Research

What’s Wrong With the Right?

I grew up in a right-wing, white, lower middle-class Southern Baptist world, where Mother tried desperately to raise her daughters to become “ladies.” Both great-grandfathers had been poor foot soldiers for the slaveholding Confederacy. My…

Article

Kitchen Table Backlash

The Anti-Feminist Women’s Movement

A White woman in a heavy coat wearing a "Stop ERA" badge smiles with other protesters in front of the White House fence.

The contemporary women’s movement has been a profound agent for change in the social, political, economic, and cultural life of the United States. Women have demanded reforms to increase their legal and economic power, advocating a…

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Gay Conservatives: Pulling the Movement to the Right

The gay liberation movement has succeeded in bringing homosexuality out of the closet and into the political, economic, and cultural mainstream. A combination of grassroots organizing, movement-building, and political pressure has created a gay…

Article

John Salvi, Abortion Clinic Violence, and Catholic Right Conspiracism

Most of the news coverage of John C. Salvi 3d has portrayed him as a confused person making nonsensical statements alleging conspiracies against Catholics. In fact, almost all of Salvi’s conspiratorial statements echo paranoid scapegoating theories…

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Regulatory Takings and Private Property Rights

“Regulatory takings” has become the cornerstone of the “Wise Use” movement’s legislative agenda as well as the ideology underlying the movement’s “property rights” wing. Under the regulatory takings banner, Wise Use leaders have rounded up a broad…

Article

More For Them, Less For Us

Woman in hat and gloves holds sign reading "Racial Economic Justice Now."

Holly Sklar Chaos or Community? Seeking Solutions, Not Scapegoats for Bad Economics Boston: South End Press 1995 Holly Sklar is on a mission to get readers to recognize that we need not be taken in by the “snake oil” of…

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The Resurgent Right

Why Now?

Boxes, prams, tarps, and other disparate items piled up under a blue sky on the sidewalk

For those who have worked to further social justice and democratic values in the United States, the election of November 8, 1994 was a defeat. The election results indicate that the American public has repudiated the liberalism that has been the…

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Racial Privilege, Racial Threat

A collection of signs reading slogans for the Black Lives Matter movement covering a fence.

Garrett Hardin Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economic and Population Taboos Oxford University Press, 1993 Tomas Almageur Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California University of…

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The Roots of the I.Q. Debate: Eugenics and Social Control

“Whatever the Jukes stand for, the Edwards family does not. Whatever weakness the Jukes represent finds its antidote in the Edwards family, which has cost the country nothing in pauperism, in crime, in hospital or asylum service.” -Albert E. Winship…

Q&A

The Snake Oil of Scapegoating

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A Call to Defend Democracy and Pluralism

by the Blue Mountain Working Group Coordinated by Chip Berlet Jean V. Hardisty Suzanne Pharr Loretta Ross November 1994 We are a group of individuals interested in joining with others to rebuild a multi-issue movement for…

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Encountering Holocaust Denial

Glass candles in a row, with one of them lit.

In 1991, college students across the country were confronted with a shocking form of bigotry against Jews: full-page ads in college papers purchased by Bradley Smith, founder of a California organization called the Committee for Open Debate on the…

Article

The Chosen People in the Promised Land

Old scrolls of the Bible and Menorah lie on a black background.

It can be frustrating to warn the public of growing U.S. antisemitism when the reply (often from Jewish advocacy organizations as well as non-Jewish groups) is that Jews are doing well in the U.S. Never better, in fact. In Scapegoat in the New…

Article

In Their Own Words: The Christian Right World View

Jerry Falwell, a white man wearing a suit coat, speaks in front of a crowd holding signs reading "I love America."

Michael Lienesch Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1993. 260 pp., plus footnotes and index. In Redeeming America, Michael Lienesch examines…

Article

Christian Reconstructionism

Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence

Overview and Roots The Christian Right has shown impressive resilience and has rebounded dramatically after a series of embarrassing televangelist scandals of the late 1980s, the collapse of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and the failed…

Article

The Hunt for Red Menace

How Government Intelligence Agencies & Private Right-Wing Groups Target Dissidents & Leftists as Subversive Terrorists & Outlaws

In this report, former PRA senior analyst Chip Berlet exposes the extensive and oftentimes illegal activities of the Right’s counter subversion movement in the United States throughout the 20th century. Rooted in conspiracist and anti-communist…

Black Conservatives: Part Two

A black and white photo of a Black man in glasses, and a black man in a suit.

In order to understand Black conservatism, it is important to understand the character of the Black bourgeoisie. Developing as it did within the context of white cultural oppression, it is not surprising that the values identified by Black…

Article

Confessions of a Religious Defender

Person's hand turning a page of a Bible.

Reading Stephen Carter is a frustrating exercise. His points are argued in reasoned tones, without the bombast or rhetoric of so many Black conservatives. In fact, he argues that he is not a conservative. He frequently assures the reader that he…

Article

Black Conservatives: Part One

A Black man in a suit, and a Black woman in a dress and a hat

For most African Americans the notion of a Black conservative is an oxymoron. The overwhelming majority of us reject conservative political positions because we understand in concrete, everyday, practical terms what conservative policies are and who…

Article

Buchanan, Fulani, Perot, & the Reform Party

The Repressive Side of Right Wing Populism What can possibly explain the Reform Party and the discussions about recruiting Pat Buchanan, that include possible support from H. Ross Perot, and Lenora Fulani? We think the rhetoric of right…

Article

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