Chip Berlet is an investigative reporter, independent scholar, photographer, and progressive activist specializing in the study of right-wing movements in the United States.

His byline has appeared in publications ranging from the New York Times to the Progressive; and he is a frequent guest on radio and television programs from Nightline to Democracy Now.

Berlet also has written scholarly articles on conspiracy theories, religious apocalyptic aggression, and organized racist groups. For thirty years he was senior analyst at Political Research Associates. He is the co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort and a vice president of the Defending Dissent Foundation.

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Selected Articles

Focus on Civil Liberties

Focus on Scholarly Writing

Current Writing Projects

Recent Scholarly Writing Projects

  • Chip Berlet. Forthcoming, Fall 2012. “Reframing Populist Resentments in the Tea Party Movement.” In Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. Illustrated working draft online here.
  • _______. Forthcoming, 2012. “Collectivists, Communists, Labor Bosses, and Treason: The Tea Parties as Right–Wing Populist Countersubversion Panic. In Critical Sociology.
  • Anders Breivik, Political Murder, and Right-Wing Demagogues (under journal review)
  • _______. 2011. “Protocols to the Left, Protocols to the Right: Conspiracism in American Political Discourse at the Turn of the Second Millennium.” In Richard Landes and Steven Katz, The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. New York: New York Univ. Press. Based on earlier study, Toxic to Democracy.
    _______. 2011. “Muckraking Gadflies Buzz Reality” In Ken Wachsberger, ed., Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 1, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State Univ. Press, pp. 267-297. Read the first few pages here.
  • _______. 2011. “Analyzing Breivik’s Ideology with Social Network Research.” In e-Extreme, the online journal of ECPR, the Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy, Vol. 12, No. 3, (October), pp. 7-8.
    _______. 2011. “Taking Tea Parties Seriously: Corporate Globalization, Populism, and Resentment.” In Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, Global Studies Association of North America, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 11-29.

    Recent Popular Writing Projects

  • "Anti-Obama Anger, Populist Rage, and Conspiracy Theories"  for In These Times
  • "Taking Tea Partiers Seriously"  for the Progressive

 

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