Subject: Re: Apology for Chip Berlet

From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <[email-masked]>
Date: 05 Jan 93 18:54 PST

Thanks for the apology, I'm sorry if I came on too strong, but I 
do need to defend my reputation as a journalist.

I have several concerns regarding Gritz. He is a self-promoting 
huckster. He peddles theories that promote anti-Jewish bigotry 
and create fear of immigrants. He misrepresents his ties to 
fascist and race-hate groups and his support for Christian 
Identity. He promotes lunatic theories about government 
misconduct which undermine and discredit serious research and 
criticism of government misconduct.

Many people who defend Gritz refuse to acknowledge the facts 
previously posted here. It is fair to disagree with the 
conclusions that I and other Gritz critics post. It is dishonest 
to pretend that there are no facts to support our arguments. It 
is unethical to charge broadly that assertions about Gritz have 
been disproven or are in error when this is not true. Every 
researcher makes mistakes. When I make them I post a correction 
and an apology. But I will vigorously confront persons who 
falsely claim I have made errors because they disagree with my 
conclusions. There are many persons on the computer networks who 
routinely post material of questionable validity. This is true of 
persons on both the left and right. Some of these persons are 
sincere but misguided. Others, such as many supporters of Gritz, 
the Populist Party, and the LaRouchians, are using the network to 
create a mass base for fascism. One of they key tools of fascist 
political movements is the use of conspiracy theories to create 
scapegoats on which to blame societal problems. That's why I take 
the time to post material on computer networks, including a forum 
devoted to conspiracy theories.

As promised, here is the full unedited text of my current press 
biography and list of lecture topics. 

Chip Berlet

Biographical Information

Political Research Associates
678 Massachusetts Avenue, Suite 702
Cambridge, MA 02139

Chip Berlet is an analyst with Political Research Associates, a 
non-profit institute studying authoritarian, anti-democratic, 
right-wing, and xenophobic political movements. Berlet has spent 
twenty years as an investigator, journalist and photographer 
focusing on civil rights and civil liberties.

He is a much-quoted expert on a variety of right-wing political 
movements, including the neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, Posse 
Comitatus, Aryan Nations, racist Skinheads, Liberty Lobby, John 
Birch Society, the New Right, right-wing spy networks, Cold War 
paranoid groups, the Lyndon LaRouche fascist cult, and left-wing 
groups with authoritarian hierarchies such as the National Labor 
Federation and the New Alliance Party. He has attended meetings 
of neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, Holocaust revisionists, and white 
supremacists, and confronted the leaders of these groups on radio 
and television talk shows, including a memorable exchange with 
the white nationalist pro-Aryan Nations minister Bob Miles on the 
Oprah Winfrey program.

As a civil rights activist Berlet has helped neighborhood, 
community and political groups fight back attempts by organized 
hate groups to inflame tensions. He was among the first 
researchers to warn of the attempt by anti-Jewish race-hate 
groups to recruit financially-strapped Midwest farmers in the 
late 1970s and early 1980's. A persistent critic of Lyndon 
LaRouche, Berlet has been sued twice by the LaRouchians for his 

characterization of them as a conspiracist neo-Nazi political 
movement engaged in illegal fundraising schemes and run by a 
lunatic cult leader. The LaRouchians eventually lost both cases.

In 1987, Berlet and his collegues received the Chicago Citizens 
Alert Award for advancing racial justice through educational 
efforts exposing farm belt bigotry, organized hate group activity 
in Chicago neighborhoods, and the growth of the neo-Nazi skinhead 
movement.

His work exposing threats to civil liberties has covered 
censorship, police misconduct, government surveillance, right 
wing surveillance operations, covert action, and the 
relationships among those phenomena. Berlet is a former vice-
president of the National Lawyers Guild and currently serves as 
Secretary of the NLG's Civil Liberties Committee. He works 
closely with the National Committee Against Repressive 
Legislation and serves on the board of advisors to the Chicago-
based Bill of Rights Foundation. In 1979 he helped organize 
national citizens hearings on FBI surveillance abuses.

