Federal authorities are investigating the founder of Armed Queers SLC, a pro-gun LGBTQ organization, over potential connections to accused sniper Tyler Robinson, who is charged in the killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
Law enforcement sources confirmed that the group’s leader, Ermiya Fanaeian, is a trans-identifying political organizer with ties to communist activism.
Investigators are looking into whether Armed Queers SLC or Fanaeian had any role in aiding Robinson in the Sept. 10 sniper attack at Utah Valley University.
Armed Queers SLC erased its online presence shortly after Kirk’s assassination. However, authorities had already compiled a cache of open-source information from the group, which was provided to the FBI.
That material included posts authored by Fanaeian, the child of Iranian immigrants.
Fanaeian’s social media called for “Revolution + Trans liberation in our lifetime!” and advocated violent uprisings as a means of achieving political change, according to a source familiar with the federal probe.
In a University of Utah interview, she cited the Stonewall Riots as a model, saying, “Sometimes violence, protest, and really riots and those kinds of loud rebellions must take place for tangible change.”
Federal officials have not yet determined whether others assisted Robinson in the Kirk shooting.
The FBI has widened its probe to examine possible “extended network” connections to Armed Queers SLC and its affiliates.
Despite her radical politics, Fanaeian has been recognized by mainstream institutions.
The New York Post detailed in its explosive and exclusive report that in 2022, Utah Global Diplomacy, a nonprofit tied to the U.S. State Department, awarded her its “7 for 17” award for work in “gender equality.”
The group later removed all public references to the award.
Archived posts also show Fanaeian onstage with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) during a 2019 presidential campaign event in Salt Lake City.
The Post further noted that in 2020, Fanaeian launched the Salt Lake City chapter of Pink Pistols, a national LGBTQ gun-rights group.
“I used to think that guns were a scary thing,” she told local media.
“Back then, I would have agreed with Joe Biden’s assertion to take everyone’s AR-15s away. And now I own one.”
Her tenure with Pink Pistols lasted about a year.
The national group announced this week that it no longer recognizes her leadership, stating that she used its name to promote political causes outside the group’s single-issue mission of safe firearm use for LGBTQ members.
Following her departure from Pink Pistols, Fanaeian founded Armed Queers SLC.
The group organized a 2023 lecture on “queer resistance” at the University of Utah, located less than an hour from where Kirk was killed.
Flyers for the event showed a young woman with an AK-47 and ammunition belts.
Fanaeian also helped establish a student study group for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which promotes Marxist ideology.
In interviews, she credited communist revolutionaries including Fidel Castro and the Black Panther Party as inspirations for her organizing work.
“The Party for Socialism and Liberation is not a liberal movement — we are a leftist movement,” Fanaeian said in a student newspaper interview.
“We are an anti-capitalist movement. We are a working class revolutionary movement.”
PSL is funded by Neville Singham, a U.S. tech millionaire with documented ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Singham has financially supported multiple left-wing activist groups, including Code Pink, International People’s Assembly, and ANSWER Coalition.
