Leftist group ‘Armed Queers of SLC’ under investigation in connection to Charlie Kirk assassination

One of the groups that is under investigation with possible links to the assassination includes the Armed Queers of Salt Lake City, which wiped its social media after the incident. Robinson was linked to a trans-identified romantic partner, his family and friends have attested that he holds leftist views, and bullet casings connected to the shooting were scrawled with messages linked to Antifa and trans ideology.

It has been revealed that one of the lead organizers of Armed Queers is trans-identified male Ermiya Fanaeian, who also has a wide array of political connections in the state of Utah and has been recognized as a recipient of the "7 for 17" award by Utah Global Diplomacy. The revelations were reported by Data Republican on X.

The University of Utah has previously held a sponsored lecture for the group in 2023. A flyer from the event went viral on X on Monday night into Tuesday.

A form to express interest in joining the group states, "Armed Queers Salt Lake City is a revolutionary LGBTQ organization dedicated to the defense, and success, of oppressed people’s movements," and states that the group is centered on 6 principles.

Those principles include: "the armed and militant protection of queer and trans communities, and all oppressed people," "the end of capitalist oppression and exploitation, and the creation of a socialist society," "trans liberation from the gender binary and biological essentialism," "the end of the commodification of housing by landlords and the recognition of housing as a human right," "the abolition of prisons and police as they serve as nothing but tools of capitalist oppression," and "dismantling the bourgeois non-profit industrial complex and replacing it with an organized revolutionary movement."

Fanaeian, as well as another man identified as Connor, also spoke during a 2025 May Day trip about how they and others around the world traveled to Cuba to train and learn how to engage in revolutionary action.

Fanaeian has previously spoken about how the armed queers group as well as pro-Palestinian organizations in Utah have organized together for pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the state since the October 7 terrorist attack. In a UPR article from October 2024, Fanaeian stated, “So when the movement for Palestinian liberation really built up ... in October, we determined as a group that it was important for us to explicitly come out in favor of the Palestinian struggle and dedicate a significant aspect of our skills and our capacity to the Palestinian cause."

It does not appear that Fanaeian’s only project in the LGBTQ community with firearms has been with the Armed Queers group. A report from 2020 at the Deseret News shows that Fanaeian turned from being a “gun control advocate” to then launching a chapter of the LGBTQ “pro-gun group” called the “Pink Pistols.”

FBI deputy director Dan Bongino has suggested that law enforcement is casting an even wider net to see if anyone else knew about the plot to assassinate Kirk before the assassin pulled the trigger. Bongino told reporters that the FBI is "looking into" if there was a "larger effort" to take out Kirk and even if “someone who knew the specifics of it and failed to report that,” per the New York Post.

Bongino added, “We’ll also be dropping a lot of paper, a lot of subpoenas out there, to take a look to see if there was any extended network."

“There appear to have been multiple warning signs” about Robinson, Bongino added when he was asked about the conversation that Robinson had with his family where the suspect expressed having disdain for Kirk. “You just laid out some of them. There were people in his network, friends and family who had stated that he had become more political.”