A young progressive activist once hailed by The Boston Globe as a bright light in the Massachusetts Democratic Party has moved on from campaigning with Sens. Ed Markey and Liz Warren. She’s found a new cause to champion.
The mullahs of Iran.
Calla Walsh is a 21-year-old from Cambridge who rose to prominence as a youth leader in Markey’s 2020 reelection campaign. She was praised in a New York Times profile as a future leader who is “ardent, organized, and (doesn’t) take orders.”
Walsh is best known in New Hampshire for leading anti-Israel protesters in an attack on the Elbit Systems facility in Merrimack just weeks after Hamas slaughtered more than 1,200 people in Israel in 2023. She pled guilty to criminal trespass and criminal mischief and was sentenced to 60 days in jail.
Her last words before sentencing, “Free Palestine.”
Now she’s making headlines by traveling to Iran to support the fundamentalist Muslim regime that governs the Islamic Republic. Walsh recently appeared on Iranian state television during the Islamic Republic’s “International Memorial for the Media Martyrs of the Struggle against the Zionist Regime.”
The event, backed by Iran’s theocratic regime, featured messages of support for armed resistance and the so-called “Axis of Resistance,” which includes Hezbollah and other anti-Israel groups.
“We all have a duty, when we go back to the countries we came from, to share the truth we saw here and to struggle against Zionism and imperialism,” Walsh said during her remarks. “Glory to all the martyrs! Glory to the Axis of Resistance! … Death to America! Death to Israel.”
Walsh’s participation in the Tehran event marks a striking turn from her previous appearances in U.S. media as a voice of progressive activism backing liberals like Warren and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. Teen Vogue published an essay by Walsh in 2021 urging her fellow Gen Zers to embrace Democratic Socialism.
“For my generation, a fascist presidential administration, pandemic, economic collapse, and a historic uprising for Black lives have shaped our worldview,” Walsh wrote at the time. “These defining events and movements have caused Gen Z to become more disillusioned with capitalism and the white-supremacist, bourgeois state than older generations.”
The Times profile also described Walsh as “representative of an influential new force in Democratic politics, activists who cut their teeth on the presidential campaigns of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.”
The profile was later shared and promoted on social media by Shady Hill School, a prestigious private school in Massachusetts that charges $52,000 per year, where Walsh attended.
“Shady Hill is proud of our alum Calla Walsh ’18, featured in a New York Times article about young activists whose media savvy and grassroots organizing have made them a force to be reckoned with,” the school stated.
Her appearance in Iran, however, has prompted backlash from critics who accuse her of promoting antisemitism and supporting repressive regimes.
“Calla Walsh isn’t just wildly anti-America; she is a raging antisemite, a Democrat activist, and a deranged climate activist,” wrote Republican strategist Steve Guest.
Walsh first gained notoriety as a teenager organizing climate rallies and working on youth voter outreach. But since her participation in the Merrimack attack, The Globe has not mentioned Walsh in its reporting. Her visit to Iran was not covered by either The Globe or The Times, despite both outlets’ earlier promotion of her political work.
Walsh, however, has not been shy about spreading the word herself. She’s remained active on social media, posting video from her Tehran trip and calling it “the greatest honor of my life.” Dressed in a hijab, she praised the Iranian regime and criticized the United States as “genocidal.”
Her appearance was part of a delegation organized by the World Service of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, a government-run media operation accused by Western critics of spreading propaganda and justifying Tehran’s controversial policies.
Nadwa Al-Dawsari, a fellow at the Middle East Institute, denounced Walsh’s trip: “Calla Walsh in Tehran chanting ‘Death to America’ while Iran and its proxies kill, displace, and brutalize millions, especially women. Nothing says ‘justice’ like cheering on a theocracy from a place of privilege.”