On October 26, just eight days before the midterm elections, Sen. Rand Paul will travel to Iowa to headline a rally for Zach Lahn, the MAHA PAC-endorsed candidate for governor of the state, who has been campaigning on food freedom, saving family farms, investigating the state’s cancer epidemic, and taxing “the heck out of” hedge funds buying up farmland in his state.
The event begins at 6 p.m. at Torrent Brewing Company in Ames, Iowa, near the campus of Iowa State University. It’s open to the public and MAHA PAC supporters are encouraged to attend and spread the word.
A second rally for Lahn will take place two days later on Oct. 28 in Des Moines, organized by the MAHA PAC, featuring Zach Lahn, Joe Mitchell, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Joel Salatin and other special guests. All Make Iowa Healthy Again supporters can register to attend, here – or watch the event live-streamed, here.
“Iowa is a pivotal MAHA state and Zach Lahn is a fearless campaigner for MAHA PAC values,” said MAHA PAC co-president, Tony Lyons. “I’m confident Zach will win and that his victory will resonate across the country, for farmers and all Americans, regardless of party affiliation, who want to live healthier lives.”
Lahn made national headlines on June 2 when as a first-time candidate he defeated sitting congressman Randy Feenstra in the Republican primary to become his party’s nominee to replace the longtime governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds.
Few people thought Lahn could win. Not in Iowa, where Big Agriculture rules.
Lahn had been calling out Big Ag and talking up organic farming. He’d referred to the big agribusiness companies as “cartels,” saying they needed to be broken up by legislation, just like Teddy Roosevelt did with monopolies in the early 1900s using the Sherman Antitrust Act.
He also decried Big Agriculture’s use of glyphosate and other chemicals that Lahn says are poisoning the groundwater and making Iowans sick.But across state, these are exactly the issues people want to hear about.
When Lahn talked about Iowa’s cancer epidemic at a recent event, heads in the room all began to nod.
“They all know what’s going on,” Lahn said later. “It’s being talked about at the grassroots level more than I think anybody understands.”
Iowa has one of the highest cancer rates in the country, and the second highest rate of new cancers.
“High nitrate load in water is one of the top causes of colon cancer, bladder cancer, ovarian cancer, and we’ve got some of the highest levels in the country, if not the highest levels,” Lahn said earlier this month on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”
“So we are focused on providing incentives to farmers – real incentives – to adopt different types of practices to allow them the ability to really change what they’re doing to stop these products from getting into the streams in the first place,” he said.
He talks regularly about expanding food freedom so farmers can sell their meat and produce directly to consumers, and also presses for better water quality and more rigorous testing of the state’s drinking water.
And like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he talks about food as medicine.
“My moonshot for the state of Iowa is to see a day in which 80 percent of the food served in our public schools is grown in the state of Iowa,” he said in the “Face the Nation” interview. “And we can do that. It will take time. But this might be the only nutritious meal a kid has all day. And Iowa has the best farmland in the world, the farmers in the world. We can do this and lead the country on it.”
It could also change Republican politics in the Midwest forever, proving that candidates do not have to be allied with and beholden to the big agribusiness companies to win statewide elections.
