The founder of Armed Queers SLC, a pro-gun LGBTQ group being investigated by the FBI for possible ties to accused Charlie Kirk sniper Tyler Robinson, has been identified as a radical transgender political organizer with ties to communist politics.
Armed Queers SLC quietly scrubbed its online presence after Kirk was assassinated, but a law enforcement source told The Post that all open-source information on the group was downloaded and handed over to the FBI.
The cache of information includes posts from Ermiya Fanaeian, the child of Iranian immigrants, according to the source familiar with the federal investigation, whose Instagram bio calls for “Revolution + Trans liberation in our lifetime!”
She has also advocated violence to achieve the aims of LGBTQ groups, citing the Stonewall Riots as an example in a TV interview on the campus of University of Utah.
“Sometimes violence, protest, and really riots and those kinds of loud rebellions must take place for tangible change,” she said.
The feds are still deciding whether to bring charges against Robinson and working to determine whether anyone else was involved in Kirk’s killing.
However, Fanaeian and Armed Queers SLC are on investigators’ radar as the FBI has widened its probe to include a potential “extended network” that could have aided Robinson in the Sept. 10 sniper attack at Utah Valley University.
In 2020, Fanaeian, 25, started the Salt Lake City chapter of Pink Pistols, a national organization “whose mission is to arm LGBTQ people,” Utah’s KUER wrote that year in a puff piece heralding Fanaeian’s involvement in the group.
“I used to think that guns were a scary thing,” Fanaeian told the outlet. “Back then, I would have agreed with Joe Biden’s assertion to take everyone’s AR-15s away. And now I own one.”
It was quite a pivot — just a year earlier, she founded the local chapter of March for Our Lives — David Hogg’s group, which campaigns to restrict gun rights.
However, the honeymoon phase with Pink Pistols was short-lived; Fanaeian, then a University of Utah student, and the group parted ways just a year later. Pink Pistols now disavowing any connection to the former chapter leader.
“While initially welcomed, she began using the Pink Pistols name to promote broader political issues, violating our rule that we are a single-issue organization devoted solely to the safe, legal, and responsible use of firearms by the queer community,” Pink Pistols wrote in a statement this week.
Fanaeian founded Armed Queers SLC, which hosted a lecture on “queer resistance” at the University of Utah in September 2023 — about 45 miles from UVU where the 31-year-old Turning Point USA founder was killed.
Flyers promoting the event hosted in partnership with self-described “leftist student organization” Mecha de U of U feature a young woman clad in two ammo belts and clutching an AK-47, with her finger on the trigger.
Fanaeian also helped launch a student study group for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), with a curriculum that includes names like Karl Marx and Vladmir Lenin.
Fanaeian’s inspiration to form the group came from “historical communist and socialist revolutionaries of the mid 1900s” including Fidel Castro and the Black Panther Party, according to the university’s student newspaper, the Daily Utah Chronicle.
“The Party for Socialism and Liberation is not a liberal movement — we are a leftist movement,” Fanaeian told the outlet. “We are an anti-capitalist movement. We are a working class revolutionary movement.”
PSL’s main backer is Neville Singham, a US millionaire tech mogul with extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who bankrolls other radical organizations including National Students for Justice in Palestine, International People’s Assembly, Code Pink and ANSWER Coalition.
Fanaeian could not be reached for comment.
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