Peter And Connie Wagner’s Filthy Managing Editor. How Did We Get Here?
For many years the N’West Iowa Review (Review) of Sheldon, IA was seen as a newspaper with balance. This balance was a carefully crafted image by founders and long-time publishers, Peter and Connie Wagner, which seemed to serve them and the region fairly well. But the last few years these images are waning, rapidly.
You may have noticed their recent front-page articles two weeks in a row, written by Managing Editor Ty Rushing on OC Pride’s LGBT (homosexual) event held in Orange City. The first article was positively promoting it here The second front-page story gave it a positive review after the fact here. The Review also ran a promotional video on their You Tube site here where the queer event was heavily promoted. (Rushing’s aggressive promotion of this captured Rescue the Perishing’s attention. Not just RTP’s attention but another man in our early-morning Ocheyedan men’s Bible study was also shocked to see it on the front page of the Review.)
This OC Pride event included kids watching drag queens dancing. And an eye witness told us she saw one of these men carry an infant around in his arms, doting over the child which had been lifted out of a mother’s stroller. The first article and You Tube video featured OC Pride’s event organizer, Mike Goll. (Remember that name.) A drag queen is usually a ‘transgender male’ claiming he’s a female and dressing accordingly, in violation of Deut. 22:5. Here’s a picture of one of the transgender men dressed as a woman who paraded in front of children during the Oct. 19-21 event at the Prairie Winds Event Center, Orange City, IA. It was taken from a participant’s FB page where he publicly posted it. We have many more, equally offensive.
Has promotion of such unBiblical wickedness come upon the Wagner’s suddenly or have they been open to it in the past?
Peter and Connie Wagner’s Transgender Promoting Granddaughter
Consider Peter and Connie Wagner’s central Iowa granddaughter Zoey Wagner. Zoey, daughter of the late Jay Wagner, is credited here for leading the effort to bring the first all-gender bathroom to Roosevelt High School in Des Moines. As the Des Moines Register reported, “Zoey Wagner was using the women’s bathroom at Roosevelt High School when she noticed a peer who identifies as a transgender man — he uses a male name and wears what would largely be considered male clothes — also using the women’s restroom. He moved quickly and seemed so uncomfortable that Wagner remembered thinking to herself: I wonder why there isn’t a facility at this school for our transgender population?”
On March 7, 2017, granddaughter Zoey took her campaign here to the Des Moines Public School board, “…to have gender-neutral bathrooms installed at all of Des Moines Public Schools’ high schools….”
Here’s two pictures of Zoey, which were publicly posted on her Facebook page here.
This one is below is Zoey and some “devil” friend, apparently in a bed.
Peter himself, below, is a ‘friend’ of granddaughter Zoey on Facebook (FB), where he presumably monitors her activities. (What Grandpa wouldn’t if they are on FB?)
Connie Wagner wrote here about her granddaughter’s efforts, “I certainly couldn’t complain….of Zoey’s accomplishing something that needed to be done. Admittedly a tough subject, but well done.”
Connie, Connie! Please!! High school boys and girls peeing together in the same bathroom is anything but “a needed accomplishment” in the Kingdom of Christ!
We sympathize with the fact that Peter and Connie have both been ill the last few years but surely they haven’t ‘checked out’ have they?
For years Connie Wagner has been on the Osceola County Republican Central Committee. Zoey has served the Iowa Democratic Party, according to her FB page. This is the party lost to sexual identity politics.
Exposing People Who Buy Their Ink By The Barrel
Rescue the Perishing knows what we’re up against when trying to expose people who, for decades, ‘bought their ink by the barrel’, as the famous saying goes. People who own one of the most popular weekly newspapers in Iowa and who arrogate for themselves, via propaganda, what truth is to their 6,000+ paid subscribers. They get to fashion “truth” as they walk the society under their influence away from Biblical morality.
Now consider what the great French Reformed thinker and legal scholar, Jacques Ellul, wrote in his 1965 classic, Propaganda: The Formation Of Men’s Attitudes, about such power available to them.