Before joining Political Research Associates in 1982, Berlet 
spent three years as a paralegal investigator at the Better 
Government Association in Chicago, engaged in research and trial 
preparation for the American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit 
against illegal government surveillance by the Chicago Police 
Intelligence Unit--litigation dubbed the "Chicago Red 
Squad" case. He has also served as a paralegal on other 
intelligence abuse and civil liberties cases filed against local 
police, the FBI, CIA and Military Intelligence on behalf of 
groups such as the Spanish Action Committee of Chicago, National 
Lawyers Guild, American Indian Movement, Socialist Workers Party, 
Christic Institute, and American Friends Service Committee.

As a freelance writer, Berlet has written, edited, and co-
authored a long list of material on right-wing activity, racism, 
prejudice, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, government 
repression, covert operations, and constitutional rights, 
including articles in the The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, 
Des Moines Register, Mother Jones, The Nation, The Progressive, 
Chicago Reader, Chicago Lawyer, The Humanist, Greenpeace 
Magazine, Boston Phoenix, Pacific News Service, The Guardian 
(NY), WIN Magazine, In These Times, Boston Real Paper, 
CovertAction Information Bulletin, National Reporter, Liberation 
News Service, High Times, and Utne Reader.

An award-winning photo-journalist, Berlet's pictures have 
appeared on book, magazine, and record album covers, been carried 
on the Associated Press wire, and been published in periodicals 
such as the Denver Post, Washington Star, and Chronicle of Higher 
Education. He is a member of the National Writers Union.

A co-founder and member of the editorial board of the legal 
newsletter Police Misconduct and Civil Rights Law Report, 
published by Clark Boardman, Co. of New York; Berlet has 
previously been contributing editor of Public Eye magazine, co-
founder of the College Press Service collective in Denver, and 
for many years was on the board of directors of the Alternative 
Press Syndicate. 

Berlet has spoken widely on right-wing groups and governmental 
civil liberties infringements at forums ranging from speeches at 
rallies and meetings, to sermons at local churches and temples, 
to workshops at local and national conventions. His college 
campus appearances include presentations at Harvard, Boston 
University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; and 

classroom lectures at the University of Chicago, George 
Washington University, and Florida State University. 

Publications which have reported Berlet's views include The New 
York Times, Newsweek and The Boston Globe. He has appeared on a 
live interview with co-host Bryant Gumbel on NBC Television's 
Today Show, and on numerous taped interviews on major television 
network evening news programs including NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN. 
He has been interviewed for National Public Radio's All Things 
Considered program, Terry Gross's Fresh Air interview program on 
NPR, and Pacifica Radio Network News, and many other radio news 
and talk show programs.

Berlet has been a persistent activist on issues involving access 
to media and information policies, and has authored critiques 
appearing in Library Quarterly, Extra!, Alternative Media Review, 
More Magazine, and TUM: the Colorado Journalism Review. He 
represented the Chicago Citizens Commission on the Media at 
hearings establishing Chicago's cable television franchise where 
he played a key role in increasing community access and 
governance provisions in the authorizing statute.

He co-founded and still runs a computer bulletin board designed 
to challenge the information circulated by racist and anti-Jewish 
bulletin boards; and to provide information on civil rights and 
civil liberties, including a kit for requesting information under 
the federal Freedom of Information Act.

In the 1970's Berlet co-edited a series of books on student press 
rights, campus activism, student financial aid, and higher 
education policy for the National Student Association and 
National Student Educational Fund.

Berlet was born in 1949, was raised in New Jersey where he became 
active in the civil rights movement as a teenager, and has lived 
and worked in Denver, Colorado, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, 
Illinois. He currently resides with his wife and son in a suburb 
of Boston . 

