Foreign Communists Are Funding and Training Violent Leftist Radicals in US

“The issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution,” said the late David Horowitz, quoting a 1960s rebel. The Palestinian conflict, the climate, transgenderism, immigration, and abortion are all proximate causes for protests and now terrorism. But they are all also part of an amalgamated “omnicause” whose real purpose is to bring down the United States and the West.

Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk and other recent tragedies that are rightly garnering worldwide attention, our leaders have finally woken up and are looking into who the perpetrators are and who organizes and finances them.

After Kirk’s death, a liberal fired three bullets into an ABC News office in Sacramento, supposedly to protest the suspension of left-wing commentator Jimmy Kimmel. Last week, another radical shot inside a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, killing two people.

Law enforcement is investigating, and Congress is weighing hearings on whether we have a problem with leftwing violence in America. For years, I have called for investigations into Black Lives Matter.

What they will find is that much of this support, not just financial but also ideological, comes from overseas, from countries that loathe the American way because its existence is a constant rebuke to their decrepit ideologies.

Front and center are dark places run by communist parties, such as China and Cuba. They fund intricate radical networks inside American society because they benefit when chaos weakens us. It doesn’t matter what issue gets thousands out on the street to riot, or now, even kill.

That’s why it’s an omnicause. The communist group ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) will storm the barricades on behalf of any matter that challenges what the Marxists would call “American power structures.” The matter itself, as Horowitz observed, is not the problem.

As an ANSWER Coalition demonstrator told a journalist in 2024 at a pro-Hamas rally, the purpose of the demonstration really was “Getting rid of America, getting rid of the West. This is what this is for. Yes. Everyone here understands that, at some level, we need to get rid of America, completely.”

Following Kirk’s martyrdom at the hands of a suspect with a boyfriend allegedly “transitioning” to be a woman, and who asserted that Kirk spread “hate,” the FBI has launched an investigation into radical groups in Utah, according to the New York Post and Axios. One group that has been named is Armed Queers Salt Lake City, a Marxist cell that believes in arming and training LGBTQ+ people to acquire power.

The group is led by Ermiya Fanaeian, a gun-toting transgender Iranian immigrant who calls for revolution. Fanaeian traveled to Cuba for training earlier this year, where he was told by Cuba’s communists, “It’s time for you to go home and make your own revolution.”

No direct evidence ties AQSLC to the man charged with Kirk’s murder, Tyler Robinson. But it’s easy to see why the FBI is investigating it.

AQSLC immediately scrubbed down its social media presence after Kirk’s assassination, as did Fanaeian, who “identifies” as a woman. AQSLC’s logo has two rifle bullets inscribed in the same manner as the bullet casings with which Robinson supposedly killed Kirk. There is also, of course, the transgender angle.

Additionally, AQSLC was organized recently in St. George, Utah, a city of just 100,000 inhabitants, where Robinson and his boyfriend, Lance Twigg, lived. Lastly, AQSLC collaborated with the Leninist, transgender Socialist Rifle Association, a violent Antifa group that the Daily Wire said is linked to several “politically motivated” violent crimes.

Then there is this: When the Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak asked SRA’s Salt Lake chapter and the national headquarters whether Robinson was a member, they both replied no. But when Rosiak asked if Twigg was a member, they demurred, citing confidentiality policies.

All this was enough for Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-FL, who on Sept. 26 wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Attorney General Pam Bondi detailing all these AQSLC links and requesting a “thorough, interagency investigation into the role that foreign adversaries have in bankrolling disruptive organizations to incite or perpetrate violence.”

AQSLC and Fanaeian seem to have had close links with Antifa, an anarcho-communist entity, and traditional and cultural Marxist groups such as Black Lives Matter, which believe in state power as long as they control it. All these angles are discussed in a very good report on radical groups in Utah, just published by the Center for Security Policy.

But even if it turns out there is no connection between Robinson and Fanaeian, using contact tracing on the AQSLC leader reveals the vast extent to which left-wing networks have burrowed in America, with or without foreign help.

Fanaeian, for example, is associated with the Marxist-Leninist Party for Socialism and Liberation, for which she set up a “student study group” at the University of Utah. The PSL was founded and is led by the same man who founded and leads the ANSWER Coalition, Brian Becker, a former host for Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik Radio. In 2022, Fanaeian also addressed a crowd at the People’s Forum’s New York headquarters.

These three groups are part of a network funded with money granted by a shadowy millionaire who lives in Shanghai and has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, Neville Roy Singham, the Network Contagion Research Institute explained in a very good study published last year.

As I explained in a paper I published last year with Mary Mobley, the People’s Forum is run by a Cuban agent named Manolo de Los Santos, who was involved in the takeover of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall in 2024. The PSL, meanwhile, attended an international Antifa festival in Caracas this year.

None of these countries has any interest in transgender politics, which their communist leaders recognize as depraved. But they are very interested in revolution in our streets.

CSP warns that “Historically, American intelligence has struggled to understand the nature of threats that do not operate based on vertically integrated command and control structures.” They better be up to the job.

Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow in the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Read his research.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal by Mike Gonzalez.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.