“At the same time, these collective beliefs, which the individual assumes to be his own, these scales of values and stereotypes, which play only a small part in the psychological life of a person unaffected by propaganda, become big and important; by the process of crystallization, these images begin to occupy a person’s entire consciousness, and to push out other feelings and judgments. All truly personal activity on the part of the individual is diminished, and the man finally is filled with nothing but these prejudices and beliefs around which all else revolves. In his personal life, man will eventually judge everything by such crystallized standards…. public opinion within an individual grows as it becomes crystallized through the effects of propaganda while his private opinion decreases. Another aspect of crystallization pertains to self-justification for which man has great need, as we have seen in the preceding chapter. To the extent that man needs justifications, propaganda provides them. But whereas his ordinary justifications are fragile and may always be open to doubts, those furnished by propaganda are irrefutable and solid. The individual believes them and considers them to be eternal truths. He can throw off all sense of guilt, he loses all feeling for the harm he might do, all sense of responsibility other than the responsibility propaganda instills in him. Thus, he becomes perfectly adapted to objective situations and nothing can create a split within him. Through such a process of intense rationalization, propaganda builds monolithic individuals. It eliminates inner conflicts, tensions, self-criticism, self-doubt. And in this fashion, it also builds a one-dimensional being without depth or range of possibilities.” p 164-165
Connie’s columns writing about kids and grand-kids and how often she ends with “God is good”, makes it near impossible to question this ‘family-values’ couple. They have created their own sense of eternal truths wrapped in ‘God-talk’ while driving out the common man’s judgments. In fact, decades of Peter and Connie’s columns have crystallized for themselves and many of their readers their own ‘self-justification’ while walking most readers away from the Holy God which as Protestants and Catholics they once feared.
Small Taste Of Wagner’s Historical Character
I have listened to Peter at countless local Republican political meetings pray self-serving prayers limited to Jesus ‘our friend’ and never to the Holy God of the Bible who is our Lawgiver. Not Peter Wagner. His March 2018 prayer at the Osceola County Republican Convention sounded more like a leftist social-justice warrior then a man who fears God and loves Christ his redeemer. (The picture at the top of this story is a snapshot of Peter during his “prayer”.)
The Wagner’s have jockeyed successfully for years to be named as Osceola County delegates to the District and State Republican conventions, yet I (Paul Dorr) don’t recall them ever locally coming to the defense of the Republican Party platform on the sanctity of human life or marriage. If they did, it certainly wasn’t anything more than the worthless neutered establishment pro-life line.
Peter wrote here recently about his early years in the business and his dependence on his banker, Doug Newman, of the Ashton State Bank. He wrote, “Sometimes we were [financially] ahead of the game and sometimes, sadly, we were overdrawn…Iowa’s bank examiners arrived in Ashton for their regular audit. It was a time we were overdrawn. Seriously overdrawn.”
Doug Newman didn’t always pay the checks and overdraw Peter’s business account. I was an officer at the then-Ocheyedan Savings Bank during this same time. Probably half-dozen times our cashier would come to my office with my wife’s bounced pay-check. My wife, Debra, was then an editor for Peter and Connie Wagner. One time I had to go to his home at night and try to collect the pay she earned. He wasn’t even apologetic about it, but defensive. Rumors abounded for years of those who had to charge-off debts owed by the Wagner’s. I know of one that was more than a rumor.
Peter didn’t limit his attempts to defraud his employee’s timely pay. He also attempted to defraud the recognition of their work. Sometime in the early 1980s a small boy near Lake Park went missing in a corn field and thousands of people turned out to look for him. Up against a deadline my wife wrote a gripping story on the rescue attempt. It was later submitted to a national newspaper group where it won “first-prize” for spot news, weekly newspaper category. But later the award was issued to Jeff Wagner. This was made easy to pull off, as the day of the Awards ceremony my wife was in the hospital bringing our 2nd child into the world. But when she later saw the plaque on the wall she was shocked that it listed Jeff Wagner.
I later called the national association and asked them to compare the name on the contest application versus the by-line on the story. They looked and were surprised, “Debra Dorr wrote the story, not Jeff Wagner.” They later sent to our home a new certificate and award plaque, naming Debra Dorr.
After our second child was born Deb returned to work where Peter made such a hostile working environment for my wife that she had to resign. Deb filed an unemployment claim which Peter resisted and where he won, on the first hearing with Iowa Workforce Development. But on final appeal the senior case officer found Peter had made a hostile working environment and awarded her unemployment compensation. After providing him national award-winning service Deb left their employment convinced it was their aggravation toward her love of motherhood which prompted them to see her gone.
