The $250 million Maoist revolutionary
Fergie Chambers, heir to a media fortune, wants to tear down capitalism by any means necessary, said Suzy Weiss in The Free Press. Neighbors of his Massachusetts commune are scared.
NESTLED INTO THE mountains of the Upper Valley in New Hampshire, up a semi-paved road in a house next to a tiny cemetery lined with white picket fencing, Fergie Chambers, 38, leans over his kitchen island, worrying over his commune.
“It feels like we’re throwing the same half-assed solutions at this over and over again and hoping it will yield something different,” he groans into his iPhone, which is on speaker. Fergie’s slight, but buff, on account of his multiple-times-a-day martial arts training and competitions. His hair is cut short. A silver boxing glove dangles from one of his ears. He is covered in tattoos, including a double portrait of Stalin and Mao inked onto his thigh. He looks as if the phrase “F--- you, Mom and Dad” were a person.
I offer my hand to a wheezing bulldog named Madison while Fergie talks over the phone to his employee in Alford, Mass.—the tiny Berkshires town where he’s bought 300 acres since 2019. Around 10 people live there at any given time. But he’s unclear—with me, possibly with himself—on what that place is exactly.
It’s a commune. It’s a “liberatory training space.” It’s a housing collective meets agricultural collective. It’s where the People’s Gym (“free for working-class people and permanently closed to cops, active military, landlords, and capitalists”) is located. It’s where the journal Combat Liberalism is based. It’s the headquarters for the Berkshire Communists group, which Fergie started. It’s where the Babochki Collective, the funding arm of all of Fergie’s projects, sometimes meets.
Fergie’s the general secretary of the Berkshire Communists, which describes itself as a “revolutionary Marxist-Leninist collective, aiming to promote the formation of a powerful workers’ party.” But the urgent issue this late summer afternoon is that 16 comrades have descended on Alford for a weekend retreat, and it’s been pouring rain. The canvas tents they pitched on the property are letting in water. A skylight in one of the six houses there is leaking. The punching bags in the barn turned gym are in the wrong place.
“It’s just that, I spent a lot of money so this would be done right the first time,” Fergie says, exasperated. Today, at least, the revolution requires $50 stall mats from Tractor Supply Co. to line the floors of the tents and keep out moisture.
Then, he changes his tune. He apologizes— “I’m sorry I freaked out about the gym”— and then Fergie’s employee reminds him that when he drives over to the property tomorrow, not to forget the boxes of beekeeping equipment that were accidentally delivered to his house here, in New Hampshire.
“Right. I’ll probably forget them,” Fergie says.
“Well, I forgive you in advance.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he tells her. “You can hold it against me forever.”
He’s talking about the boxes, of course. But he could also be talking about the stupendous amount of money in his possession.
FERGIE CHAMBERS, AN avowed communist since the age of 13, wants everyone to hold it against him forever that he is heir to an enormous fortune. And he’s willing to go to enormous lengths to tear down the mechanisms—capitalism, imperialism, liberalism, the rule of law, America—that delivered it into his lap.
That struggle has taken him from the charming cobblestone streets of his Brooklyn childhood to the mountains of upstate New York to the lake country region of Georgia to the Donbas region of Ukraine and now back to the woods of the American Northeast, where locals say that his radical political organizing has taken a menacing turn, especially when it comes to the Jewish state on which he’s uniquely fixated.
“Make Zionists afraid,” Fergie wrote in a post on his Instagram on Nov. 15. In another he wrote: “We need to start making people who support Israel actually afraid to go out in public. We need to make all of white America afraid that everything they have stolen is going to be burned to the ground. That’s what makes them listen.”
Great Barrington, Mass., the larger town that abuts Alford, has been called the “best small town in America.” But there’s a deep and growing tension there since Covid brought an influx of second-home owners, driving home prices through the roof. There are very liberal colleges with very liberal students who want to take the theories they learn in the classroom into the streets. And then there’s Fergie, with hundreds of millions of dollars, eager to make it all go boom.
“If he was just a kook, that would be one thing,” a father in Great Barrington told me. “If he was just a gun-toting communist, that would be one thing. If he was just a millionaire, who liked to host young people and put a roof over their head and train them and indoctrinate them, that would be one thing. But it’s a completely different ball game when we’re talking about someone from a family that is arguably not only the richest in the county but maybe richer than the whole county put together.”
Until very recently, by dint of his birth, Fergie owned a percentage of Cox Enterprises, a planet-spanning megacorporation and the third-largest private cable provider in the U.S. Over 50,000 people work there. The fact the Coxes still own the company outright makes them the eighth-richest family in America, with a net worth around $34 billion.
It’s as if the Murdochs had double the money. But instead of Australia, they’re from America, and instead of conservative, they’re all—except for Fergie and a lone Republican aunt whom no one talks to— establishment Democrats.
