In today’s episode, we hear a June 29, 2016 interview with Daniel Oppenheimer, a writer and documentarian, and the author of Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Shaped the American Century. In his book, Daniel Oppenheimer writes about the political conversions of six figures whose names might be familiar—Whitaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens. Though each of these figures defected from the left in one if not all ways, their stories are certainly not identical: whereas Chambers and Burnham were both committed Marxists at one point, Reagan was never really of full-fledged lefty. And Hitchens, though a supporter of the Iraq War and a friend of neoconservatives, always bristled at the accusation that he was in any way on the Right. Still, despite the differences between these figures, studying their respective apostasies can reveal something valuable and instructive about the changing political landscapes of the 20th century. And in a broader sense, the question their stories raise is really about us, today: how and why, our guest Daniel Oppenheimer asks, do we come to believe in certain political positions at all—either on the left, the right, or somewhere in the middle?