Inside Utah's Trans-Marxist Militia: From Cuba Revolutionary Trips And Rifle Training To Declaring War On Landlords

via Miah Blackwell of The Cougar Chronicle, 

Over the last few years, individuals and groups tied to violent and extremist LGBTQ activism have been emerging in the heart of Utah. In May, we exposed how extremist students and clubs at UVU have been responsible for vandalism, violent threats and rhetoric, and even justifying the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Some even left the words “bella ciao” on the sidewalk during left-wing protests.

In September 2025, the FBI opened an investigation into Armed Queers of SLC in connection to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Since then, no updates have been released. Today, we are shining a light on a problem Utah's leaders and media are ignoring: the rising trans militia. pic.twitter.com/fTLOHRPeYY

— The Cougar Chronicle (@TheCougChron) August 11, 2026

In June, we documented an LGBTQ gathering in Provo where individuals beat an effigy of a police officer and wrote extremist propaganda in chalk. 

But these appearances of violent LGBTQ activism are minor compared to the actions and rhetoric of a group called Armed Queers of Salt Lake City, which has been at the center of this radical movement for some time. 

Describing itself as a socialist, trans-led collective, Armed Queers of Salt Lake City emerged in 2020 with the purpose of combining armed community defense with their far-left Marxist-Leninist and radical LGBTQ ideologies.

A recruitment card we obtained says the group is working toward:

1. the armed protection of queer and trans communities, 
2. the end of capitalist exploitation, 
3. trans liberation from the gender binary, 
4. housing as a human right, 
5. the abolition of prisons and police, 
6. the dismantling of the nonprofit “industrial complex.” 

In a 2024 interview the group framed its work as defending people it considers endangered from both right-wing vigilantes and the state. At a public event the following year, one member described it plainly as a “queer and trans-led Marxist-Leninist organization.”

This is clearly not a normal activism club; it’s an armed political group that resembles a militia. The card makes it explicit: their goal is “armed and militant protection.” And with ties to a tragic shooting at a “No Kings” rally in June of 2025, as well as reports of an FBI investigation into suspected ties to Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk, this group should be setting off alarm bells throughout government and law enforcement agencies.

But as we began to investigate this group, one of the most worrying things we discovered was how silent community, state, and federal leaders have been on the issue of organized and armed LGBTQ extremist groups.

Charlie Kirk's Assassination: A Wave of Attention

In the weeks after the September 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, the group scrubbed much of its online presence, its Instagram and other social media pages going dark. Some of it has since flickered back. 

On September 16, just days after Kirk’s assassination, Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna publicly stated that Armed Queers SLC was under investigation by the FBI as an “extended network related to Charlie’s killer.” The New York Post later confirmed this and added that the probe sought to reveal if Armed Queers and related groups had foreknowledge of the assassination.  

But as of August 11, 2026, no further information about this FBI investigation has been revealed to the public. Indeed, Armed Queers of Salt Lake City has barely been mentioned at all by community, state, or local journalists and leaders. But even if Armed Queers had no connection to Tyler Robinson, their ongoing activities–including firearms training, vigilante security operations, and even activism trips to Cuba–should be cause for public concern.

So we took it upon ourselves to do the job that other Utah journalists and law enforcement agencies are not doing: we are shining a light on the growing trans militia in Utah. 

Our Look Inside a Meeting

On June 14, journalists from The Cougar Chronicle attended and investigated a formal Armed Queers meeting during Salt Lake City’s Pride Month festivities. 

The gathering took place inside the Church and State church building, which is now frequently home to pagan and satanic-themed groups and businesses. Along the wall was a line of tables representing the different organizations. Among those groups were: Armed Queers of Salt Lake City, Salt Lake Community Bail Fund, Rise SLC, The Brown Berets De West Valley, Queers for Palestine and an oddly adorned table at the end dedicated to COVID-19. Each table had its own set of pamphlets and flyers to hand out to the guests.

It was a small, intimate gathering of less than fifty people–at least half of them wearing COVID-19 masks–and a panel of speakers representing the different organizations where they talked about events, history, oppression followed by a Q&A at the end. With mic in hand, our correspondent went and mingled with the representatives at each table–specifically the representatives of Armed Queers SLC.

