You have seen him before. He was wearing wire-frame glasses in 1937, talking about the blood of the proletariat, Stalin and Trotsky and counterrevolutionaries in Mexico. He wore a flannel suit in the heat of the New York summer in 1953 and was obsessed with the Rosenbergs. He was radical chic in 1970, all tight pants and confabs with Black Panthers who stroked their pistols while eating canapés on the Upper East Side. You saw him in a Mao suit in 1975, a red star on a green military cap, the Great Leap Forward and the “Little Red Book” and a thousand flowers, all in bloom.
In 2024, he wears sneakers and a black T-shirt, the better to show off the tattoos that climb the guns and speckle the face. The one below the Adam’s apple—“ACAB”—is for “All Cops Are Bastards.” The one on the cheek, a kind of arrow beside his large brown eye, means something like “Fuck you and your death culture.”
He’s 39 in 2024, and his name is James Cox Chambers Jr., better known as “Fergie.” His wife is Julian Schnabel’s daughter Stella, who, like Fergie, is a product of Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights, a $60,000-a-year progressive private school. He was, but no longer is, an heir to one of the great American fortunes, the Cox media empire. Newspapers, cable, auto companies—Cox is worth upward of $37 billion, part of which Fergie stood to inherit before he cut ties with his family during the pandemic, settling for $250 million, which he promises to use to fund the revolution.
Fergie has been the object of a scion’s share of recent media attention, with articles dedicated to the riddle of his nature in The Free Press, Mother Jones, and Rolling Stone, among others. In each, we once again learn the story of his strange wayward career, which unfurls less like a typical C.V. than a folk song.
For a time he ran a kind of commune (the Berkshire Communists) in southern Massachusetts—he tagged himself “general secretary,” the same title as Mao. He is one of the people funding the current struggle, the street-bound effort to overthrow not just the Zionists—Israel is merely a zit on the ass of the machine—but the entire system that undergirds Western power. Bankroll. Benefactor. Sugar daddy. The memo box in his checkbook should be marked “anti-colonialist efforts.”
In this, Fergie personifies a type as old as income disparity: the rich kid who betrayed his parents, turned on his class, and used his part of the bonanza—ill-gotten gains, according to his ideology—to fund the storming of the Bastille.
And it’s not just money. Fergie also battles by tweet. He is a vicious social-media warrior. Every point is a turning point on Fergie’s posts, every struggle the last struggle, every enemy the devil—hyperbole is the way of the age.
The memo box in his checkbook should be marked “anti-colonialist efforts.”
New York mayor Eric Adams is the “former chief pig and major Zionist.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken is to be “hanged for crimes against humanity,” as are all those who haven’t condemned the entity, that alien U.F.O. that parked itself between the river and the sea. “If you are not unequivocally for the total annihilation of Israel,” Fergie posted on X, “your soul is rotten.”
It was this hatred that drew me to Fergie. I have always been fascinated by such intense and seemingly generalized animosity. To me, it’s as mysterious as the existence of tornadoes or the common cold. I want to know why such a thing exists.
But when I spoke to him, Fergie was a surprisingly pleasant conversationalist. He speaks in dulcet tones. The content might be drive-time A.M. radio, but the vibe is long-form F.M., light jazz. His good manners are probably the result of his first-class schooling. Saint Ann’s, Bard—it allows him to talk the talk of the boardroom and the underground, to move between worlds, to work both sides of the fence.
“Did elite education get me around ideas that other people wouldn’t get around? Absolutely,” Fergie told me. “People who are the most oppressed by a system are often those who have the least capacity to find ideas that would overthrow that system. It’s people in the elite who betray their background who build the intellectual vanguard.”
Fergie was in Tunisia when we spoke. He’d been building his movement in Alford, Massachusetts, when his political work got the attention, first of the local press, and then of the neighbors, who called in the cops, who turned up the heat.
Fergie ran a gym where he taught the proles a little of the old hand-to-hand—the police shut it down. He organized civil actions, including an October 10 anti-Israel rally that, with its threatening language, put people on edge. There was suddenly talk of guns, and militants gathered at Fergie’s 80-acre hilltop compound.
