Chip Berlet (1949-2026), by Spencer Sunshine and Daryle Lamont Jenkins – 5 February 2026

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.

Program for the Anti-Racist Action conference announcing Chip Berlet’s presentation

He had previously worked with Jean Hardisty’s think tank Midwest Research, and in 1987 moved to Boston to help her establish its successor, Political Research Associates (PRA), which produced rigorous and in-depth research on the U.S. right. He was its Senior Analyst until being fired in a 2012 purge. During his time at PRA, he wrote articles, op-eds, academic journal pieces, and reports which covered “prejudice, demonization, scapegoating, demagoguery, conspiracism, and authoritarianism” and investigated “far right hate groups, reactionary backlash movements, theocratic fundamentalism, civil liberties violations, police misconduct, government and private surveillance abuse, and other anti-democratic phenomena.” Among them was the highly influential PRA report Right Woos Left, the first major study of Red/Brown politics in the United States.

He edited the influential 1995 anthology Eyes Right! Challenging the Right Wing Backlash, and in 2000 published his magnum opus, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, co-authored with Matthew N. Lyons. It is a comprehensive study of right-wing extremism, starting with the anti-Masonic movement in the 1820s, and then before covering the various eras of the KKK starting in the 1860s, Henry Ford, the John Birch Society, the militia movement, paleocons, and neo-Nazis. Berlet also had a particular focus on how toxic conspiracy theories are—to the dismay of many on both the Left and Right. The book also set out a pioneering theoretical framework about right-wing extremism, and it has influenced generations of academics, journalists, and activists.

In 2020, he published an anthology of his work, Trumping Democracy: From Reagan to the Alt-Right, but retired the same year after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The next year a festschrift in his honor was released, Exposing the Right and Fighting for Democracy: Celebrating Chip Berlet as Journalist and Scholar, edited by his former collaborators Pam Chamberlain, Matthew N. Lyons, Abby Scher, and Spencer Sunshine. It includes essays and tributes from them as well as by Daryle Lamont Jenkins, Kay Whitlock, Marc Potok, Tal Lavin, Shane Burley, Heidi Beirich, and others.

Berlet died peacefully at home in Salem, Massachusetts on January 30, 2026 of leukemia.

First pubished by Idavox. Read the original here.

Chip Berlet (1949-2026), by Spencer Sunshine and Daryle Lamont Jenkins – 5 February 2026

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