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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 a researcher at Political Research Associates — which claims to concentrate on 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 and High Times to the New York Times and Boston Globe. During the late 1970s Berlet was the Washington, D.C. bureau chief of High Times. 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 Pacifica Radio’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.

In the early 1980s Berlet wrote reports and articles on LaRouche for High Times and other magazines and newspapers which claimed LaRouche had a right-wing and agenda and was an antisemite and fascist. LaRouche sued Berlet for defamation for these charges -- and LaRouche lost in court.

Berlet, along with Dennis King and Russ Bellant combined their research efforts to show 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 convicted and jailed for their crimes; 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, to debate his activities and ideas. 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.

LaRouche supporters make much of this meeting (see the link to the Quinde Affidavit below), but Berlet has stated repeatedly the meeting was a debate where left-wing critics of LaRouche were asked by conservatives to present and defend their claims about LaRouche spying and fascist tendencies. LaRouche supporters note, however, that all the participants, both right and left, were outspoken opponents of LaRouche. Berlet further notes 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, whereas LaRouche supporters maintain that the meeting was a planning session to produce a wave of hostile press coverage, intended to make those convictions credible.

Journalist 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, led from Chairman Mao to Yippie, to Yuppie writing for the Reader's Digest-a path parallel in its revisionism and no less bizarre than that of the despised object of their fixated animosity, LaRouche himself." Evans goes on to say about LaRouche, however, "LaRouche himself and the NCLC are worth studying as a point of reference, not only because they are prima facie evidence of the twisted nature of the political spectrum, but also because, as a highly sophisticated intelligence front and economic cult, they have held shifting positions over the years on various issues. Evolving into a synthetic political cosmology, they have developed a weltanshauung that addresses almost every subject under the sun. The LaRouchies have identified and embraced some of the genuine high points of Western culture, like Plato, the Golden Renaissance in Florence, and the music of Bach and Beethoven. At the same time, the LaRouchian political analysis represents a species of "modified limited hangout," fulfilling the Buddhist maxim of "hiding in the open" what the ruling class wishes to conceal. "

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.

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 recommendations of books by Victor Marchetti and L. Fletcher Prouty among others). 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.

However, during the 1991 Gulf War Berlet suddenly reversed some of his former positions regarding government abuse, 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 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 his claim that their origins were within a populism of the extreme right wing, and not being genuinely progressive or leftist. In 1995 Berlet edited a collection of articles along those same lines, which appeared as the book Eyes Right! Challenging the Right Wing Backlash, from South End Press.

Many consider his actions during that period to have been unfair and very 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 smother any further coverage of issues such as the JFK assassination theories, October Surprise, and Iran-Contra scandal.

Since then, Berlet has steadily expanded his definition of what he considers unacceptable, and more recently has issued attacks on 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. 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, by the late 1990s he was attacking those willing to work with Antiwar.com and with industrialist Roger Milliken, both of whom are conservative but neither of whom can in any way be considered anti-Semitic or fascist.

Berlet's critics, such as Mark Evans, are suspicious of Berlet's new 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 at the University of Kansas and maintains a library of extremist materials. 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. Chip Berlet's 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."

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.

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