When we inquired about the origins of Armed Queers of Salt Lake City, one female representative said:

“So, um, we're a socialist organization that's focused on the support and, um, protection of, uh, oppressed communities with a focus on bearing arms and defense … Armed Queers came about by being armed and being queer because queer inherently is political. And so we wanted to keep the queerness into the armed part, where we're not just a gun group, we're also a queer group that focuses on politics and all the other stuff. And so we wanted to kind of figure out a way to combine all that together to really symbolize who we are…So we want to make sure it's political, not just gun … the gun part is about the protection and the liberation of all of us people.”

Exposing Children

Listening to other conversations, we noticed a lot of emphasis on exposing children to “queerness.” One panelist said, “...I have noticed in the last 25 years a lot of children are going down into our community.”

During the panel, the only biologically identifying male–known for doing drag–spoke more about children:

“..there was this like school bus of children walking by, and a good chunk at the top were like, ‘oh my gosh, you're beautiful, can we take a picture?’ Like you just don't think about that when you think of students in Utah. You just think that they are their parents, essentially. But children are so amazing. And they want to see things and see growth in the state. So just go to a lot of queer events. How about that?”

Materials and Literature

At the meeting, Armed Queers handed out various materials and literature including a how-to guide on writing to political prisoners, a request for donations to acquire a firearms instructor and “enroll our comrades” in a public gun range day, and information about the Salt Lake Community Bail Fund. Additionally, they had flyers claiming that the Trump administration is “gearing up for war” by mentioning the arrest of Nicolas Maduro and the ongoing Iran war. They characterized ICE agents as operatives of a fascist regime and handed out books such as The Communist Manifesto.

Weapons Training and Trips to Cuba

An archive of Instagram posts acquired before Armed Queers took down the page reveals some of the group's normal operations before September of 2025. These activities include monthly firearm training sessions, providing citizen defense for LGBTQ pride events, holding educational forums, and even sending members to Cuba to be trained and participate in the May Day Brigade.

When we attended their June 2026 meeting, we learned that these activities are still ongoing and were not entirely ended by the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination. A recent post from founder Ermiya Fanaeian confirms that members affiliated with Armed Queers SLC traveled to Cuba this summer.

Links to Other Violent Groups

In 2023, Armed Queers SLC hosted a workshop with the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club called "Protecting People's Movements: The Rise in Community Defense."
The workshop taught participants about the history of left-wing community defense, the threat of the right-wing, and the importance of organizing armed defense.

The Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club (EFJBGC) is a left-wing social-justice gun rights group reportedly based in Kansas. One revealing blog post from 2024 details recent issues they've had with leadership, and some reports mention several spin-off groups and affiliated organizations, but their aims, rhetoric, and methods are almost identical to Armed Queers SLC. In July of 2025, several of the individuals who attacked and injured a law enforcement officer in the Prairieland ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, were linked to EFJBGC, as reported in The New York Times.

The Origins of Armed Queers

The group's public origin runs through Ermiya Fanaeian, a male-to-female transgender activist and the son of Iranian immigrants, who first drew local attention as a teenager. In the aftermath of the 2018 Parkland shooting, he helped organize a Utah chapter of March for Our Lives, the student gun-control movement. 

But within a few years, Fanaeian reversed his position on guns. Speaking to Utah’s KUER, he said, “I used to think that guns were a scary thing. Back then, I would have agreed with Joe Biden’s assertion to take everyone’s AR-15s away. And now I own one.”

He later launched a Salt Lake City chapter of the Pink Pistols, a national LGBTQ firearms group, but later broke with it. Pink Pistols tells a pointed version of that split, saying they cut ties because Fanaeian began using its name to advance a broader political program in violation of the group's single, narrow purpose of promoting lawful, responsible gun ownership. Pink Pistols says his chapter remains defunct.

When Fanaeian organized AQSLC, he kept the core Pink Pistols model–armed, organized, and queer–but expanded on it with additional features. Armed Queers distinguishes itself in three vital ways:

• An explicit political mission. Armed Queers’ own membership sign-up form states the group’s goal of establishing a socialist society and achieving "trans liberation from the gender binary and biological essentialism,” which are ideological aims. The group describes itself as aligned with Marxism and trains queer and trans people to arm themselves in opposition to capitalism and oppression. 

