It’s Wednesday, July 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Why Bernard-Henri Lévy won’t surrender history. Debating the DSA’s insurgency. A letter to the former head of PEN America. And much more.
But first: How Fergie Chambers landed in a Spanish jail.
Back in August 2023, I traveled up to the Berkshires to meet Jim Chambers, known as Fergie, an avowed communist and an heir to the Cox family fortune. Fergie had just taken a massive advance on his inheritance, to the tune of a quarter-billion dollars, and he was gaming out how to distribute it: to the fight against a police training campus in Atlanta, to set up a dojo of sorts for young Marxist-Leninists, and generally to undo the empire that had brought his family such stupefying fortune.
Since I spent a day and a half with Chambers—driving around his gorgeous properties in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, picking up weed, listening while he lectured his daughter about the importance of class struggle, that sort of thing—a couple of things have changed.
First, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and with it, Fergie found his ultimate cause. After a year or so of anti-Zionist campaigning stateside, which included getting arrested at a protest and footing the bail for his acolytes, like the radical activist Calla Walsh, Fergie became a Muslim and moved to Tunisia.
Then, this week, he was arrested in Ibiza at the request of the U.S. government, which has allegedly charged Chambers with funding terror groups. He is awaiting extradition in a Spanish jail. I’ve been keeping tabs on Chambers via Instagram. He seemed to be settling into his new life in Tunisia—funding a local soccer team, going to pray, and posting on his Instagram about how eager he is to see the imperial core fall.
His arrest—Spain has 40 days to decide whether to honor America’s extradition request—may be the only thing that could have stopped Chambers’ endless, wild campaign both to reinvent himself and bring everyone else along for the ride. Read Jay Solomon’s deep dive into Fergie Chambers’ strange journey in the months after I profiled him, and what might happen next.
—Suzy Weiss
Far-left candidates are toppling safe Democratic incumbents in primaries across the country. Is their ideology communism, as Trump says? Democratic socialism, as the candidates say? Third Worldism? Generational economic rage? We asked a range of contributors—including Natan Sharansky, Victor Davis Hanson, and Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara—to weigh in. They disagree on what to call it, but nearly all agree what’s happening now will define the party’s future. Read differing views on today’s Democratic Party and where it goes from here.
PEN America, a literary organization founded to champion free speech, exists to defend writers. This month, its president quit to protest a report documenting how Israeli and Jewish writers have been pushed out of literary life since October 7. William Kolbrener, one of the writers interviewed for the report, responds in this open letter. “You cannot defend free expression,” he writes, “by declaring that a whole body of writers never really spoke.” Read the whole thing here.
Last week, Niall Ferguson and John-Clark Levin argued in our pages that historians have lost the battle against antisemitism. AI, algorithms, and the mainstreaming of Holocaust denial have made truth essentially powerless, they wrote. Bernard-Henri Lévy disagrees. The French intellectual argues that the post-truth world we live in is nothing new, having been born in ancient Athens rather than Silicon Valley, and that the defenders of truth have been tempted to surrender in every era only to prevail. Read BHL on why the world’s oldest hatred may be winning battles, but it has not won the war.
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New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill said Tuesday that 6,600 noncitizens were registered to vote in the state by a malfunctioning DMV software system, and that 400 of them cast ballots in recent elections. Sherrill said the problem had been identified under her predecessor, fellow Democrat Phil Murphy, but never publicly disclosed.
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A federal appeals court rejected Joe Biden’s attempt to block the publication of interviews he gave his biographer in 2016 and 2017, finding disclosure “is likely to advance the public interest.” A final decision has been pushed to August 3 while Biden’s attorneys weigh further appeals.
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France’s parliament passed legislation that would ban social media access for users under 15 and prohibit cellphones in the nation’s high schools. President Emmanuel Macron has backed the measures.
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New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, who said repeatedly on the campaign trail last year that he would order the NYPD to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, admitted Tuesday that he did not have the power to do so. The admission came at the end of a two-minute video in which Mamdani repeatedly denounced Netanyahu as a “war criminal.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story referred to a property owned by Fergie Chambers as being in upstate New York. It is in Massachusetts. This has been updated. The Free Press regrets the error.
New York City’s moral and intellectual decay will soon be followed by an économic and societal implosion brought on by this idiot Mondami and those like him. This will be graphic example to the rest of the nation. People who never built anything nor employed anybody will never rise to a level of greatness Bernie Sanders is a shining example. Simply a bothersome gadfly.
There is something revealing about using a quarter-billion-dollar inheritance to build a movement against concentrated wealth. The problem is not that a wealthy man is forbidden from criticizing capitalism. The question is whether he is surrendering power—or simply using his fortune to decide which revolution everyone else should live under. And because the criminal allegations remain allegations, truth requires us to wait for evidence before declaring guilt.