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John Foster "Chip" Berlet is a researcher at Political Research Associates who specializes in tracking and analyzing right-wing movements. He began his career as a member of Students for a Democratic Society, the 1960s New Left group, and was later involved in the National Student Association, which was later exposed as a CIA front, and is part of the reason he bacame interested in the semi-covert activities of right-wing organizations. He has published articles in publications ranging from High Times to Radical America.
Like his colleague Dennis King, Berlet made much of his reputation by researching Lyndon LaRouche, charging that LaRouche has an hidden right-wing agenda. Berlet and King met numerous times with the John Birch Society's John Rees, Richard Mellon-Scaife, and others, for the purposes of planning a campaign against LaRouche . He has been criticized by some for allegedly accepting money from these known right-wingers.
During the 1988 Presidential campaign in the United States, Berlet issued a report entitled "Clouds Blur the Rainbow" which was heavily critical of the New Alliance Party. In 1974, Fred Newman, the psychotherapist who later founded the New Alliance Party, had entered into a brief alliance with Lyndon LaRouche, which lasted less than a year. In 1988, the New Alliance Party managed to place Lenora Fulani on the ballot in all 50 states as a third party, left-wing Presidential candidate. Critics, including Berlet and former New Alliance Party presidential candidate Dennis Serrette, charged 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. LaRouche, as well, has attacked Fulani, charging her with being an apologist for policies of colonial genocide in Africa.
Besides his research into Lyndon LaRouche and Fred Newman, Berlet gained a reputation during the 1980s as a respectable 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 issued lists of recommended books on government abuses which included books by Victor Marchetti and L. Fletcher Prouty. However, during the 1991 Gulf War, Berlet suddenly reversed many of his former positions, and began attacking 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 such as The Progressive and In These Times, Berlet launched attacks on a number of other critics of U.S. intelligence operations who had been active from the late 1980s through the 1991 Gulf War. Chief among those whom Berlet criticized were the Christic Institute, Craig Hulet, Victor Marchetti, L. Fletcher Prouty, and Mark Lane. He further expanded his criticism when the Oliver Stone film JFK was released, charging that Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories had their roots in extreme right populism. He published a lengthy report entitled "Right Woos Left" in 1992 which was a long diatribe against many of the theories and personalities that had gained currency on the left at the time, from the Christic Institute's lawsuit, to JFK assassination conspiracy theories, to the October Surprise theory, to some of the guests which Pacifica Radio had given considerable airtime to during the Gulf War. Berlet saw all these as having their origins within a populism of the extreme right wing, and not being genuinely progressive or leftist. He further charged that some of the personalities involved had ties to either Liberty Lobby or to Lyndon LaRouche, both of which he characterized as fascist.
In recent years he has continued along those same lines, issuing frequent criticisms of people on the left, including 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 peace activism. He is active as a researcher with a Massachusetts-based group called Political Research Associates, which concentrates on researching the political right, but which also promotes Berlet's criticisms of others on the left. Critics charge that Berlet's criticisms are heavy-handed and often transparently propagandistic, and take on an 'us vs them' or 'good vs evil' tone that allows for no middle ground and constitutes blacklisting. However, he continues to be highly respected in most quarters on the American left, who follow Berlet's pronouncements as to who should be given airtime and print space in progressive media outlets, and who should not. Pacifica Radio for example has generally dropped popular guests and denied them any more airtime following the issuance of an attack on them by Berlet.
Berlet, however, has steadily expanded his definition of what he considers unacceptable. In 1991 he was writing that there is nothing inherently wrong with people on the left working with conservatives or libertarians on some issues, and he tended to limit his criticisms only to those who willing to work with groups he considered anti-Semitic or fascist, such as Liberty Lobby and Lyndon LaRouche (an important exception was Craig B. Hulet, whom Berlet continued to attack despite having to admit that Hulet was in no way anti-Semitic or extreme-right and that the only thing wrong with him was he was a libertarian who laced his analysis with conspiracy theories.) Since then, however, he began to attack any collaboration with anybody right of center, such as with the libertarian Antiwar.com and with conservative industrialist Roger Milliken, neither of whom could in any way be characterized as anti-Semitic or fascist.
Further, he has developed an ideology based on an opposition to what he calls "centrist/extremist theory", and what he calls "populist producerism". Centrist/extremist theory holds that a liberal political center should be the guiding mainstream ideology and that the extreme left and extreme right are both considered the political fringe which should both be equally opposed (v. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s 1949 book "The Vital Center", and also closely associated with 1950s and 1960s political writers like Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter), and takes a sociological approach to examining why people join extremist movements of either the left or the right, while Berlet sees things in simpler terms: left = good, right = evil, the further left the better, mainstream society itself is inherently repressive, and centrist/extremist theory is something to be challenged because it conflicts with this worldview. Berlet's worldview is, therefore, fundamentally anti-liberal; indeed, at the heart of his attacks on conspiracy theorists has been his belief that conspiracism is based in the liberal notion that the economic and political systems in the U.S. are fundamentally sound, and that it is bad people who need to be removed from positions of power, not the system itself that needs to be changed. His opposition to "populist producerism" is likewise based in a Marxist-Leninist view of social classes and not a liberal one. Chip Berlet has written, regarding Political Research Associates: "PRA was founded on the idea that various forms of oppression are rooted in mainstream society, and that right-wing groups merely fanned exisiting flames."
Researcher Laird Wilcox has pointed out that Chip Berlet was a founder of the Chicago Friends of Albania, which supported the unique Albanian brand of communism of Enver Hoxha, a brand of communism which even most other leftists and communists would consider extreme.