As Republican Zach Lahn launched his campaign for Iowa governor, the private school he founded in Kansas quietly scrubbed the names of controversial right-wing figures from its website.
The effort to paint over the influence of Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, two men widely credited with mainstreaming white supremacist and anti-feminist ideas, took place as Lahn launched a campaign that has centered repeated attacks on what he calls a “sinister” agenda by the left to shape public education, while he vows to revoke the licenses of teachers seen as indoctrinating students.
“And education is one that they have targeted so deeply because they know that if they can get their hands on your children — on our children — that they can work to change their beliefs to alter society in the future,” Lahn said during a candidate forum hosted by the conservative group Moms for Liberty in January.
“It is one of the most sinister things you could imagine doing, because you’re taking an innocent, vulnerable child that’s there for curiosity, that’s there to learn new things and make friends, and you’re molding them for a specific purpose — an evil purpose, I’ll say.”
During the same forum, Lahn said he wants to “wipe out” the Iowa Board of Education Examiners “and put in place people who will hold teachers accountable for when they indoctrinate our kids, suspend their licenses, or permanently take their licenses, if we have to.”
Lahn often talks about his experience, over the span of a decade, starting schools, including one in Wichita, Kansas, that’s called Wonder. Archived versions of Wonder’s “Who we are” section from September 2021 through March 2025 described the school “team” as including “fans of Elon Musk,” the world’s richest person, along with “a couple [of fans] of Jordan Peterson,” a Canadian psychologist with millions of YouTube subscribers and a large following among the so-called manosphere.
As of at least two weeks ago, the sentence mentioning Musk and Peterson had been removed from the school’s website, replaced by a note that Lahn and his wife serve on the school’s board of directors. That means the names came down sometime within an 18-month span, which covered the period when Lahn announced his campaign in November 2025.
Lahn did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Musk has long attracted admiration as an entrepreneur responsible for developing innovative companies such as Tesla and SpaceX. When he acquired the social media platform Twitter (since renamed X) in 2022, he reinstated previously banned extremists such as white nationalist Nick Fuentes, while scrapping misinformation safeguards. Musk’s takeover of X coincided with his own increasingly outspoken posts on the platform, which alienated some political centrists while thrilling conservative and far-right fans.
In 2024, Musk wholeheartedly threw himself into politics by endorsing Donald Trump and spending more than $290 million to support his campaign. By the time Musk joined the second Trump administration in January 2025 as leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, where he slashed federal government jobs and gave a fascist-style salute, he had become a deeply polarizing figure.
Meanwhile, Peterson emerged as a popular and notorious figure near the end of the last decade as he promoted a message of male grievance that dovetailed with Trump’s crude misogyny and the male chauvinism of far-right extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and what was then called the “alt-right.”
Peterson appeared to defend Alek Minassian, an “incel” attacker who carried out a vehicle attack in Toronto in 2018, by telling a writer for a New York Times profile that Minassian “was angry at God because women were rejecting him.” Peterson added: “The cure for that is to enforce monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”
Peterson, who denies being a misogynist, has expressed some “sympathy” for those who admire Andrew Tate, the popular internet influencer who now faces sex trafficking and rape charges in the UK. Peterson said Tate represented “forthright aggression” as “a preferable alternative to a cringing defeat.” Peterson’s popularity was linked in one British study to a rising belief among Gen Z boys and men that feminism has done more harm than good.
Lahn’s silence on the school website revision leaves it unclear whether he was a “team” member who was a fan of Musk, Peterson, or both, or what he thinks about the two men. But Lahn has framed public education as a cultural battleground, while accusing the left of introducing “Marxism” into the curriculum. He complains that the left emphasizes the negative aspects of Iowa and American history.
“Look, when we were starting schools, one of my foundational principles that I said is, ‘We are going to strengthen the parent-and-child bond — not get in between it,’” Lahn said during the Moms for Liberty candidate forum. “Public school is to promote civic virtue — to understand the principles of faith and our country and our culture. And that’s what it will be when I am governor.”
Musk has entered the public debate over cultural identity, not just in the United States, but abroad. And there is little subtlety in his positions — often expressed by agreeing with other users on X — that white people are threatened by Muslims, non-white people and other perceived outsiders.
Following his apparent fascist salute at the time of Trump’s 2025 inauguration, Musk addressed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany, appearing to dismiss the country’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust by saying there was “too much focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.”
At that time, the reference to Musk was still on Wonder’s website.
But Musk’s history of sympathy for far-right views predates his speech to Alternative für Deutschland, and one extremism analyst has said his statements are indistinguishable from those of any white supremacist.
Most notably, Musk endorsed a post on X in November 2023 that promoted the white supremacist great replacement theory.
“I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest s— now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much,” reads the post by a little-known X user that garnered Musk’s approval. “You want the truth said to your face, there it is.”
“You have said the actual truth,” Musk replied.
William Braniff, a former U.S. Department of Homeland Security official who now leads the Polarization and Extremism Research Lab at American University, told the Guardian earlier this year that “the great replacement has been an especially important mobilizing narrative for highly lethal white supremacist attacks in the United States and elsewhere.”
“Great replacement” was cited by the perpetrators of numerous mass murders, including the Tree of Life synagogue attack in Pittsburgh in 2018, the Walmart mass shooting targeting Latinos in El Paso, Texas in 2019; the 2022 mass shooting targeting Black people at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., and the 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Some of Lahn’s campaign rhetoric has raised anxiety about cultural identity, albeit without blaming Jews or using language that specifically mentions race or immigration.
“We’ve watched — the same 20 years and more as a lot of the state that we grew up in has changed; some of it is unrecognizable,” Lahn said during a campaign speech in Ankeny, Iowa, in May. “But let me tell you this: When we started this, it was all about ideas…. It was all about what we could do to make the state of Iowa become — how we could bring back our culture and our heritage.”
Lahn did not respond to a question from Raw Story about whether voters should interpret his comments about “culture” and “heritage” as references to race or immigration status, or to an invitation to explain what “culture” and “heritage” he seeks to restore.
Other Republican candidates across the country have left little doubt about how they define those they see as threatening a vaguely defined culture defined by states or the country as a whole, including a former U.S. Senate candidate in South Carolina who endorsed a view that a Dallas suburb is replacing “white people” with Muslims and Hindus.
In Texas earlier this week, Bo French, the Republican nominee for state railroad commissioner, incurred outrage when he posted a photo of South Asian fans cheering the University of Texas football team on X, while writing that “Americans have been displaced by foreigners.” He added, “It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.”
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