Moonbat Central is the group blog for DiscovertheNetworks.org, David Horowitz's searchable, online database of the organized left.

DiscovertheNetworks and Moonbat Central were launched together on February 15, 2005.

DiscovertheNetworks offers comprehensive data on the left — hard facts on its people, networks, alliances and organizations.

Moonbat Central puts that data to work, seeking insight into the motives and agendas driving the left's daily antics as reported in the press.

Why "Moonbat Central?"

The term "moonbat" or "barking moonbat" is blogger jargon for an ideological extremist.  In practice, it usually refers to leftists.

We call this blog Moonbat Central because we seek to provide here, both through our daily blogging and through our ever-expanding DTN database, a central clearinghouse of information on the plans, goals and activities of the barking moonbats of the left.

Of course, not all moonbats hail from the left.

The official Samizdata.net blog glossary defines a "moonbat" - or, more properly, a "barking moonbat" – as, “Someone on the extreme edge of whatever their -ism happens to be.”

The same glossary entry quotes blogger Adriana Cronin thus:"Definition of a `barking moonbat': someone who sacrifices sanity for the sake of consistency."

Moonbats: Left, Right and In Between

One need not be a leftist to trade sanity for consistency.

Indeed, the first known use of the term "barking moonbat" - by British blogger Perry de Havilland of Samizdata.net - was directed at Harry Browne, who heads the United States Libertarian Party (see "Harry Browne Gets Blogged Over the Head By Foxy Andrea," Samizdata.net, March 21, 2002).

To be sure, moonbattery comes in all shapes and sizes.  We deplore it in all its manifestations.

But here at Moonbat Central, we focus our critique on the moonbats of the radical left, whose ranks seem to generate dangerous, anti-social fanatics at a rate far surpassing that of other movements.

All too often, it would seem, the utopian future that leftists fantasize at the end of the rainbow exerts a seductive grip on their psyches so complete that they deem any sacrifice (or atrocity) as worthwhile in pursuit of it.