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John Foster "Chip" Berlet is a researcher at Political Research Associates — which concentrates on researching the political right — and specializes in tracking and analyzing right-wing movements.
Berlet began his activism 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 became interested in the semi-covert activities of right-wing organizations. He has published articles in publications ranging from Radical America to High Times.
Berlet made much of his reputation by researching Lyndon LaRouche. Berlet and Dennis King, co-wrote a report on LaRouche in 1981 for High Times magazine, entitled "They Want to Take Your Drugs Away," which discussed the issue as part of what was described as LaRouche's right-wing agenda. In 1983, Berlet and King met with a number of sources to research a series of hostile articles about LaRouche. Among those they met with were John Rees, of the John Birch Society; Roy Godson, then a consultant to the National Security Council and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB); Mira Lansky Boland, head of fact-finding at the Washington, D.C. offices of the Anti- Defamation League of B'nai B'rith; at least one representative of Freedom House, a private research organization headed by PFIAB Chairman Leo Cherne; Richard Mellon-Scaife, a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman, whose tax-exempt foundation would later come under federal criminal investigation for illegally financing the arming of the Nicaraguan Contras (Mellon-Scaife later became notorious for his involvement in the Paula Jones case, and other activities intended to discredit President Bill Clinton); and several dozen journalists from major national media outlets, including NBC-TV, Readers Digest, Business Week, The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal.
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, left-wing Presidential candidate that year. The report asserted 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, but heavily influenced the tactics and strategies of the New Alliance Party. 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 addition to his research into LaRouche and Newman, Berlet gained a reputation during the 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 issued lists of recommended books on government abuses which included books by Victor Marchetti and L. Fletcher Prouty. During the 1991 Gulf War Berlet worked to expose 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. He published a report entitled "Right Woos Left" in 1992 about many of the above theories and how he saw their origins within a populism of the extreme right wing, and not being genuinely progressive or leftist. Berlet has been critical at times 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 peace activism.