Exposing the Right and Fighting for Democracy:
Celebrating Chip Berlet as Journalist and Scholar
Exposing the Right and Fighting for Democracy: Chip Berlet as Journalist and Scholar, which I co-edited with Pam Chamberlain, Matthew N. Lyons and Abby Scher, has just been released by Routledge. This festschrift—a collection of essays in honor of a scholar, often done at the end of their career—includes an all-star cast of scholars, activists, and of course Chip Berlet’s friends.
Chip has researched, written about, and organized against fascists and the Far Right for four decades, co-founding a think tank dedicated to this, and influencing hundreds, if not thousands, of people along the way.
Although I had already done activism and research on fascists and antisemites, Chip (as he is known to one and all) was the one who encouraged me to get more deeply involved in the work. He solicited from me, and then convinced his think tank, to publish my first major article on this subject in 2008. Later I ended up as a Fellow at that organization.
But more than that, over the intervening years Chip has been a resource and a friend. I’ve asked him for advice many times, and we have done talks together, even co-authoring a journal article. But at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Chip was forced to retire for health reasons. It is with great sadness that the journal article we did together turned out to be his last, and furthermore two talks I booked for him in March 2020 ended up being his final public appearances.
Although I already had written about the Far Right and have a different approach, Chip is the closest thing to a mentor I have had. And in appreciation for him, I and three others—two others who had worked at the think tank, Abby Scher and Pam Chamberlain, as well as Matthew Lyons, the co-author of Chip’s magnum opus, Right-Wing Populism in America—assembled this festschrift together. Chip has been such a mensch over so many years to so many people that our solicitations received an incredible response. Almost everyone we asked, no matter how famous or busy they were, contributed a piece. Indeed, Chip is one of the only people who can be said to have influenced everyone from the militant antifascist movement to the U.S. Justice Department, and this anthology reflects that. The articles themselves range in length from a paragraph to full-length essays. They include both personal and political stories about Chip, analyses of his work, and essays on the Right which are dedicated to him.
I encourage everyone to buy this book, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I’ve enjoyed working with Chip.
Exposing the Right and Fighting for Democracy: Celebrating Chip Berlet as Journalist and Scholar
Edited By Pam Chamberlain, Matthew N. Lyons, Abby Scher, and Spencer Sunshine
Part I: The Early Years
Part II: Analysis
Part III: Practice
Part IV: Legacy