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The one-time heir to the roughly $34 billion Cox media empire — who liquidated his reported $250 million share of family assets and disowned his relatives — is now pouring his money into fighting Israel, Zionism and other “anti-colonialism” causes from his current perch in Tunisia.
James “Fergie” Chambers, 38, is also donating a $24,000 check he received from New York City — part of a payout to about 1,300 Black Lives Matters protesters — “to Palestine.”
“The City of New York has paid me and 300+ others $24k each, for beating us & detaining us w out rights in the Bronx, during the 2020 George Floyd rebellion[.] I would like @NYCMayor Eric Adams, former chief pig and major Zionist, to know that this money is going to Palestine,” Chambers tweeted on Jan. 5.
He has called on US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to be hanged “for crimes against humanity” and tweeted that “If you are not unequivocally for the total annihilation of Israel your soul is rotten.”
Chambers, who attended Bard College, where his father now chairs the board, is currently living in Tunisia and learning Quranic Arabic as part of what he calls his “reversion” to Islam.
He’s there with his Jewish partner, 40-year-old former downtown scenester Stella Schnabel, the daughter of artist Julian Schnabel, and their son Victor, 2.
He is the first-born son of James Cox Chambers, the co-owner of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks who has a net worth of $5.65 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
After divorcing Chambers’ mother, artist Lauren Hamilton, Cox Chambers went on to marry the daughter of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.
Chambers told The Post that many members of his family, which includes socialite Katherine Rayner, are “sociopaths.”
“I’m not saying my mother is but I have issues with how she raised me,” he said. “But many of the rest of them are, and I include those who made all the [family] money.”
His father did not return phone calls from The Post.
Chambers has come under fire in the US where he’s been portrayed as a cop-hating Communist out to get the capitalist forces which led to the success of his family, reportedly the eighth-richest in the country.
He has also been accused of building a Communist militia, in the Alford area of Berkshires, called the Berkshire Communists.
The Berkshire Eagle newspaper first sounded the alarm on Chambers and what he calls his “comrades” in November, calling him a “pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian gun owner.”
The Eagle reported that county residents are afraid of Chambers and his group because of his tweets and unapologetic, anti-American, anti-Israel statements, both in real life and online, and have sent screenshots of his posts to newsrooms and nearby police departments.
(Chambers is also vehemently anti-police and wants them defunded.)
Berkshire District Attorney Timothy Shugrue told the State Police Detective Unit that’s assigned to his office to “continue to keep him abreast of the situation,” the Eagle reported.
In response to the public concern, Shugrue responded with a statement that “strongly condemned those who spew hate rhetoric in our community.”
The name for the Berkshire Communists’ funding arm is the Babochki collective and it is being run by the group’s secretary, Paige Belanger, in his absence, Chambers said. “She definitely doesn’t have any guns,” he added.
The Post has reached out to Belanger for comment.
Chambers added that he barely owns any guns and that he is not building an armed camp in the Berkshires.
“No one is raising a militia in Alford,” he told The Post.
As for accusations of antisemitism: “We have Jewish members and Jewish residents, who despise Zionism, even its liberal shades, more than anyone.”
Local residents in Alford have been rattled by Chambers’ rhetoric.
“The United States is & has always been completely irredeemable & indefensible,” Chambers wrote on X Sunday. “The most gorgeous souls, the greatest notions born within its prison walls, since the Anglo occupation began, have shone so brightly only in spite of it and in resistance to it. Never be a part of it.”
The Free Press recently visited Chambers at his sometime home in New Hampshire, which he openly admits is his address for tax purposes, and also spoke to some Alford, Mass., residents who said Chambers and some of the people who live on his 300-acre property there are like a “mob” or a “cult” with “Fergie playing the dual role of guru and sugar daddy.”
Chambers said referring to him as a cult leader was “beyond insane,” adding, “Westerners are obsessed with cults of individual. I am no one’s leader. I was lucky enough to fall into a lot of resources and some smart people with clear ideas and I’ve tried to share that and make use of it. I would never take myself seriously enough to be a ‘guru.'”
Pro-Palestinian activist Calla Walsh chained herself to the entrance Israeli-based weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems’ Cambridge, Mass., office, in October along with Chambers and Berlager,
“The onslaught of hit pieces about Fergie, and ridiculous fabrications like the ‘Berkshire County people’s militia’ show how scared the ruling class is that one of their own has become a genuine class traitor,” Walsh told The Post Monday.
Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises was founded in 1898 by Chambers’ great-grandfather, former Ohio Gov. James M. Cox, who made an unsuccessful run for president in 1920 against Warren G. Harding before going on to build his industrial empire.
The powerful conglomerate has grown to include Cox Communications, the nation’s third-largest cable company, and businesses such as Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book and Valpak.
The family fortune built by Gov. Cox was bequeathed to his two daughters, Barbara and Anne, Chambers’ grandmother.
Before Anne died at 100 in January 2020, she distributed her shares to her three children, including James Cox Chambers, who reportedly owns a 17% stake in Cox Enterprises.
Chambers, who studied at St. Petersburg State University in Russia and has tattoos of both Stalin and Mao, is a fan of the Soviet Union and Communist China but not of the US.
“I am singularly opposed to every armed wing of the US empire,” Chambers told The Post. “It’s an evil, murderous, thieving, genocidal idea and every element of it ought to be deconstructed.”
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