Boy Scouts of America expelled from the Cub Scouts because he is transgender, on December 30, 2016. Although the Boy Scouts had never had a policy on transgender boys, after kicking out Maldonado, officials announced that they were relying on birth certificates to determine eligibility.
Nearly a month later, Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh announced that the organization would allow transgender boys into the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. Surbaugh said “that moving forward, the BSA would accept the gender listed by parents/guardians on the youth’s application.â€
After graduating from the University of Iowa, Wahls enrolled in a post graduate program in public policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.Â
In addition to his advocacy work along with his younger sister, Zebby, he launched a KickStarter crowd-fundraising effort in 2016 to promote and sell playing cards that featured influential women such as Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Beyoncé, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman and others. Two bonus cards were added in the initial run which featured Ellen DeGeneres and Betty White as jokers. The cards were wildly successful and sold out in their first run.
If his journey thus far is any indication, then there’s a very high probability that voters in his home district will send him to Des Moines to represent them in November of 2018.
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Image courtesy Scouts for Equality, used with permission.Â
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President Donald Trump is reportedly suing Rupert Murdoch and Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, over the publication of a story alleging he sent a “bawdy” birthday letter in 2003 to Jeffrey Epstein, the now-notorious convicted sex offender who died in 2019.
“Court records show that Trump filed a lawsuit alleging libel against Murdoch, the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones, and the reporters who wrote the article in federal court for the Southern District of Florida,” CNBC reported late Friday afternoon.
Trump vehemently denied the Journal’s report and publicly threatened to sue after it was published. The Journal had reported in its story that Trump had warned he would take legal action if the story ran.
“The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Thursday night. “These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his a– off, and that of his third rate newspaper. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DJT”
READ MORE: FBI Told to Flag Mentions of Trump in Epstein Files, Dem Says in Scathing Letter to Bondi
Image via Reuters
One thousand employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation sifting through thousands of pages of the Epstein files were instructed to flag any mentions of President Donald Trump, according to Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, the Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee.
“According to information my office received,” Senator Durbin wrote in a letter (below) to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday, “you…pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel…on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline.”
“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned,” Durbin charged.
The files are from the criminal investigation into the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of child sex offenses.
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In his letter, Senator Durbin also posed a series of more than a dozen questions to Bondi. Among them:
“Have you personally reviewed all files in DOJ’s possession related to Jeffrey Epstein?”
“The records DOJ released on February 27 did not include a client list. Why did you
publicly claim on February 21 that the client list was ‘sitting on my desk right now to review’?”
“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?”
“Please list all political appointees and senior DOJ officials involved in the decision to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned.”
“What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?”
CNBC reported that “Durbin asked the Justice Department and FBI to explain what his office called ‘apparent discrepancies’ regarding handling of the Epstein files and findings from a Justice Department memo.”
In his four-page letter, Durbin also wrote, “in 2002, Mr. Trump said of Mr. Epstein, ‘I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy, He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.’ Just yesterday, it was reported that the Department previously reviewed a ‘leather-bound album’ comprised of dozens of letters from Mr. Epstein’s friends in celebration of his 50th birthday in 2003.”
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“The letters were collected by Mr. Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell and included one from President Trump that allegedly ‘contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker … and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist.'”
“Despite tens of thousands of personnel hours reviewing and re-reviewing these Epstein- related records over the course of two weeks in March, it took DOJ more than three additional months to officially find there is ‘no incriminating ‘client list,’ and the memorandum with this finding includes no mention of the whistleblower or additional documents, the existence of which you publicly claimed on February 27.”
Read a copy of Senator Durbin’s letter below or at this link.
Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino have made a mess of the Epstein files.
It’s time to clear it up once and for all for the American people. pic.twitter.com/WQw13gmf1F
— Senate Judiciary Democrats 🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryDems) July 18, 2025
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Image via Reuters
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, after cutting 1,300 employees last week, is now ordering diplomats to not comment on foreign elections and internal affairs—limiting official communications to congratulating the declared winner.
“Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats not to comment on the legitimacy or fairness of foreign elections, breaking with decades of American diplomatic practice,” The Daily Beast reports. In a memo, the Secretary stated that U.S. missions will no longer issue election-related statements unless there is a “clear and compelling” foreign policy reason for doing so.
“Diplomatic personnel writing official messages are instead instructed to ask themselves: ‘Would the President say this?'”
The memo, seen by Reuters, says the messages “should be brief, focused on congratulating the winning candidate and, when appropriate, noting shared foreign policy interests.”
READ MORE: ‘He’s So Frustrated’: Johnson Defends Trump Over Explosive Epstein Birthday Letter
The memo makes clear, based on President Trump’s remarks, that the U.S. will “pursue partnerships with countries wherever our strategic interests align,” regardless of democratic values.
U.S. promotion of human rights, democracy, and press freedoms has traditionally been a “core foreign policy objective,” Reuters reported.
“Under Trump, the administration has increasingly moved away from the promotion of democracy and human rights, largely seeing it as interference in another country’s affairs.”
The Washington Post adds that for “decades, the United States has offered judgments on whether elections were conducted in a free or fair matter [sic], a judgment that can have significant impact in countries.”
“Scholars have accused the United States of democratic backsliding since Trump, who refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, returned to office this year.
President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have defended right-wing and far-right political groups, including Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which reportedly has ties to right-wing extremists.
Secretary Rubio in May ignited a “spat” with Germany’s foreign ministry when it “hit back…after he criticized the decision to classify the Alternative for Germany party as a ‘right-wing extremist’ organization,” the Associated Press reported at the time.
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Image via Reuters
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