Leaving the Left: Moments in the News That Made Me Ashamed to Be a Liberal »

Keith Thompson, a former staffer for Ohio's Democratic senator Howard Metzenbaum, is now a freelance journalist and author.

One man's personal story of his conversion from lockstep liberal to free-thinking conservative

In May 2005, Keith Thompson published an essay in the San Francisco Chronicle that put him on the map in the conservative world, winning praise from people like Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin as well as garnering thousands of supportive messages from across the country.

A distance-running, wilderness-trekking baby boomer living in Northern California, Thompson had been a progressive all his life. But over the years, he became more and more uncomfortable with the excesses of the left, from diversity issues to the taboo on using the word "evil."

But the tipping point came when the left dismissed President Bush's liberation of the Iraqi people. As he writes, "Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's 'peace' movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a longsuffering third world country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom."

In this memoir, Thompson goes beyond his original essay to recall the defining moments in history that led to that tipping point. He describes how episodes such as the left's mindless embrace of Anita Hill in 1991 and its kneejerk defense of Bill Clinton in 1998 made him wonder what had happened to the progressive movement of his youth.

Leaving the Left will appeal to conservatives who love the books of former liberals like David Horowitz, Zell Miller, and Bernard Goldberg.