====================

Political Research Associates (formerly Midwest Research) is an 
independent, not-for-profit research center which monitors the 
organizations, individuals, and activities of the American 
political right wing and initiates anti-right organizing 
projects. Our purpose is to serve as an information clearinghouse 
providing archival information on the right wing, including links 
among right-wing groups, financing behind right-wing activities, 
and analysis of right-wing movements, and to serve as an 
"early warning system" for those who need to know about 
emerging trends and developments. PRA's director is Dr. Jean 
Hardisty, a former political science professor. The full-time 
staff includes analyst Chip Berlet, researcher Margaret Quigley, 
a graduate of Harvard Law School, and archivist Francine Davis.

====================

Chip Berlet
Prepared Lectures for 1992
Racism, Fascism and the Far Right:

Moral choices in defense of pluralistic democracy 

Since the end of World War Two and the fight against Fascism, 
there have been several domestic U.S. political movements which 
echo Nazi-era themes of racial superiority, ultra-nationalism, 

and xenophobia. What are these movements, how do they differ and 
interact? What is Nativism? Who were the original America 
Firsters? What advisor to Oliver Stone's film "JFK" is tied to 
pro-Nazi elements? What moral obligations do we have, as citizens 
of a pluralistic democracy, to break the silence and speak out on 
behalf of the victims of racist and fascist movements? Resources: 
Hanna Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (book).

Concentration Camps to Contragate:

Nazis, Anti-Communism, and the National Security State
How obsessive Cold War anti-communism led to an alliance with former 
Nazi collaborators and the development of the National Security State 
with its emphasis on militarism and covert action abroad, and secrecy 
and repression at home. Why Contragate was merely the latest round 
in this fight. The role of Nazi collaborators in the 1988 Bush campaign. 
Why the National Endowment for Democracy is misnamed. The role of 
the "Imperial Presidency," and bi-partisanship.

Secular Humanism Phobia:
The right-wing conspiracy theory of the world.

Is modern art part of a secular humanist conspiracy to destroy 
traditional family values? No. But these people think so. The 
attack on the National Endowment for the Arts explained as part 
of a widely-held right-wing theory of one-world creeping 
socialism.

The White Racist Alliance:
Scapegoating and fear mongering in troubled areas

Case studies of how a coalition of white supremecist groups tried 
to exploit fear in the farm belt, the rust belt, and urban 
neighborhoods struggling with integration. How those communities 
fought back. Why a policy of not publicizing organizing drives 
and incidents by racial hate groups often backfires. Update on 
current Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist organizing.

The Hunt for Red Menace:
The FBI's discredited justifications for political spying

A serious (yet humorous) talk on how the FBI has repackaged 
discredited "McCarthy Period" theories of subversion, 
manipulated fears of "terrorism," and employed a paranoid 
analysis of the U.S. social change movement, all in an attempt to 
justify its violation of constitutional rights through 
surveillance and harassment of dissidents. The new attacks on the 
environmental movement. The role of right-wing private spy 
networks, and hysterial anti-communism. Resources: Emile 
D'Antonio, Point of Order (film).

LaRouche 's Authoritarian Agenda:
Fascism wrapped in an American flag

Lyndon LaRouche is more than a lunatic crook and "perennial 
presidential candidate"; and neither a Marxist nor 
"extreme conservative" as the media like to call him. 
LaRouche is the quintessential Fascist demagogue who has built a 
sophisticated high-tech electronic spy network to help propel him 
into power. 

Other topics:

The New Alliance Party:

How the NAP uses totalitarianism as a political style. What is the 

therapy cult behind the NAP?

Media Myopia and Informed Consent:

Self-governance in the age of the thirty-second sound bite. What 
was president James Madison's warning?

Racism and Anti-Semitism:

Defining the terms, expanding the debate. Theories of prejudice, bigotry 
and scapegoating.

Civil Liberties Threat of the New Right:

Self-righteous Nativism versus democratic pluralism.

Debunking Conspiracy Theories:

There was no "Secret Team" behind Iran Contragate, the "Octopus 
Theory" is all wet, George Bush's New World Order is not part 
of a clandestine para-government run by Yale's "Skull and Bones" 
society. An appeal to reason and logic.