The Young American Woman Who Fights For Our Enemies

“Glory to all the martyrs. Glory to the Axis of Resistance. May we witness victory in our lifetimes,” a young American woman told her Iranian hosts in a clip circulated in July. “Marg bar Âmrikâ. Marg bar Israel”—in English: “Death to America, Death to Israel.”

The woman’s name is Calla Walsh, and her journey to that stage in Tehran is a strange one. The child of professors, Walsh, now 21, took an interest in politics in high school. Her campaigns for prominent figures like Boston city councilor Julia Mejia and Senator Ed Markey once earned her praise in Boston magazine as part of the “Gen Z” takeover of Boston politics. Four years later, Walsh’s latest campaign is in Lebanon, where she effectively serves as a mouthpiece for the Axis of Resistance. She now considers the label “terrorist” a “badge of honor.” Walsh did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

While Walsh’s story has its own unique aspects, she represents a new kind of foot soldier in a fifth-generation war playing out across an increasingly multipolar and digital world. Once a young talent and asset to the Democratic Party, she now agitates against American interests. What measures can the government take to prevent American citizens from becoming weapons of foreign regimes?

Walsh admits that she experienced a “pretty rapid radicalization” since becoming politically active in high school. She was the youngest delegate at the Democratic Socialists of America’s National Convention in 2021, but she left the organization that year over its “Zionism.” Walsh no longer engages in electoral campaigns—though she did write in Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar in the 2024 presidential election. Instead, she now believes in “community organizing, direct action, [and] internationalism as forms of struggle.”

This belief stems in part from her experiences during the George Floyd riots—an “uprising,” in Walsh’s words—which she describes as deeply transformative: “being in the streets then was truly the most radicalizing thing that ever happened to me, and that changed my politics. I was in the streets realizing, ‘Oh, we have to fight the police. Like, we have to overthrow this illegitimate government that is occupying this land that we live on.’”

After October 7, 2023, Walsh helped found Palestine Action US, sometimes shortened to Pal Action US. The group was modeled after Palestine Action UK, which the British government recently designated a terrorist organization due to its sabotage campaigns targeting defense contractors and military sites. Palestine Action US has since been renamed Unity of Fields. After roughly six weeks of direct action, Walsh and her comrades in the “Merrimack 4” were charged with rioting, sabotage, burglary, and conspiracy for doing nearly $100,000 worth of damage to an Israeli-owned defense contractor’s facility in New Hampshire. The group faced up to nearly 40 years in prison.

In November 2024, Walsh and her three co-conspirators negotiated a plea deal with the state of New Hampshire. The agreement sentenced each woman to 60 days in jail, deferred six months of their sentence, and required good behavior, community service, and $95,000 in restitution for their vandalism attack on Elbit Systems. With New Hampshire a bust for organizing, Walsh simply left the country.

She has spent much of this year abroad, traveling through Cuba, Iran, and most recently Lebanon. While in Iran, Walsh participated in the Sobh International Media Festival, a state-sponsored event hosted by Iran’s sanctioned broadcaster IRIB. Alongside fellow American activist Jennifer Koonings, Walsh toured the Iranian National Aerospace Park, where she praised Iran’s “indigenously produced drones and missiles” and described the experience as “the greatest honor of my life.”

Concurrent with her trips, Walsh has worked to normalize political violence. In the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, she took to social media to offer “Thoughts and prayers for the bullet 💕.” As the brutal nature of the murder became clear, she held firm, posting that “Direct action works,” and following up with the statement that “Fascists should be scared to go out in public.”

After ghoulish celebrations of Kirk’s murder flooded social media, Walsh lamented that Tyler Robinson was receiving more support than Elias Rodriguez, the alleged Capital Jewish Museum assassin. In an X post, she wrote, “Don’t get me wrong, Charlie Kirk getting murked was great and all, but it’s telling that there has been exponentially more celebration of his assassination than there was celebration of Elias Rodriguez heroically assassinating 2 actual zionist war criminals in DC.”

This was not the first time that Walsh endorsed violence. Just weeks earlier, during her appearance on far-left podcast Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, Walsh urged Westerners to support individuals like Rodriguez; Jakhi McCray (accused of torching 10 NYPD vehicles); Tarek Bazrouk (charged with hate crimes for attacking random Jewish pedestrians in New York); and Mohamed Sabry Soliman (accused of killing an 82-year-old Jewish demonstrator in a firebombing).

“We need to uphold these people and defend these people because they have resisted,” she said, before lamenting the lack of “organized infrastructure for escalated militancy” in the United States. Walsh even floated the idea of breaking these individuals out of prison.

Influencers and radical activists who use their identity and platform to agitate on behalf of hostile foreign powers pose a twenty-first-century quandary for American security.

Walsh is just one example. There’s also Jackson Hinkle, the self-described “MAGA Communist,” who has become a propagandist in favor of Russia and the Houthis. Others, like Koonings, prefer to do their work on the ground: harassing Kash Patel, promoting 9/11 conspiracy theories at Ground Zero, or joining Walsh in Lebanon.

These agitators are supercharged by social media. For the Baby Boomer generation, Jane Fonda became “Hanoi Jane.” Imagine if Fonda had been able to livestream her visit to Vietnam, post daily videos, and share images designed to drive engagement and radicalize her audience. Imagine if she had done this not in one hostile country, but across several pariah states, returning home to justify and encourage political violence.

The Trump administration may be starting to take such actors seriously. On her way to Lebanon, Walsh had her electronic devices seized. Koonings was also interrogated by Customs and Border Protection.

These developments are only a start. Many of these individuals openly act to support terrorist movements and coordinate with repressive regimes—actions that represent potential violations of federal law, which the FBI can and should investigate.

Kyle Shideler, senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy, has proposed a concrete step forward by creating a formal classification for far-left violent extremism. The current label, anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism, is too broad and fails to capture the ideological nature of this threat. By acknowledging the problem and recognizing that this ideology poses a real danger to national security, the FBI can begin to take meaningful action to confront it.

Figures like Walsh and her allies are exploiting digital platforms to amplify authoritarian narratives, glorify violence, and undermine democratic institutions. They coordinate with hostile regimes, promote terrorist propaganda, and seek to destabilize the country from within.

If the United States is serious about countering this threat, it needs to do more than just investigate individual actors. That means aggressive enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, expanded investigations into transnational propaganda networks, and a renewed commitment to protecting Americans while upholding the Constitution. Anything less is surrender to the digital insurgency and to the influence of figures like Caliphate Calla.

Photo by EYAD BABA/AFP via Getty Images