How Did a Former Elizabeth Warren Volunteer End Up Attending the Ayatollah’s Funeral?

At just 16 years old, Calla Walsh was celebrated by the New York Times as part of an “influential new force in Democratic politics” for her work on the campaigns of Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.)

But six years on, Walsh is making headlines again for a much different reason: She recently appeared in an Iranian state-media interview calling the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei the “greatest anti-imperialist leader” of her lifetime.

Walsh, now a 22-year-old full-time resident of Lebanon, has descended from a progressive wunderkind to a radical who has been placed on a suspicious persons watch list by the U.S. government for her “expansive dealings with the governments of Cuba and Iran … as well as a spiderweb of U.S.-designated terrorist groups,” according to the Free Press.

“He was a leader to all people of the world who struggle against imperialism, arrogance, against Zionism, against genocide,” Walsh said of Khamenei while speaking with Iran’s PressTV about her attendance at his funeral Saturday.

Walsh’s shift to Iranian propagandist would have at one time been hard to predict. She is the daughter of a Boston University English professor and a Harvard writing teacher who studied at two elite Boston preparatory schools, Shady Hill and Winsor, and rose to fame early in her teens for her political activism.

At just 14, she knocked on doors in Cambridge to encourage residents to support a bill that would prohibit “gender-identity-based discrimination” in public places. One year later, she helped coordinate thousands of young protesters for an international “climate strike” at Boston’s City Hall. At 17, she served as one of the youngest delegates at the Democratic Socialist of America’s National Convention. That same year, the Boston Globe called her a “force in the world of climate activism.”

She volunteered for Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign and also helped Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s campaign.

She received significant notoriety for her efforts in the “Markeyverse” in 2020, an online Gen Z–led movement credited with helping the incumbent senator secure a 2020 primary win over then–Representative Joe Kennedy III. “The Markeyverse carried out a devastating political maneuver, firmly fixing the idea of Senator Markey as a left-wing icon,” the Times reported.

She went on to hold several other roles in Democratic politics: She served as communications director for Massachusetts state house candidate Jordan Meehan, and she did digital-media work for Boston City Councilor Julia Mejia’s reelection campaign in 2021. She also worked as a regional organizer and strategist for Act on Mass, a progressive nonprofit.

But the candidates she was working to elect were falling short of her increasingly radical politics. Just two months after she helped to secure Markey’s reelection, she was already protesting outside his office, according to the Free Press. She partnered with CodePink and The People’s Forum to protest the senator’s support for a bill to increase U.S. defense spending in East Asia.

The makings of her radicalization were beginning to fall in place as early as 2021, when she was invited to Cuba at just 17 years old. She then visited the country four times between 2022 and 2024.

By the end of 2021, Walsh announced her exit from the Democratic Party and electoral politics. She explained that she’d been disappointed by Markey in the aftermath of his reelection win and that she’d learned that no party or candidate could spur the revolutionary change she wanted — it might be achieved only by “direct action, protest, and internationalist solidarity.” 

Soon after, she posted a Me Too account of an inappropriate relationship she had with a 27-year-old campaign field director in Massachusetts when she was just 16. She and the older man had sexually explicit conversations during a yearlong relationship that included in-person meetings but did not involve sex.

“Most of the interactions I have with men and adults I work with in politics are tainted by my trauma and fears of being sexually exploited again,” she wrote.

In addition to her trips to Cuba, Walsh also notably appeared in Chinese state-media propaganda videos in 2022 to criticize then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for leading a congressional delegation to Taiwan. Walsh was involved, at least for a time, with CodePink and The People’s Forum which are led by Neville Roy Singham and his wife, Jodie Evans, who are both under investigation for their suspected ties to Chinese intelligence services.

Her trips to Cuba ultimately led to her introduction to Fergie Chambers, a Marxist organizer and millionaire heir to the Cox Communications empire. Walsh met Chambers, who is 20 years her senior, at a 2022 conference in Cuba. That meeting seemed to supercharge her extremism.

By October 2023, Walsh had dropped out of Canada’s prestigious McGill University after less than one semester, calling it a “terrible colonial university.” At the same time, Chambers opened a 300-acre compound in Alford, Mass., that served as a “martial arts dojo and a command center for far-left activists he called the Berkshire Communists,” according to the  Free Press.

The same month that Walsh left college, Hamas carried out its terrorist attack on Israel.

“When the 7th happened, we just really shared the analysis about things, and about the urgency of the situation,” Chambers told the Boston Globe, speaking of himself and Walsh. “We spent a bunch of time together for, like, two months, just thinking about this stuff, writing about stuff.”

Walsh, with support from Chambers, co-founded Palestine Action US, which was inspired by a British group of the same name that had been labeled a terrorist organization by the U.K. government. The group conducted “direct action” against institutions linked to Israel.

Chambers and Walsh responded to the start of the Israel–Hamas War by planning guerrilla-style raids on Israeli defense companies in New England. Walsh participated in at least two of these raids, both of which ended in her arrest. She said her goal in participating was to cause “maximum material damage” and to “instill fear” among the employees of Elbit Systems. While charges in connection with the first raid were dropped, she ultimately pleaded guilty in November 2024 to reduced charges in connection with the second action and spent two months in a New Hampshire prison.

After her release from jail, Walsh seemed to understand that she had hit a point of no return. “I’ve kind of destroyed all my career prospects at this post,” she said in a podcast interview at the time.

Her radical activism made her a recruitment target of several American adversaries. She would come into contact with the information-warfare departments of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

She traveled to Iran on at least two occasions for state-sponsored events and was seen on camera chanting “Death to America, death to Israel.”

In 2025, she celebrated the fatal shooting of two young Israeli Embassy officials in Washington, D.C. “We should be asking ourselves why there weren’t 100 more Elias Rodriguezes,” she said in an interview on Free Palestine TV, referring to the alleged killer.

When Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in February by a U.S.-Israeli airstrike, Walsh wrote on social media, “May a global uprising avenge him, complete the great flood, and never forsake the path of resistance to the Great Satan.”

She added an Arabic phrase from the Koran that translates to, “To Allah we belong and to Him we shall return.”

She also previously mocked the four American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike, posting: “They all died fighting for fascism, genocide, pedophilia, and cannibalism.” 

In October, she moved to Beirut, where she has become a regular contributor to Iranian state media.

Walsh’s family has expressed “growing alarm” about her turn toward extremism.

“We love Calla deeply and absolutely. And we have serious, fundamental political disagreements with her,” the family said in a statement to the Free Press.

The family similarly told the Boston Globe, “Though we have some differences in political opinion, we respect and love Calla very much and, like her, wish that the attention of the press and public be directed not at her but at the ultimate cause she has risked so much for: ending war and oppression for all people.”

Back in 2021, Walsh spoke to NPR for an article on “How to Be a Citizen: Being Involved in Civic Life at a Young Age.” Her interviewer asked her what her future held.

“I’m definitely focused on, like, what’s happening in my state, but who knows where I’ll end up being in, like, five years from now,” Walsh told NPR. “So whatever I do, I hope that, you know, it’s aligned with my values now.”