“The local press was accusing me of forming a militia, which was crazy,” he said. “I had a shotgun for bears—it was being portrayed as guys hoarding guns and training people. We were giving martial-arts classes to working folks, and they were trying to say I was building Hamas in the Berkshires.”
And so, he took off.
Why Tunisia? “We develop a lot of theory in the U.S., but it’s not rooted in international resistance,” he explained. “Being in the Islamic world, in the Global South, close to what’s going on in West Africa, in Palestine, even in Ukraine, helps me feel more connected to those things.”
Fergie, who believes Russia is battling an appendage of the neo-colonial Western empire in Ukraine, is actually a fan of the old Soviet Union: his vanity license plates read CCCp.
“We were giving martial-arts classes to working folks, and they were trying to say I was building Hamas in the Berkshires.”
The Cox fortune was built by Fergie’s great-grandfather James M. Cox, who was born in a log cabin on a farm in Butler County, Ohio, in 1870, where the wind moved like a scythe across the endless steppe. He apprenticed at a newspaper in Middletown, Ohio, then followed the media train all down the line, building the newspaper-and-TV conglomerate that his great-grandson, talking to Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, would later—much later—describe as “a rotten capitalism firm like the rest of them.”
James M. Cox became a passionate progressive before the liberal sensibility spaghetti-fied in the 21st century. He represented Ohio in the U.S. Congress, served two terms as the state’s governor, and was the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1920, a race he lost in a blowout to Warren G. Harding. He begat Anne Cox Chambers, who begat James Cox Chambers, who begat Fergie, who watched from his Brooklyn Heights bedroom as his father divorced his mother and married Nabila Khashoggi, a cousin of Dodi Fayed’s and the firstborn of Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi arms trader once considered the world’s richest man.
“My father’s family behaved in incredibly cold, calculating sociopathic ways with one another,” Fergie said. “I made note of the discomfort I felt around them and how difficult it was to relate to people like that. My father was a complex guy, and we had a complex relationship. I think he tried to do the right things politically for many years and sort of veered off in a bad direction right around the turn of the millennium. Since he got involved with his [second] wife, who also came from a prominent global, ruling-class family, I think his agendas and interpretations are very much in step with the class he comes from. We fell out for good during Covid. I don’t see a chance for reconciliation. I think he’s part of something very evil.” (James Cox Chambers could not be reached for comment, and a spokesperson for Cox Enterprises said, “We cannot comment on matters related to the family.”)
In some ways, Fergie is a stand-in for a generation of kids in search of meaning, kids who’ve lost faith in their country. You could also see Fergie as a young man who’s gone to tremendous extremes to get off cannabis.
“I was heavily pathologized,” Fergie said. “I was sent to a shrink when I was, like, six years old and subjected to medication under the age of 10. I was institutionalized when I was 11 for tantrums. We’re talking about straitjackets and Thorazine and thrown in a quiet room for 48 hours and being sexually assaulted by roommates. When I got institutionalized the first time, a lot of kids were in there for drugs. So they taught me about drugs, and I came out and got on drugs. I recognized this was the solution that was offered by Western liberal society.”
Fergie could not kick pot. And could not kick it. And could not kick it. Then, in the way of an old wino, he noticed the book that had been on the shelf all along. Only instead of the Gideon Bible, it was the Koran.
“When I opened the Koran, it answered the questions I had been asking for years about faith and devotion,” he continued. “It began to bring a peace to me I hadn’t felt before. I had relied on marijuana for decades to cope with existence. And once I said shahada, the statement of faith in Islam, and began to pray five times a day, I didn’t feel the need for it in my life anymore. I haven’t smoked weed. I haven’t felt the same anxiety.”
But perhaps Fergie can best be seen as an example of one of the world’s oldest stories: the kid who rejects his parents.
Fergie dates his break with the Cox family, and hence the West, to his discovery that Cox was helping fund the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as “Cop City,” a $109 million campus where the next generation of police will be trained in what Fergie considers the art of oppression. Fergie opposed Cop City and helped fund public protests, from the start, but it was only when he opened the Koran that he really began to see the connections—between Atlanta and Khan Yunis, the I.D.F. and the A.P.D.
