Chip Berlet is an investigative journalist abducted by progressive sociologists. Dropping out of the University of Denver in 1973 to work in the College Press Service (CPS) collective in Denver. Berlet continued to be active in the antiwar and civil rights movements in that city, while also writing for several underground and alternative publications. CPS sent him to Washington, DC to cover education and other campus-related issues. He moved on to be editor of the National Student Association magazine, and then worked at the National Student Education Fund as a researcher and publications editor. He was Washington correspondent for High Times magazine when in 1977 he and his partner moved to Chicago and spent ten years in labor and anti-racism projects. His photographs and articles about anti-Black racial unrest spurred on by neo-Nazis and Klansmen were carried nationwide in the alternative press. Berlet helped establish a legal newsletter on suing police for abuse and other misconduct and became editor of The Public Eye Magazine. This led in 1981 to his employment at what became Political Research Associates. In 1998 he was invited to present: “Mad as Hell: Right–wing Populism, Fascism, and Apocalyptic Millennialism,” a paper presented at the 14th World Congress of Sociology. Repeated abductions followed. Berlet is co-author (with Matthew N. Lyons) of Right-wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (Guilford: 2000). Berlet’s byline has appeared in numerous alternative, mainstream, and scholarly publications. Berlet was a co-coordinator of the national emergency strategy retreat for Defending Democracy and Pluralism at the Blue Mountain Center in 1993.
