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Idavox has learned investigative reporter, author, and activist Chip Berlet has died at 76. Long before Trump, Berlet was one of only a handful of figures who consistently tracked and organized against right-wing extremism from the 1970s and into the ‘10s. He was also a journalist, scholar and photographer, mentor, and co-founder of the think tank Political Research Associates.
Although universally known simply as “Chip,” he was born John Foster Berlet in November 1949 in Hackensack, New Jersey. He attended the University of Denver, where he helped organize anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and worked with the underground press, but dropped out in 1971 before completing his degree. He later moved to Chicago’s Marquette Park to work against neo-Nazis who were leading the neighborhood’s resistance to desegregation. He first infiltrated their group, and then openly counter-organized against them. After talking to local ministers, he saw a need to change tactics in order to protect Black families from being firebombed out of their homes and protect them. Eventually, the White supremacists were driven out of Marquette Park, and today it is a predominantly Black and Brown neighborhood.
In 1976, Berlet was a paralegal at the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), where he and other staffers revealed a network of right-wing groups collecting information about liberal movements and organizations. The following year, the NLG sued the National Security Agency, the CIA, the FBI, and the U.S. military, resulting in the release of 300,000 pages of documents chronicling fifteen years of COINTELPRO, which focused on disrupting left-wing movements.
In 1981, Berlet published his first major article on right-wing extremism, which was an exposé on crypto-fascist Lyndon LaRouche, who later unsuccessfully sued Berlet. In 1985, he founded the Public Eye BBS, one of the first to counter the White supremacist bulletin boards that littered the early internet. This and other efforts made Berlet a go-to person on information about neo-fascism in the United States, and his influence spread from militant antifascists to the Justice Department. His writings on the militia movement influenced the Clinton administration’s response to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing—and that same year he spoke at the Anti-Racist Action (ARA) national gathering.
I am incredibly sad to relay the news that that Chip Berlet has passed on. Chip was one of the key figures—not that there was much competition—watching and organizing against the U.S. Far Right from the 1980s into the 2010s.
I got to know Chip quite well over the years. I met him in 2007 or 2008 while he was still Senior Researcher at the think tank he co-founded, Political Research Associates (PRA). Through his recommendation, PRA published my first important article on the Far Right, “Rebranding Fascism: National-Anarchists.” And so I blame him entirely for dragging me into the sordid world of Far Right watching! After he was fired from PRA in a 2012 purge, I was one of the people tapped to be a Fellow, where we acted as temps to replace the intellectual ballast that had been thrown overboard. (I did ask Chip first, and he gave me his blessing.) I kept this affiliation from 2013 to 2019 while increasingly working with Chip, as PRA was largely useless. He gave me a lot of good advice, and we became friends.
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