“I can’t say my life has always been super-easy and that I had everything figured out,” he told me. “I’ve had my interpersonal troubles, my anxieties. I had a lot of confusion around separating myself from my family’s business, starting a new collective, trying to figure out how to orient myself around an enormous amount of responsibility. And then, you know, feeling this burden of repression, from Palestine, but really from Atlanta, and Cop City.”
We were chatting on Zoom. I was in my office in Connecticut. There was snow out the window and a Stratocaster on the wall, occasioning a discussion of music. He said he’d known one of Keith Richards’s kids growing up. I asked if he was homesick for America—he’d been gone for several months. He said, “Yes, sometimes.” I asked if he missed his family. He said, “There is always sentimentality regarding one’s parents.” I agreed that was so. I had the sound of the plows and kids on a snow day behind me. He had the muezzins, the souk, the wind blowing fine red sand off the desert. His room—at one point, he stood and walked, and I could see the layout of his North African digs—looked large, sun-filled, and expensive.
When I asked about his intellectual journey, Fergie recalled a particular teacher at Saint Ann’s, “a peripheral Marxist who exposed me to Howard Zinn and Marx and Lenin.” And his time at Bard—he went but did not graduate—a Saint Ann’s–style progressive incubator that he believes has gone downhill since his father, a minority owner of the Atlanta Hawks, became the chair of the board of trustees.
It was only when he opened the Koran that he really began to see the connections—between Atlanta and Khan Yunis, the I.D.F. and the A.P.D.
“The U.S. can’t roll over people the way they did in the past,” he told me. “The power is crumbling.... The great anti-imperialists, whether we’re talking about Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Amílcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Hugo Chávez, saw it coming. The chickens are coming home to roost.”
There is an element of role-play in Fergie’s life. It’s like Halloween, only it’s all year long. Instead of being just another private-school rich kid—not the son, nor the grandson, but the great-grandson of the man who had the ambition and made the money—he gets to be a player in the eternal struggle, good versus evil.
Which is exactly how many Americans saw themselves in the 1980s, when the behemoth was Soviet Russia, and those who fought it—the Catholic Church, the Poles, the United States—were the righteous. But the C.C.C.P. buckled, and the Berlin Wall came down, and history (see: Francis Fukuyama) ended.
And, really, what’s the fun of living in the aftermath, the golden gloaming, no matter how comfortable? The story of America as indispensable nation, savior of Europe, last best hope of mankind, became boring because we’d heard it so many times.
To Fergie, October 7, 2023, the day Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, is a turning point, a watershed in the fall of the global elite—i.e., Mom and Dad. It exhilarated because it proved the machine can bleed. It’s not the war that followed that incited him. It’s the images that flooded the media at the end of that long day. “There was a vein of truth and profundity that was clear to me,” he explained. “I believe it was a legitimate military operation, that it was an inspiration to tens of millions across the Global South, all those under the thumb of the persisting imperialist neo-colonial movements led by the U.S.”
There is an element of role-play in Fergie’s life. It’s like Halloween, only it’s all year long.
A few days after our Zoom, I wrote Fergie on Signal, the encrypted-messaging app he insisted we use. I told him I’d been nervous before we spoke. He’s married to a Jew. I know that because he’s said it again and again. But his anti-Israel tweets have been so vehement the tone was hard for me to distinguish from a general condemnation of Jews.
“I am a Jew,” I wrote, “and I have family in Israel and it seems like there is no room for me and them in your world. Half the Jews in the world live in Israel. If you destroy Israel, you destroy or exile half the Jews in the world. What do you say to people who are scared by what you say, and feel a kind of abstract hatred coming off of the tweets?”
He replied:
Totally insincere crap.
Intellectually dishonest, genocidal apologism…
“Israel” is not a Jewish state.
Israel is a side hustle of the satanic US weapons industry.
Don’t you fucking dare conflate it with Judaism.
But you will, and you’ll call me an anti-Semite.
Boring. Predictable.
I should sue you for not disclosing your Zionism before interviewing me.
This guy seemed to hate me so much that I was almost starting to love him.
Rich Cohen is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL