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Chip Berlet

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File:King berlet.jpg
Chip Berlet (right) with Dennis King

John Foster "Chip" Berlet is senior analyst at Political Research Associates — a 20 year old progressive think tank with a staff of eight which specializes in researching the political right and tracking and analyzing right-wing movements and government intelligence abuse. He has published articles in publications ranging from Radical America, Overthrow, and High Times, to the New York Times and Boston Globe. He has appeared live on ABC’s Nightline, NBC’s Today Show, and CBS This Morning. He has been interviewed on scores of other national and local television and radio news programs and talk shows, including NPR’s All Things Considered, Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, David Barsamian’s Alternative Radio, and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now.

Berlet began his activism in the civil rights movement through the Presbyterian Church in the mid-1960s, and later became involved in the antiwar movement. In the 1970s he was an editor at College Press Service and later was a magazine editor at the National Student Association, but this was several years after it was exposed as a CIA front, not before, as wrongly claimed by Lyndon LaRouche supporters. Berlet became interested in government intelligence abuse and covert action while researching FBI spying and disruption of the Alternative Press for the Underground Press Syndicate where he served on the board of directors. During the late 1970s Berlet was the Washington, D.C. bureau chief of High Times magazine.

Berlet gained a reputation during the 1970s and 1980s as a researcher into government abuses of civil liberties, and as a critic of intelligence agencies and the FBI. Articles of his appeared in publications such as Covert Action Quarterly, and he, along with Linda Lotz, issued a widely-circulated list of recommended books on government abuses. He was a founder of a national newsletter devoted to training attorneys to litigate against police misconduct and spying abuse, and he worked as a paralegal investigator on several lawsuits aginst the FBI, CIA, Military Intelligence, and local city and state "Red Squads." In the 1980s, Berlet worked with and later edited the Public Eye magazine, now published by Political Research Associates.

During the 1988 Presidential campaign in the United States, Berlet issued a report entitled "Clouds Blur the Rainbow" about the New Alliance Party, which placed Lenora Fulani on the ballot in all 50 states as a third party Presidential candidate that year. The report noted that in 1974, Fred Newman (the psychotherapist who later founded the New Alliance Party) had entered into a alliance with Lyndon LaRouche, which lasted less than a year. Critics, including Berlet and previous New Alliance Party presidential candidate Dennis Serrette, argued that the New Alliance Party was in fact a psychotherapy cult that was more a vehicle for Fred Newman's Social Therapy movement than it was a left-wing third political party, and which continued to incorporate some of LaRouche's ideas.

In 1995 Berlet edited a collection of articles about right-wing political and social movements, which appeared as the book Eyes Right! Challenging the Right Wing Backlash, from South End Press. The book received a Gustavus Myers Center Award for outstanding scholarship on the subject of human rights and intolerance in North America. In 2000 Berlet and co-author Matthew N. Lyons wrote Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, published by the Guilford Press. This book was also was recognized with a Gustavus Myers award.

Starting in the late 1990s, Berlet began writing a number of articles and book chapters on racist, antisemitic, and fascist social movements; focusing on what he calls the dynamics of conspiracism, demonization, and apocalypticism. He served on the advisory board of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. Berlet continues to write about government intelligence abuse, including an article he co-wrote on domestic political repression in Amnesty Now for Amnesty International, USA. He is on the advisory board of the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation.

Berlet as a critic of Lyndon LaRouche

While the vast majority of material written by Berlet makes no mention of Lyndon LaRouche, in the 1970s and 1980s, Berlet wrote reports and articles on LaRouche for several magazines and newspapers. These articles claimed LaRouche had a right-wing agenda and was an antisemite and fascist. In 1984, LaRouche filed an unsuccessful civil libel suit against NBC, the Anti-Defamation League, Dennis King, and Berlet. LaRouche lost the case and the jury awarded damages from a counter-suit to NBC News.

Berlet, along with Dennis King and Russ Bellant, alleged that LaRouche and his associates were engaged in illegal fundraising and tax dodging activities amounting to millions of dollars per year. LaRouche and several associates were eventually convicted and jailed on similar charges, and the photo of Berlet and King on this page was taken in Alexandria, Virginia where the two authors were celebrating LaRouche being led off to jail from the courthouse. Both Berlet and King have stated they are delighted they played a role in seeing LaRouche imprisoned.

In 1983, Berlet and King met with a variety of both left-wing and right-wing opponents of LaRouche. The nature of these meetings is disputed; LaRouche supporters make much of these meetings (see the link to the Quinde Affidavit below), maintaining that they were planning sessions to produce a wave of hostile press coverage, intended to make criminal prosecutions credible. Berlet has stated repeatedly the meeting that he attended was a debate where left-wing critics of LaRouche were asked by right-wing critics to present and defend their claims about LaRouche's spying and fascist tendencies, and that he and King were present to protest the fact that LaRouche agents were supplying information about their political enemies on the right and left to the Reagan administration—including the National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency—a relationship that some conservatives close to the Reagan administration felt was inappropriate and sought to terminate. According to Berlet and King, the LaRouche supporters try to use the meeting to distract attention from the convictions of LaRouche and his associates. Berlet offered to let LaRouchite Quinde hire a lawyer to obtain any government documents on Berlet available under the federal Freedom of Information Act, so long as all documents were made public. Quinde and the LaRouchites rebuffed the offer.

Among the other participants at these meetings were:

Journalist and conspiracy researcher Mark Evans wrote, "Chip Berlet and his sidekick Dennis King, author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, have made careers out of their postgraduate preoccupation of being 'LaRouche watchers.' To them, Lyndon LaRouche, recently released from prison, is the Great Beast. Berlet and King's own political trajectory, in shades of The Big Chill, a path parallel in its revisionism and no less bizarre than that of the despised object of their fixated animosity, LaRouche himself."

Berlet and Lyons counter that: "Though often dismissed as a bizarre political cult, the LaRouche organization and its various front groups are a fascist movement whose pronouncements echo elements of Nazi ideology. Beginning in the 1970s, the LaRouchites combined populist antielitism with attacks on leftists, environmentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, and organized labor. They advocated a dictatorship in which a “humanist” elite would rule on behalf of industrial capitalists. They developed an idiosyncratic, coded variation on the Illuminati Freemason and Jewish banker conspiracy theories. Their views, though exotic, were internally consistent and rooted in right-wing populist traditions...." From Right-Wing Populism in America,

More controversies

A larger and more diverse group of Berlet critics object to his complaints about what he calls conspiracism and its role in building left/right coalitions which Berlet finds objectionable.

During the 1991 Gulf War Berlet began criticizing other left-wing critics of intelligence agencies as wittingly or unwittingly being channels for conspiracy theories of the extreme right. In articles which appeared in magazines including The Progressive and In These Times, Berlet criticized the Christic Institute, Craig Hulet, Victor Marchetti, L. Fletcher Prouty, Mark Lane, the Oliver Stone film JFK, and the October Surprise theory. This is ironic because the reading list circulated by Berlet in the 1980s contained books by Marchetti and Prouty. PRA published a Berlet report entitled Right Woos Left in 1990 about many of the above theories and his claim that their origins were within a populism of the political right wing, and not genuinely progressive or leftist. His 2000 book Right-Wing Populism in America is based on these theories.

A few critics of Berlet consider his actions during that period to have been unfair and disruptive on the left, especially because of the resulting pressure on media outlets such as Pacifica Radio to drop such popular guests as Craig Hulet, Dave Emory, and John Judge, and to reduce coverage of conspiracy-related programs on the JFK assassination, October Surprise, and Iran-Contra scandal. Yet there are many supporters of Berlet and his efforts to raise questions about the relationships among "conspiracism," apocalyptic dualism, and bigotry, including reporters and staffers on several Pacifica radio stations, authors Sara Diamond, David Corn, Holly Sklar, G. William Domhoff, Norman Solomon, and Janet Biehl; as well as Irwin Knoll, the late publisher of the Progressive Magazine. In 2004, the Pacifica network featured a speech by and interview with Berlet as part of a national fundraising drive for the Pacifica archives, demonstrating that despite being controversial, Berlet's work has both supporters and detractors.

Berlet has also been critical of Ralph Nader, Alexander Cockburn, and Ramsey Clark, who are willing to work with populists of the right on common issues of concern, such as anti-globalization and antiwar activism. While in 1991 he mostly limited his criticisms of left-right alliances to those willing to work with groups which could be characterized as anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi, or fascist, such as Liberty Lobby and the Populist Party, Berlet has also been critical of those willing to work with Antiwar.com and with industrialist Roger Milliken, both of whom are conservative but neither of whom are anti-Semitic or fascist. Berlet says they promote "xenophobia." Berlet's views are frequently featured by columnist Matthew Continetti of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, attacking various figures on the Left who are deemed guilty of "conspiracism", the most recent target being Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.

Berlet's critics, such as Mark Evans, are suspicious of Berlet's role. Evans charged that Berlet's "...sudden prominence and cachet on the progressive political scene portends a dangerous tendency which might aptly be called Neo-Mugwump or left-wing McCarthyism." Another critic of Berlet is Laird Wilcox, who specializes in researching extremist political movements and who archives a collection of extremist materials at the University of Kansas library. Wilcox notes that Berlet himself has a history of activity on the extreme left, including being a co-founder of the Chicago Friends of Albania. PRA is one of four groups profiled in the report The Watchdogs by Laird Wilcox, who notes: "The watchdog 'second string' which includes the Center For Democratic Renewal and Political Research Associates, are noted for their radical political agenda and extensive 'links and ties' to extremist groups of the far left. These four organizations are closely studied in this detailed investigative report, which reveals a little-known side that they would prefer kept from the public."

Another critic is Daniel Brandt, who is, like Berlet, a former activist in the New Left groups of the late 1960s, and is now best known for the NameBase software and website. Among Brandt's criticisms: "He isn't critical of conspiracy thinking on the basis of the evidence, but waits until the theorist can be shown to have incorrect political associations. Berlet doesn't fit anywhere on our spectrum; he's running his own show."

However, in Berlet's study Right Woos Left, Berlet offers a different perspective: "Dan Brandt, whose Namebase research database software remains a very useful research tool, originally attempted to keep my criticisms of his defense of Fletcher Prouty in perspective. He later began openly praising Spotlight, claiming he could find no anti-Jewish bias in its pages, and denouncing me as part of an alleged PC thought police movement on the left." The Prouty criticism by Berlet was sparked when the late Prouty had his book on intelligence policy, The Secret Team, republished by the Institute for Historical Review, a group primarily devoted to denying the commonly understood facts about the Nazi genocide of Jews and others.

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