The FBI is investigating Armed Queers SLC founder Ermiya Fanaeian, a radical transgender activist with ties to communist politics, after the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Law enforcement sources confirmed that agents are reviewing whether the group had connections to accused sniper Tyler Robinson.
Armed Queers SLC scrubbed its online presence following Kirk’s death, but investigators secured a cache of posts from Fanaeian, the child of Iranian immigrants. Her social media called for “Revolution + Trans liberation in our lifetime!” and she openly declared, “Sometimes violence, protest, and really riots and those kinds of loud rebellions must take place for tangible change.”
Despite her extreme rhetoric, Fanaeian had previously been embraced by mainstream institutions. In 2022, Utah Global Diplomacy honored her with a “7 for 17” award for “gender equality,” a recognition partly funded by government grants. A State Department official has since announced those ties are being severed: “We are taking aggressive action to ensure that any implementor that has any relationship whatsoever with this radical organization is completely cut off from any State Department engagement.”
Fanaeian has long blended leftist politics with gun activism. She first led a Pink Pistols chapter in Utah before being disavowed for using the group’s name to push a broader agenda. In 2020, she launched Armed Queers SLC, which hosted a University of Utah lecture on “queer resistance” featuring flyers with an image of a young woman gripping an AK-47. She also organized a Party for Socialism and Liberation student group, praising Marx, Lenin, and Fidel Castro.
“The Party for Socialism and Liberation is not a liberal movement — we are a leftist movement,” Fanaeian once said. “We are an anti-capitalist movement. We are a working class revolutionary movement.”
