The Fox News headline is attention-getting: FBI snares an American heir indicted for allegedly bankrolling anti-cop, pro-Hamas communist revolution. So too is the lede: “The Justice Department and FBI have a new communist financier in their crosshairs for alleged financial crimes: James "Fergie" Cox Chambers Jr., the estranged bad-boy heir to the Cox cable empire.”
Spanish police, we learn, “… detained Chambers on the luxury
island of Ibiza, in response to an international arrest warrant, according to
sources. Chambers is allegedly wanted for money laundering and providing
support to Hamas, following years of financing anti-Israel and anti-West
organizations and protests. The transnational network he helped fund and
support is kicking in to cast him as a victim of the Trump administration's ‘fascism,’
while critics are cheering the arrest as long overdue.”
Where else but on a “luxury island” should one expect to
find a billionaire bad boy? And “Fergie” has been very bad indeed, but he will
not be among the billionaires regularly taunted by leftist progressives as
greedy redundantly wealthy capitalists who, they suppose, stuff their billions
under their pillows at night and sleep of the just after a hard day’s work grinding the faces of
the poor in the dirt.
Fergie is not that kind of capitalist. He is a George Soros
capitalist, a man full of odd and treacherous twists and turns.
His Stakhanovite ideological posturing has insured Fergie against
recriminations from leftist saints such as Mayor of New York City Zohran
Mamdani and socialist front-man U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont who, may
it be never be forgotten, spent “his honeymoon” with his honey in the Soviet
Union shortly after the two were wed in 1988, the year Mikhail Gorbachev became
general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee.
The Sanders visit, fact-checkers tell us, was not in fact a
honeymoon, although Bernie described the trip as “a very strange honeymoon,”
possibly a failed attempt at humor. Humor and Sanders are strangers to one
another. The 10 day trip was “a mission to establish a sister‑city
relationship between Burlington, Vermont, and Yaroslavl, Russia.” The city, northeast of Moscow on the Volga
River, was founded by Yaroslvl the Wise, a prince of Kievan Rus when he ruled
the Principality of Rostov from 988-1010. History is full of ironic smirks and
scowls. The name Russia is derived from the medieval state of Kievian Rus,
founded by Scandinavian Vikings. When Moscow was a rude wooden fort, Kiev was a
flourishing center of trade, which gives the lie to Vladimir Putin’s assurance
that Ukraine, the capital of which is Kiev, “is not even a country.”
Communist bad boy Fergie was arrested in Spain in response
to an extradition request from the United States Department of Justice relating
to his financial support for Palestinian causes. His estranged family described
the extradition as “politically motivated.”
The great-grandson of James M. Cox -- a former Ohio
governor, 1920 Democratic presidential nominee and founder of the media company
that became Cox Enterprises, estimated worth $27 billion -- Chambers walked
away “from the company in 2023 after a falling out with his family over the
company's support for Atlanta's controversial public safety training center,
known by critics as ‘Cop City,’” according to Fox News. “In April, a grand jury
indicted three alleged Antifa-linked protesters accused of throwing firebombs
at the general contractor of the Atlanta police training center. Chambers
openly redirected his fortune into communist collectives, bail and legal
underwriting and groups engaged in hard-edged protest and property disruption.
A convert to Islam, Chambers represents the fusion of socialist and communist
activists with Islamist interests that seek the destruction of the West, free
enterprise and the state of Israel and the rise of political Islam, communism
and a new Palestinian state.”
This guy checks all the boxes: heir to a capitalist fortune,
amateur revolutionist estranged from his
insufferable granddaddy, the co-founder of the Cox Empire; a recent
convert to Islam; a novice communist agitator insured against the contumely of
the sort of socialists responsible for electing to office Mayor of New York
City Zohran Mamdani, a member in good standing of the (Democratic Socialists of
America) conventicle, noisy and anti-democratic. The DSA program calls for the
abolition of the U.S. Senate, the popular election of Supreme Court Justices
and, like notable progressive former President Woodrow Wilson, the DSA camp
believes the provisions of the U.S.
Constitution should be no more binding than state statutes.
This world view is not a giant step forward for mankind.
Hardly progressive at all, it is a retreat to the pre-democratic barbarism of
the usual failed authoritarian progressive/communist state, efficient only in
emptying grocery shelves and assigning disagreeable professors and independent
journalists to prisons and gulags. Both Feodor Dostoevsky during the reign of Czar
Nicholas I and Solzhenitsyn during the reign of Czar Joseph Stalin were
committed to political prisons and gulags, defining features of the socialist
state.
Each of the pictures accompanying the Fox News story is
worth more than a thousand words. One shows Fergie, a telltale keffiyeh draping
his neck, cavorting with his two dogs in Tunis, Tunisia. Dogs as house pets are
frowned upon in Islam households, as are insincere American converts to Islam. Malcolm
X was warmly welcomed by those attending the Hajj in Medina, but the
honorable Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X’s New York Imam before Medina opened his eyes, was regarded as little more
than an amusing joke.
Apart from Fergie’s millions, Platner and Fergie have a
great deal in common. Both sport Nazi
prison camp guard tattoos; both are self-confessed admirers of Stalin-like
communism; both claim to be working-class (proletariat?) supporters when, in
reality, both are bourgeoisie to the bone. Platner, like Fergie, is a child of
privilege. Planter’s father, a lawyer who attended Dartmouth, served as an
assistant district attorney in Maine. His grandfather was an architect. His
mother’s restaurant was his chief “oyster farming” customer.
Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle puts it this way:
“The fact that he [Platner] was cast as a man of the people by elites, while
the working class rejected him, seems kind of emblematic of the whole progressive
project right now.” McArdle called Platner “a rich person’s idea of a poor
person,” according to a quotable piece in the Washington Examiner – “Working-Class
Zeroes: Radical socialist Democrats pretend to be blue-collar allies.”
One imagines that the socialist welcoming committee, once
Fergie arrives for trial in the United States, will be headed by the usual
American socialist/communist front men and women – Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC), the political corpse of Graham Platner -- and the usual tinny
left leaning journalist brass band.
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