‘Forest Defenders’ Had Financial Backing from a Millionaire Communist

Let me just say up front that millionaire communists are my favorite kind of communists. I enjoy the way they slum it with their blue-collar comrades and then give lengthy interviews to leftist magazines bragging about spending their inherited wealth for the cause and basically bigging themselves up as the most radical of radicals.. 

Fergie Chambers is a descendant of the billionaire Cox family. In the past six months there have been at least two feature articles about him and his funding of various fashionable leftist causes. The first one appeared last October in LA Magazine:

The 38-year-old self-described Communist confirmed to Los Angeles magazine in an interview this week that some of his wealth is paying the legal fees for members of Palestine Action. The activist group targets Israeli defense contractors and has recently opened a chapter in the United States. 

“I chant death to America every day. Imperialism is the death of humanity,” Chambers tells Los Angeles.

Chambers is funding his activism with part of his inheritance, negotiated when he broke away from his family this past summer.

Yesterday a much lengthier profile appeared in Mother Jones. This one focuses on his funding of the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta:

…in 2023, Georgia state troopers killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, an activist known as Tortuguita, who had taken up residence at the planned facility’s wooded site hoping to block construction. Outraged by Tortuguita’s death, organizers supercharged efforts to put the project up for a voter referendum in the fall. More radical protesters allegedly have damaged construction equipment and thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails at police cars; 42 are currently facing state domestic terrorism charges. In August, 61 opponents of the project were indicted under Georgia’s RICO law—the same broad anti-racketeering measure behind Trump’s Fulton county election interference case.

The protesters, meanwhile, have doubled down, sending teams out to collect signatures for the ballot measure, chartering buses to pack events, and hiring lawyers to defend those facing charges. This kind of activism doesn’t come cheap—but luckily for the protesters, they have a deep-pocketed ally: Fergie Chambers, a 39-year-old self-proclaimed communist with a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars…

Chambers estimates he’s donated “a couple million dollars” in the last year to groups opposing the very facility that high-profile members of his family want to be built. Not only has he financially supported signature gathering for the referendum, he’s sponsored buses to shuttle protesters to the site, and contributed “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to funds that paid for bail and lawyers for those who had been arrested.

While the broader Cox family’s political reputation is squarely centrist, Chambers’ is somewhere in the vicinity of Chairman Mao. When we spoke—after a few weeks of phone tag that involved me missing some pre-dawn calls back from Chambers—he seemed to relish defying mainstream orthodoxy, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “one of the better statesmen of our century,” and describing Hamas’ October 7 attack as “a moment of hope and inspiration for tens of millions of people.” While he denies a recent claim in Los Angeles Magazine that he chants “death to America” every day, he allows that the idea is more or less true. “I think the most important thing for the prosperity of humanity is the destruction of the US,” he told me.

The funding part of it seems simple enough but the rest of his life is enough to give you whiplash. Married three times, divorced twice, he’s lived in New York, in Georgia and in Russia. He’s been a college student, a gym owner, a commune founder and now seems to spend most of his time being a professional radical on X. But his activism may also have created some potential legal problems. Fortunately, his wealth allowed him to escape any consequences. While his comrades are facing RICO charges, Fergie has moved to Tunisia (at least that’s what he says).

When I asked him in December if I could join him at an Atlanta protest event sometime, he told me that would be unlikely; he had moved to Tunisia. “I just needed to take a break,” he told me. “Elements of people who call themselves the left and the state want to come after me.”

Specifically, he thinks the FBI may have been looking at him. And why not? He’s funding a group that uses threats and arson across multiple states to achieve their political goals and he’s said explicitly he wants to bring down the United States. I certainly hope the FBI was looking at him.

Sadly, his “forest defender” comrades weren’t as thrilled with the article about Fergie as he probably imagined they would be. They wrote a thread trashing it today.

FALSE: “state troopers killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán…who had taken up residence at the planned facility’s wooded site”

TRUE: Tort was killed in a public park adjacent to the site, in broad daylight, during legal park hours.

— Defend the Atlanta Forest/Stop Cop City (@defendATLforest) March 22, 2024

I get the impression they weren’t thrilled with the idea their group was well funded. Doesn’t fit the image.

FALSE: “This kind of activism doesn’t come cheap”

TRUE: Nearly all organizing in the movement has been done for free by grassroots volunteers and community members donating their time and personal resources.

— Defend the Atlanta Forest/Stop Cop City (@defendATLforest) March 22, 2024

FALSE: “A poll last year showed that a majority of the state’s voters—and 43 percent of Democrats—support the facility.”

TRUE: Rival polls show opposing statistics. Regardless, another way to say what they are trying to say is that a majority of Democrats oppose Cop City.

— Defend the Atlanta Forest/Stop Cop City (@defendATLforest) March 22, 2024

They also didn’t like the suggestion in the article that their extremist behavior might help reelect Trump.

FALSE: “The “kind of rhetoric” from the most strident protesters, he said, “is something that might get Trump reelected.””

TRUE: Dems have failed to deliver on almost all of their promises and are conducting a record number of deportations while rents soar. They can’t blame us.

— Defend the Atlanta Forest/Stop Cop City (@defendATLforest) March 22, 2024

But mostly they seemed upset by the money thing.

FALSE: “If the protesters were going to win, they needed more people on their side. And if they wanted more people, they needed more money”

TRUE: While $ makes some things easier, its no shortcut. Our movement, & most freedom movements in history, are led solely by poor people.

— Defend the Atlanta Forest/Stop Cop City (@defendATLforest) March 22, 2024

This is a bit sad, really. Two million dollars doesn’t buy as many radical friends as it used to.

Yeah I knee jerk reacted sort of positively to this, simply bc she didn’t skewer me how others in the press have before, but upon further glance there are some bad narratives in here.

Not least of all, the notion that I’ve “bankrolled the protests.” Give me a break.

— Fergie Chambers 🇵🇸🇷🇺🇾🇪🇹🇳 (@jccfergie) March 22, 2024