In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce James “Fergie” Chambers, an American communist, tankie and heir to the Cox fortune. He’s best known for bankrolling revolutionary causes, cheering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and supporting Hamas.

Chambers is a great-grandson of Cox founder James M. Cox. He financed opposition to Atlanta’s “Cop City,” which his family’s company backed, and set up the Babochki Collective to fund his causes.

“Babochki” is Russian for “butterflies.”

In 2023, Chambers cashed out his stake in the Cox family business for a reported $250 million. He promised to use the money for socialist and anti-imperialist causes.

Capitalism had supplied the revolution with a generous starting budget.

If you didn’t think Hasan Piker was ridiculous enough, Fergie’s an even more “serious” leftist: he moved to New Hampshire for its low taxes.

A quarter-billion dollars for revolution is apparently no reason to contribute more than necessary to any social redistribution. The communist heir had picked the libertarians’ promised land: for the same reason, New Hampshire is also home to the Free State Project (FSP), a libertarian movement encouraging activists for low taxes & more freedom to move there and concentrate their political influence.

The New Hampshire Libertarian Party (LPNH) is infamous for its provocative, racist rants, and for its Kremlintarianism — admirers of Putin LARPing as freedom-lovers. The FSP itself also sponsored “Rage Against the War Machine,” a tankie-Kremlintarian pro-war rally.

In Massachusetts, Fergie led the Berkshire Communists and ran the Berkshire People’s Gym (sic). The group mixed political education with combat sports. Its Instagram warned that cops and landlords were unwelcome; Fergie was the group’s General Secretary.

A Marxist-Leninist with Stalin and Mao tattoos and a self-described tankie, Chambers told Rolling Stone that his goal is to dissolve the US government and end the US empire. A fairly ambitious agenda for a family fortune.

He frequently calls Putin “a great man”. Anti-imperialism had found its favourite imperialist army:

In 2022, he travelled to the Donbas to report on people who welcomed Russian forces: “The only thing anyone’s angry at Putin about there is that he didn’t intervene sooner.”

Even Russian state media doesn’t believe that shit anymore:

In April 2022, he interviewed Russian Communist Party official Roman Kononenko, who denied Ukraine was independent and demanded its military defeat. “Toward Freedom” made the defeat demand its headline.

His May 2022 report for Toward Freedom cast Bucha atrocities as unverified allegations and said no independent inquiry had taken place. He presented the conflict as US/EU/NATO aggression against Russia.

Human Rights Watch had already published its Bucha field investigation on 21 April, documenting nine apparent summary executions by Russian forces. The evidence existed more than a month before Chambers’s article appeared.

He wrote on Telegram that he’d appeared on RT to discuss the myth of Western democracy. In September 2023, he described Ukrainian territory taken by Russian/DPR forces as “liberated.”

His family asked him to pledge to leave the family business if he returned to Russia.

Asked in October 2023 if he supported Hamas’s October 7 attack, Chambers told The Berkshire Edge that he did. He portrayed it as resistance to genocide and denied there was compelling evidence that civilians had been deliberately targeted.

In fact, Human Rights Watch’s investigation documented deliberate attacks on civilians during the Hamas-led assault. UN investigators found evidence of sexual abuse during the attacks and against hostages in captivity.

Nine-month-old Kfir Bibas and his four-year-old brother Ariel were kidnapped to Gaza. Both died in captivity; their bodies were returned in February 2025.

Hamas also murders Palestinians. Its former leader Yahya Sinwar was known as the “Butcher of Khan Younis”, not for killing Jews or Israelis, but for killing Palestinians.

October 7 also led to a devastating war that killed many Palestinians: nothing to celebrate there.

Chambers helped found Palestine Action US after October 7 and paid activists’ legal costs. In November, members targeted Elbit Systems in Merrimack, NH, damaging the Israeli defence contractor’s building. He posted bail for the arrested activists, including Calla Walsh.

Calla Walsh, a Babochki member who has organised with CODEPINK, shares Chambers’s taste for dictators and oppression. She’s praised Hamas as “heroic freedom fighters” and argued that “Woman, Life, Freedom” succeeding in Iran would be bad.

Of course, she’s not an Iranian woman who has to actually live under that oppressive, patriarchal regime.

Basiji Soup

She’s an American who can just travel to Tehran, admire Shahed suicide drones, call for “death to America”, and… return to America.



 

After the Merrimack action, Chambers moved to Tunisia. On 10 July 2026, Spanish police arrested him in Ibiza following a US extradition request. His lawyer told CNN the sealed case included money laundering, riot and conspiracy to riot.

He remains jailed in Spain pending an extradition decision. Spanish court records describe US allegations that he conspired with Iran to support Hamas. A caricature of the campist rich kid, Fergie uses inherited privilege to champion the subjugation of Ukrainians and calls it “liberation”.

Anti-imperialism

His “anti-imperialism” amounts to cheering for dictators and terrorists as long as they oppose the West.

And of course, Putin is a billionaire oligarch too. A tankie’s idea of class solidarity.

The Kremlin spends $5 billion a year on propaganda to manufacture support for its wars, while wealthy tankies like Fergie chip in too, throwing their free time & family money toward the same goal. Fact-based research to counter their BS is crucial — please support our work.

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