• Coalition activism. Fanaeian protested with the Salt Lake City chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, demanding "police and prison abolition.” He also founded a local PSL chapter himself. Aligning and actively working with other far-left movements (as also evidenced by the other booths at the event we attended) is an essential element of Armed Queers.
• Campus ideological programming. In 2023 the group lectured at the University of Utah, hosted by a socialist student organization, promoting "queer resistance" and dismantling "cis-heteropatriarchy" and "land ownership." 

Fanaeian has not been shy about what this organization leads to. In a local television interview, he said that "Sometimes violence, protest, and really riots and those kinds of loud rebellions must take place for tangible change." He invoked the 1969 Stonewall Uprising as his template. 

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk brought national attention to the group, the US State Department cut ties with Utah Global Diplomacy, a foreign relations NGO who had previously given Ermiya Fanaeian the “7 for 17” award for advancing the United Nations’ 17 goals. They had also named her a Young Diplomat of Utah. Utah Global Diplomacy has since scrubbed Fanaeian’s presence from their website, but receipts remain courtesy of Data Republican on X.

And in an essay that has since been taken down (with only screenshots courtesy of James Lindsay on X remaining), Fanaeian writes extensively about the “trans struggle” in the framework of radical marxism. In an Instagram post detailing a trip to Cuba, he wrote in the caption, “Spending time in Cuba has made me, alongside my comrades, acutely aware of our duty in the belly of the beast.”

The June 2025 Shooting

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is not the first time Armed Queers SLC has come under public scrutiny. 

On June 14, 2025, at a Utah “No Kings” rally in downtown Salt Lake City, thousands of people were in the streets. Among the marchers was Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, “Afa” to those who knew him, a Samoan fashion designer who had once competed on Project Runway. 

Armed volunteers, including members of Armed Queers and the 50501 protest network, formed a volunteer armed security force they called “peacekeepers.”

During the protest, one of these peacekeepers, 43-year-old Matthew Scott Alder, believed he saw a man “ducked down as he was loading his rifle” and thought he was about to commit a mass shooting. Raising his own weapon, Alder fired at the man three times. One round struck the man with the rifle, while another struck Ah Loo, who collapsed and later died. Nearly six months afterward, on December 3, 2025, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill charged Alder with manslaughter, a second-degree felony carrying up to fifteen years.

Pictured: Ah Loo

An attorney for Ah Loo's family said the groups providing security that day included both the 50501 protest network and Armed Queers SLC, and that Alder is “believed to be associated” with the latter. The same attorney has alleged that the groups deliberately obscured their leadership and operated under pseudonyms. 

However, both the Attorney General’s charging announcement as well as the media coverage from CBS, NBC, CNN, the Associated Press, and the Salt Lake Tribune, only tie Alder to the event's volunteer safety detail and to the 50501 movement, but not Armed Queers SLC. And when Ah Loo's widow filed a wrongful-death lawsuit, the named defendants were Alder and six leaders of Utah 50501. 

A Warning to Utahns

This trans militia was built and is thriving in Utah. The meeting we attended took place in downtown Salt Lake City, and the founding member is a student at the University of Utah. 

During our investigation of UVU’s extremist Civil Disobedience Club, we unearthed internal discord messages of a transgender individual offering to train others with firearms. This same individual was responsible for other rhetoric where harming conservatives was implicitly justified or made to seem inevitable. This individual is a student at Utah Valley University. 

We also recorded transgender individuals glorifying violence against law enforcement and teaching children to follow suit. This group was at Kiwanis Park in Provo.

And let’s not forget that Tyler Robinson was from Washington, Utah, and was living in St. George at the time of the shooting. 

Violent extremists are in our communities. Armed Queers of SLC is evidence that some are even organizing into militia-like entities. Charlie Kirk’s assassination generated an appropriate amount of concern for these activities, but that concern faded far too quickly. If law enforcement, policymakers, and community leaders fail to address the perpetuation of this radical and violent extremism in Utah, Ah Loo and Charlie Kirk will not be the only victims.