There are many more reports but most are afraid to go on record. The “eternal” truths which Peter Wagner has crystallized for himself betrays Biblical morality and character and it has for a long time.
Now Let’s Fast Forward
What RTP finds disturbing is in an August 1, 2017 column here, Peter Wagner wrote, “With a third-generation of Wagners coming of age we hope it will continue to be a thriving family business for at least another 45 years.”
Does this third-generation include the likes of Zoey, flying what appears to be gay homosexual banner on this picture taken from her FB page?
Their Filthy Managing Editor
Ty Rushing was hired in June of 2018 to be “the lead content producer for The Sheldon Mail-Sun and help oversee a staff of nearly a dozen writers, editors and photographers for various Iowa Information publications, including The N’West Iowa REVIEW, Sioux Center News and Okoboji magazine” and presumably for the newspapers in Ireton and Hawarden which the Wagner’s recently acquired. Rushing was previously employed as a business reporter at the Sioux City Journal. He is a foul immoral person with a history of social media use that no respectable newspaper would publish. Again, he is the writer who penned the stories on OC Pride listed above.
He has posted such vile, filthy and disgusting tweets on his Twitter account that in the interest of children not seeing them all, they are only accessible by typing in the password FilthyEditor at this link here! Here is a survey of a few of them below. Warning, even these are disgusting. Anyone who is rightly shamed by such past posts would take them down. Not the Managing Editor of the Review – Ty Rushing. At least not until today. Don’t be surprised if Rushing scrubs his Twitter and Facebook pages after this is published. Notice his assessment of ‘un-rape worthy’ women. Doesn’t this necessarily lead one to conclude that he also finds some women are ‘rape-worthy’. What female wants to work alone with a man or be interviewed alone by a man, who views women accordingly?
Anyone doing half-a-job in Human Resources these days knows to review a job applicant’s social media pages before offering them a job. There’s even a more evidence of his boastful filthy morals when he did this stand up “comedy” skit in May of this year in Sioux City, here, bragging about hanging out at a ‘whore bar’ in Newton, Iowa. Did Iowa Information give him a pass on this stuff?
Rushing also appears to be good friends with Mike Goll, OC Pride Event organizer and their chief spokesperson. See this picture where Rushing has his arm around Goll.
See this next public FB picture on Rushing’s wall where Iowa Information’s Managing Editor calls the OC Pride organizer “a pretty OK guy.”
RTP has contacted Renee Wielenga and Lana Bradstreet, female employees who appear to be under Rushing’s supervision at the Review and the Sioux Center News. We sent them some of his tweets (above) and asked them to forward them on to any other female employees under his supervision. RTP asked their response to having someone in a position of authority over them who has such public views toward women. Bradstreet had no comment and, as of press time, RTP has not heard back from Wielenga after sending an email and leaving a voice message for her.
Peter and Connie Wagner are still listed with the Iowa Secretary of State’s office as Publishers of the parent company, Iowa Information, Inc. No matter who controls the Review today they are still the ‘brand-name’ behind this paper and they continue writing their dissembling columns.
It is too bad that a once great newspaper has now drifted into the abyss. Have they become so jaded that they are willing to employ someone with such coarse filthy moral ethics as their senior managing editor, Ty Rushing, who actively promotes drag queen balls here in NW Iowa?
The Wagners attend Sibley Presbyterian Church. My goodness, Peter actually teaches adult Sunday School there. Their Pastor Terry Simm can be reached at (712) 754-3126 or by email at terry@sibleypresby.church. Ask his elders to hold the Wagners accountable.
Connie Wagner remains on the Osceola County Republican Central Committee. Its Chairman is Tommy Zylstra of Sibley, Iowa. Call him at 712-754-4014 and insist he lead the effort to remove from their committee, a woman who is clearly working to undermine that which the state Republican party platform defends and, more so, what NW Iowans historically held firm moral Biblical convictions on!
Also, file your protest with the Wagner’s here.
May God have mercy on my generation who has worked by commission and omission to corrupt those who followed behind us.
Paul R. Dorr, Director
P.O. Box 115
Ocheyedan, IA 51354
Email rtp@iowatelecom.net