Chip Berlet
American political analyst
John Foster "Chip" Berlet (; November 22, 1949 – January 30, 2026) was an American investigative journalist, research analyst, photojournalist, scholar, and activist specializing in the study of extreme right-wing movements in the United States. He also studied the spread of conspiracy theories. Starting with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Berlet regularly appeared in the media to discuss extremist news stories. He was a senior analyst at Political Research Associates (PRA), a non-profit group that tracks right-wing networks.
Berlet, a paralegal, was a vice-president of the National Lawyers Guild. He served on the advisory board of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, and for over 20 years was on the board of the Defending Dissent Foundation. In 1982, he was a Mencken Awards finalist in the best news story category for "War on Drugs: The Strange Story of Lyndon LaRouche", which was published in High Times. He served on the advisory board of the Campaign to Defend the Constitution.
Background
Berlet attended the University of Denver for three years, where he majored in sociology with a minor in journalism. A member of the 1960s student left, he dropped out of the university in 1971 to work as an alternative journalist without completing his degree.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chip Berlet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.