Welcome to DiscoverTheNetworks, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The DiscoverTheNetworks website is a "Guide to the Political Left." It identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left, and also the institutions that fund and sustain the left; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left's (often hidden) programmatic agendas; and it provides an understanding of the left's history and ideas.

The site is made up of two principal data elements along with a powerful search engine to locate and explore the information stored. The first of these elements is a database of PROFILES of individuals, groups and institutions, which can be accessed through the gray buttons on the home page, or through the DTN DIRECTORY on the navigation bar. The PROFILES provide thumbnail sketches of histories, agendas and (where significant) funding sources. The information has been culled from public records readily available on the Internet and in books and other sources whose veracity and authenticity are easily checked.

The second data element of this site consists of a library of articles, both scholarly and journalistic, which analyze the relationships disclosed in the database and the issues they raise. These articles have been entered into the database and linked in the RESOURCES columns that appear on the PROFILE pages. The judgments that inform these analyses are subjective, reflecting informed opinion about the matters at hand. In every case possible, their authors and sources are identified so that users of the database can form their own judgments and opinions about the reliability and value of the analyses.

DiscoverTheNetworks is an ambitious undertaking that would not have been possible before the creation of the Internet, with the storage capacities and data linkage features that digital space affords and that such an undertaking requires. As a result of the information that these technologies make available, a user of this site can follow the networks described in the database to arrive at a new understanding of the forces that define our social reality and shape our collective futures.

The database will readily answer many questions that previously would have required volumes of printed text to establish. The primary question is: "Is there a left?" Since the early 1970s, radical activists began referring to themselves as "liberals" (in part to distance themselves from their failures as a socialist left). A sympathetic media culture went along with this deception, with the result that the word "left" has all but disappeared from the political lexicon. The spectrum of views is now regularly described in the media culture as extending from "liberal" to "moderate" to "conservative" or "right," as though a left did not exist or was so marginal as not to matter.