I am incredibly sad to relay the news that that Chip Berlet has passed on. Chip was one of the key figures—not that there was much competition—watching and organizing against the U.S. Far Right from the 1980s into the 2010s.

I got to know Chip quite well over the years. I met him in 2007 or 2008 while he was still Senior Researcher at the think tank he co-founded, Political Research Associates (PRA). Through his recommendation, PRA published my first important article on the Far Right, “Rebranding Fascism: National-Anarchists.” And so I blame him entirely for dragging me into the sordid world of Far Right watching! After he was fired from PRA in a 2012 purge, I was one of the people tapped to be a Fellow, where we acted as temps to replace the intellectual ballast that had been thrown overboard. (I did ask Chip first, and he gave me his blessing.) I kept this affiliation from 2013 to 2019 while increasingly working with Chip, as PRA was largely useless. He gave me a lot of good advice, and we became friends.

Although I did not know it at the time, in 2019 I co-authored his last academic journal article, “Rural rage: the roots of right-wing populism in the United States,” and in March 2020 booked his last two talks. Above is the video of the second-to-last one at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in NYC, called “Why the Far Right Kills,” which he did with Tal Lavin, just before her Culture Warlords book came out. (At the end of my introduction, Abby Scher and I can be seen giving him the “Lifetime Antifascist Achievement Award,” complete with sparkly glitter. It was all very weird because it was one or two days before the city shut down for Covid, and we were all hoping that we were not going to die because we were there!) But what I had found out right beforehand was that he already had Alzheimer’s at 70, and it had been slowly progressing for a year or two. I told him I’d organize a festschrift for him, which I did quickly with a few other former collaborators of his.

To make matters worse, in 2025 he developed leukemia. It was all an ugly way to die. When news of his passing finally came, Daryle Lamont Jenkins and I wrote something for Idavox since no one else had. And so I learned one last thing from Chip: it is really hard to write an obituary for your friend.

Mostly, though, I am just so sad.



An earlier version of this was published at Idavox.

“Chip Berlet (1949-2026)”
Spencer Sunshine and Daryle Lamont Jenkins

Investigative reporter, author, and activist Chip Berlet has died at 76. Long before Donald Trump, Berlet was one of only a handful of figures who consistently tracked and organized against right-wing extremism in the United States from the 1970s to the 2010s. He was also a scholar, photographer, mentor, and co-founder of the think tank Political Research Associates.

Although universally known as just “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 student press, but dropped out in 1971 before completing his degree. As a Zippie—a breakaway faction of the Yippies—he attended the 1972 protest against the Republican National Convention in Miami.

Chip later moved to Chicago’s Marquette Park to work against neo-Nazis who were leading the neighborhood’s resistance to desegregation. First infiltrating their group, he then openly counter-organized against them—but after talking to local ministers, changed tactics to protect Black families whose homes were being firebombed. Eventually, the White Supremacists were driven out.

In 1976, as a paralegal with the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), Chip and other staffers uncovered a network of right-wing groups collecting information about left-leaning movements and organizations. The following year, the NLG sued the NSA, CIA, FBI, and the U.S. military, resulting in the release of 300,000 pages of documents chronicling fifteen years of COINTELPRO, a government program focused on disrupting left-wing movements. Chip would remain staunchly committed to countering government surveillance, and spent thirty years on the board of what became the Defending Dissent Foundation.

In the late 1970s, Chip was the Washington, D.C. bureau chief of High Times, where in 1981 he published his first major article on right-wing extremism. It was an exposé on crypto-fascist Lyndon LaRouche, who later unsuccessfully sued him. Chip would return the favor by continuing to research and speak out against the LaRouchites for decades.

In 1985, Chip founded AMNET, a BBS which was one of the first to counter the White Supremacist bulletin boards that littered the early internet. This and other efforts made Chip a go-to person on information about right-wing extremism 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, while that same year he spoke at the Anti-Racist Action (ARA) national gathering.

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). Still around, it is known for its rigorous and in-depth research on the U.S. right, and he was its Senior Analyst until being fired in a 2012 purge. During his time at PRA, he wrote articles, op-eds, and reports, both for the think tank itself, as well for everything from movement newsletters to academic journals to the New York Times. He 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 1995 anthology Eyes Right! Challenging the Right Wing Backlash, which brought together activists and academics to map out the contemporary U.S. right. In 2000, he published his magnum opus, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, co-authored with Matthew N. Lyons. This comprehensive study starts with the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s before covering the various eras of the KKK starting in the 1860s, Henry Ford, the John Birch Society, Lyndon LaRouche, the militia movement, paleocons, and neo-Nazis. Chip also had a particular focus on the toxic nature of conspiracy theories—to the dismay of many on both the left and right. Right-Wing Populism in America also set out a pioneering theoretical framework about right-wing extremism, and it has influenced generations of academics, journalists, and activists.

Chip was very proud of his photography, and his pictures included the original cover of the first Roches album, Seductive Reasoning. He was a generous mentor to a wide variety of people, whose first understanding of the right often came from him. His absurdist sense of humor was on display at otherwise staid conference presentations, when he would use magic tricks, sometimes involving a fire-breathing wand. And his stories were legendary, such as listening to a young teenage Condoleezza Rice play piano to entertain the guests of her father, who was a professor (Chip was his student and would be invited to dinner at his house), when the Cuban government tried to recruit him as a spy (he said he wouldn’t betray his country), and how his brother went to a military academy with Donald Trump (the brother had nothing good to say about him).

In 2020, he published an anthology largely containing his own work, Trumping Democracy: From Reagan to the Alt-Right, but retired the same year when he was 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.

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