Exposing the Right and Fighting for Democracy: Celebrating Chip Berlet as Journalist and Scholar

This book celebrates the life and work of scholar-activist Chip Berlet. His contributions over four decades have had broad-ranging impacts on activists, independent intellectuals, and academics, from think tanks and social movements to generations of scholars.

Berlet’s work over the decades has covered a wide range of topics, from the Christian Right, armed militias, social movement theory, and white supremacy to conspiracism, civil liberties, and government surveillance. This book features contributions reflecting on many of these topics by leading scholars and activists who have been inspired by his work and example.

This book will be of great interest to scholars, students, and activists within anti-racist, anti-fascist, and progressive social movements.

Pam Chamberlain worked, for fifteen years, alongside Chip Berlet at Political Research Associates, USA, as a researcher and analyst, helping to produce the Defending Democracy series of activist toolkits. Her writing focused on issues of sex, sexuality, gender, and how the Right sought to limit progress and gain power through its organizing in these areas. She has been a high school English teacher, a sex educator, an anti-nuclear activist, and an advisor to LGBTQ youth organizations.

Matthew N. Lyons writes regularly for Three Way Fight, a radical antifascist blog. He has written several books, including one co-authored with Chip Berlet, and for various journals, magazines, and websites. His work focuses on the interplay between right-wing movements and systems of oppression, and responses to these movements by leftists, liberals, and the state. He is co-trustee of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust, which stewards the literary legacy of the late playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry.

Abby Scher is a New York-based sociologist whose writing on the Right, economic justice, and women’s and immigrant issues appears in national outlets. She served as editorial director and interim research director of Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank that tracks the US Right, where she was a colleague of Chip Berlet. She is a partner in Research-Action, a worker-owned cooperative that allies with community and labor organizations to promote social change. The Ford Foundation recognized her organizing work bridging racial and ethnic divides with its Leadership for a Changing World Award.

Spencer Sunshine has a PhD in Sociology and has spent over 15 years researching, writing about, and counter-organizing against the Far Right. From 2013 to 2019 he was an Associate Fellow at the think tank Political Research Associates, USA. He has written numerous articles chronicling the Far Right in the Trump era, including one co-authored with Chip Berlet. He is currently working on a history of neo-Nazi James Mason’s influential pro-terrorist book, Siege.