In the fall of 2022, Alex Cox, Fergie’s cousin and the CEO of Cox Enterprises, called Fergie and offered a compelling proposition. Though part of the deal is that he can’t get into exact amounts or how many shares he sold with a reporter, Fergie tells me that he received north of $250 million, which is likely less than he would’ve gotten if he’d stayed entwined with the company—he says they paid him 30 cents on the dollar per share.
But still, a quarter of a billion dollars. He was given half of that earlier this summer, and the rest will be doled out over the next 14 years. “I had money before. I had a lot of money,” he says, “but I didn’t have A LOTTA money.” The question now was: “What the hell was he planning on doing with it?”
FERGIE’S NEW HAMPSHIRE house, where he spends the lion’s share of his time, is modern: no walls, all blond wood and sweeping views of the wet mountains bursting with late-summer green. The bookshelf is stacked high with dozens of copies of The Communist Manifesto and Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China. There’s a framed picture of Fidel Castro above a mini fridge cooling raw milk. A shotgun hangs on bike hooks along one of the rafters.
Fergie is pulling espresso shots on a nearly $6,000 Italian coffee machine when his older daughter, Anne Margaret Chambers, 14, with a neck full of hickeys and wearing a ripped Pierce the Veil concert T-shirt, trips up the stairs from the basement to make herself two cheese quesadillas. Fergie’s other two kids from his first marriage, Nadya and James, live with their mother in Atlanta.
In addition to Fergie and Anne, Stella Schnabel, 39—daughter of the painter Julian, sister of the art dealer Vito—Fergie’s on-off partner, lives here, along with the pair’s 2-year-old son, Viktor Gonzo Cox Schnabel Chambers. They’re all still getting their bearings in New Hampshire. They only moved here from Alford this past January for its lax gun laws and low tax burden, after Fergie decided to cash out.
“I don’t want to pay taxes to Uncle Sam,” Fergie tells me. “Objectively, somebody like me should pay almost all of their money in taxes, but if I can legally evade giving that to the U.S. war machine, I will.”
It’s Wednesday, and Fergie is rolling joints in the kitchen. Stella—statuesque, in leggings, and with her dark hair in a bun, just back from a month in the Hamptons with their son—is directing a team of movers who are shuffling around plush jewelgreen sofas that were trucked up from her Brooklyn storage unit.
Fergie’s always tended to gravitate toward the hard stuff. Combat sports. Guns. He takes his steak raw, slathered with raw honey and butter. He tells me that he was shooting up heroin at 14, sobered up by 16, but then at 18 he was cooking crack in the shared kitchen at the dorms at Bard College. He was asked to take a leave of absence for the crack incident. After a booze-and-drugs binge 10 years later, in 2013, he was arrested on domestic battery charges.
He has a tattoo on his face. It’s a lightning bolt with an arrow on the end of it, a keepsake from a moment during a mushroom trip he had during a blizzard at the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 2016. “It was like revolutionary suicide,” he says. “There was no question that I’ll be doing this to the death.”
EVEN MORE THAN imperialism, liberalism, idealism, capitalism, the cops, the 12 steps, psychopharmacology, his dad, and America—all of which he despises—Fergie hates Israel. The war that broke out on Oct. 7 when Hamas attacked Israeli civilians gave him the perfect opportunity to put his money where his mouth is—to let the world know where he stood on the Jewish state. Mostly, the world has meant his neighbors in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
People around town have known about Fergie for as long as he’s been here. There was a separate protest in 2021, during the last bout of violence between Hamas and Israel, where comrades held up signs that read “Death to Amerikkka,” which raised eyebrows. But the Great Barringtonians I speak to say they’re more scared than they’ve ever been since a rally he organized in town on Oct. 10. “I didn’t feel personally threatened until that rally,” one neighbor tells me.
At that rally, Fergie and the Berkshire Communists held signs that read “End all U.S. aid to Israel” and “Israel and U.S.A. = Terrorists.” When asked by a reporter at The Berkshire Edge if he supported Hamas, Fergie answered in the affirmative: “Yes,” and added, “Hamas is an indigenous anticolonial resistance group.” How about the specific events on Oct. 7, where 1,200 people were murdered, women raped, and others burned alive? “The Al-Aqsa Flood was a powerful statement of resistance to genocide,” he said.
“This just changes everything. It just changes everything,” one neighbor says of Fergie’s posture toward Hamas. She told me she feels threatened by him—and scared. “The idea that everything is justified? Well, then, what does that mean for your neighbors, like what’s justified?” She adds, “How many guns does he have stockpiled here in Alford?”
“This is life or death,” says another community member, who has beefed up security at his own house—he’s purchased cameras, floodlights, a dog—since Fergie arrived on the scene. “He’s got enough money to ruin my life. I have a business, I have a family that I love,” he says. “I just want a comfortable, quiet life.”
For his part, Fergie posted a message directly on Instagram to Great Barrington residents who feel threatened by him: “You are rich white [E]uropean settlers in a cultural resort town.” The working class are “coming for you one day soon,” Fergie predicted, and once that happens, “There won’t ever be enough cops to call.”