Discover the Networks

Discover the Networks is a research project that studies the U.S. political left wing. It was launched in 2004 by David Horowitz and has a staff of over a dozen contributers. Its current Editor-in-Chief is Horowitz. John Perazzo is the project's managing editor. Richard Poe is its investigative editor.

According to the project's missions statement, Discover the Network's goal is to provide a comprehensive "guide to the political left" covering "the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it." The project also seeks to "define the left's...programmatic agendas," which it contends are often concealed. The project's contributers contend that the political left in the United States commonly applies a "deceptive public presentation" of itself that conceals a network of affiliations and shared political views with "radical agendas" with a variety of communist, socialist, environmentalist and other "anti-capitalist" and "anti-American" causes.

The project currently maintains a database of prominent leftist personalities in academia, politics, and the media as well as leftist interest groups. It assembles and publishes data on the financial backers of liberal personalities and organizations. Much of their research focuses upon individuals with financial connections to groups that espouse communism and socialism and with Arab terrorist organizations, but the group is also concerned with critics of the USA PATRIOT act, advocates of social justice (which the website refers to as a "post-Communist terminology for socialism and communism"), and members or supporters of labor unions. When first launched, the website received ridicule from many liberal and moderate media and blogs for listing radical Muslim terrorists and entertainment celebrities such as Bruce Springsteen and Barbara Streisand on the same page [1]. Horowitz initally justified these juxtapositions as a "quirk in the format" [2], but as of 2005 the site has now stopped this practice.

Discover the Network is associated with the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which has received numerous grants from right-wing foundations. [3]

External links

DiscoverTheNetworks.org database
Response by profiled activist Tim Wise