How an American college woman turned into a propagandist for terrorism

The Free Press has a long article on Calla Walsh, a 21 year old American woman who became radicalized at about 16 and now lives in the Middle East, making propaganda for Hezbollah and Iran.

Here’s a mugshot of Walsh from an earlier arrest in the U.S. for vandalism and trespassing on the grounds of an Israeli-owned company said to be involved with “genocide.”  She served two months in prison.

Here she is all growed up (see link below). I’ve put a recent Instagram post at the bottom.

Walsh was the definition of “privileged” when young:  the scion of two academics from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one who attended two fancy prep schools before dropping out of Canada’s McGill University after one semester.  She started off advocating against climate change and writing about the Democratic Socialists of America for Teen Vogue (thank goodness that rag went belly-up!), and campaigned for the successful re-election of Senator Ed Markey, as well as other Democrats (see an admiring profile of Calla in a 2021 Boston Magazine ). She then went on to oppose the “genocide” committed by Israel in the Gaza war, visited Cuba, and after that she went full Monty—or should I say full Mamdani? She traveled to Iran and has apparently settled in Beirut.

The Free Press details what happened to her and where she is now. Click below to read; the article cannot be archived.  If you want a shorter account, read her Wikipedia bio, which includes the following:

Walsh’s political ideology has shifted over time. In the 2010s, she was a member and activist in the Democratic Party, as well as an environmental activist. In 2021, NPR described her as a “progressive organizer and activist based in Massachusetts”. Later in 2021, she identified as a Democratic Socialist and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. In 2023, she described herself as a communist and anti-imperialist.

Following the October 7 attacks, Walsh tweeted that “defending their homeland from illegal occupation and genocide isn’t ‘ugly Palestinian retaliation'”. Later that day, Walsh posted a map of the attack sites with the message, “This is what decolonization looks like”. In April, Walsh added, “We will never forget who called Palestinian freedom fighters ‘terrorists’ after October 7 and then turned around and claimed to support Palestine”. On October 12, Walsh tweeted that those living in the US have “an obligation to take direct action against murderous companies like Elbit”.

For the 2024 presidential election in the United States, Walsh filled in the name of Yahya Sinwar as a write-in candidate. Walsh has expressed support for Tyler Robinson, Elias Rodriguez, and Mohamed Sabry Soliman.

In December 2025, Walsh was nominated by the pro-Israel group StopAntisemitism for “Antisemite of the Year”.

In February and March 2026, following the 2026 Iran conflict, Walsh wrote a series of posts on X social network calling for the use of global violence against Israeli and American officials.  Following the start of the 2026 Iran massacres, Walsh was one of several media personalities that promoted the Iranian state’s claim that the protests had been stoked by the CIA and Mossad.

She’s clearly a hater of both Jews and America, and given what she’s done, she’ll never be allowed back in the U.S., or, if she is, she’ll have to spend a long time behind bars.

A couple of long excerpts of a very long article:

In the weeks since the U.S. and Israel launched their joint assault on Iran, perhaps no American has more aggressively and publicly rallied behind the Islamic Republic than Calla Walsh. From her new base in Lebanon, the 21-year-old Cambridge-raised activist has taken to social media and left-wing podcasts to incite her fellow countrymen and women to sabotage U.S. and Israeli defense contractors wherever they can find them. On March 3, she mocked four American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike, posting: “They all died fighting for fascism, genocide, pedophilia, and cannibalism.” She attached pictures of the dead Americans. In recent days she reposted a list of missile-production sites inside the U.S.

“We have a duty to escalate,” Walsh told her host on the Psychic Militancy podcast last Saturday from Beirut, noting that “lockdowns” of weapons factories and vandalism alone are “not sufficient at this point.”

She added: “And as the genocide and these wars of aggression continue to escalate, much more is demanded of people in the West.”

Walsh looks every part the art-school hipster, with her thick-rimmed glasses and a mop of curly hair. But she’s a chameleon of terror. Five years earlier, as a 16-year-old, Walsh was fawned over by The New York Times for being a young, social media-savvy activist who was helping to shake up the Democratic Party in Massachusetts. But as a monthslong investigation by The Free Press shows, she’s thrown her allegiance squarely behind the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Axis of Resistance, which includes the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The U.S. government has placed her on a suspicious persons watch list for her expansive dealings with the governments of Cuba and Iran, U.S. officials told me, as well as a spiderweb of U.S.-designated terrorist groups.

Over the past few years, Walsh’s radicalization has played out in real time on X and Instagram. She quickly moved from political organizing for the Democrats to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to conducting guerrilla-style raids on Israeli defense companies in New England, for which she received jail time in 2024. She has regularly called for the assassinations of Israeli officials and their allies in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In October, she formally relocated to Beirut, The Free Press learned, where she has established herself as a regular contributor to Iranian state media, particularly the English-language site of Tehran’s Press TV on which Washington has imposed sanctions. She is actively engaging in propaganda and information-warfare operations on behalf of the Iranian regime and Hezbollah, which is fighting Israeli forces in south Lebanon.

She’s too far gone, I think, to ever return to the U.S., and perhaps she doesn’t want to. But those who ally themselves with American enemies in this way are rarely either allowed back to where they were born or, when do they are jailed. I suspect that Walsh will be in Lebanon for good. A bit more:

According to U.S. counterterrorism officials I spoke with, any financial or operational ties Walsh has established with blacklisted organizations—whether in Iran, Cuba, or Lebanon—means she could be indicted for providing material support to proscribed groups. Walsh’s latest trip to Tehran places her in even greater legal jeopardy if she ever returns home.

“I’ve never seen someone who’s done jail time so publicly integrate herself into terrorist infrastructure,” a senior national security official told me. “She’s totally exposed now.”

More:

. . . . Walsh’s new role as Tehran’s Gen Z propagandist has her regularly appearing on Iranian state media with other outcasts from Europe and North America. In December, Walsh was a guest on a Press TV show called Palestine Declassified, with two Britons who have been banished from UK politics and academia in recent years for antisemitism. She set up a camera from her Beirut apartment to tape the show and extol the military prowess of the late Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani, whom the U.S. assassinated in a 2020 drone strike.

And this, near the end, show how ideologically captured she is, so much so that she blames Mossad for massacring Iranian civilians:

In February, when Walsh returned to Iran, she provided an American face to spread the message that it was the CIA and the Israeli spy service, Mossad—not the Iranian government—that massacred thousands of Iranians during the prior month’s uprising. (The United Nation’s special rapporteur on Iran estimated the number could be over 20,000.) “The fact of the matter is police in Iran are defending the revolution and are defending their government from U.S. and Zionist-backed regime change,” she said on Press TV.

. . Experts in extremism tell me they’re deeply worried that the American is now too far gone. In recent weeks, she’s crisscrossed the Middle East in support of the Axis of Resistance, placing her in the range of American and Israeli bombs and fighter jets, whether in Tehran or south Lebanon.

“She’s a true believer. It’s over after that, because you’ll do anything for your cause,” said Mubin Shaikh. He was a jihadist in Pakistan and Syria before going through a deradicalization program in Canada and emerging as one of his country’s top counterterrorism experts. “Martyrdom? Don’t think that’s off the table.”

You can imagine how dicombobulated her parents are. They are quoted as saying, “We love Calla deeply and absolutely. . . . And we have serious, fundamental political disagreements with her.”

Here’s a recent Instagram post. Click screenshot to see a video interview from presstvchannel, an Iranian-controlled state media site. Note that she uses “anti-Zionist” instead of “antisemitic”.  This euphemistic ploy disgusts me.