Jerry Lamon Falwell, Sr. (August 11, 1933 – May 15, 2007) was an evangelical fundamentalist Southern Baptist pastor, televangelist, and a conservative commentator from the United States. He was the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, a megachurch in Lynchburg, Virginia. He founded Lynchburg Christian Academy (now Liberty Christian Academy) in 1967, Liberty University in 1971, and cofounded the Moral Majority in 1979.

Falwell and twin brother Gene were born in the Farview Heights region of Lynchburg, Virginia, the son of Helen and Carey Hezekiah Falwell. His father was an entrepreneur and onetime bootlegger who was agnostic. His grandfather was a staunch atheist. Jerry Falwell married the former Macel Pate on April 12, 1958. The couple had two sons and a daughter (Jerry Falwell, Jr., a lawyer; Jonathan Falwell, a pastor; Jeannie, a surgeon).

He graduated from Brookville High School in Lynchburg, Va., and from Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri in 1956. This Bible college was unaccredited until 2001. Falwell was eventually awarded three honorary doctoral degrees, and he sometimes used the title "doctor". The honorary doctorates were Doctor of Divinity from Tennessee Temple Theological Seminary, Doctor of Letters from California Graduate School of Theology, and Doctor of Laws from Central University in Seoul, South Korea.

William "Bill" Maher, Jr. ( /ˈmɑːr/; born January 20, 1956) is an American stand-up comedian, television host, political commentator, author, and actor. Before his current role as the host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher hosted a similar late-night talk show called Politically Incorrect originally on Comedy Central and later on ABC.

Maher is known for his political satire and sociopolitical commentary, which targets a wide swath of topics including religion, politics, bureaucracies of many kinds, political correctness, the mass media, greed among people and persons in positions of high political and social power, and the lack of intellectual curiosity in the electorate. He supports the legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage, and serves on the board of PETA. He is also a critic of religion and is an advisory board member of Project Reason, a foundation to promote scientific knowledge and secular values within society. In 2005, Maher ranked at number 38 on Comedy Central's 100 greatest stand-up comedians of all time. Bill Maher received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star on September 14, 2010.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.

Christine Therese O'Donnell (born August 27, 1969) is a former US Republican Party candidate who founded two advocacy organizations. She has been an advocate for nonprofit clients and nonprofit causes for nearly 20 years. A Tea Party favorite, and with strong financial support from the Tea Party movement, she defeated nine-term U.S. Representative and former governor Michael Castle in Delaware's September 2010 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. She lost the November 2010 U.S. Senate election in Delaware, to Democrat Chris Coons by a margin of 57% to 40%.

O'Donnell's 2010 Senate run was her third try for the office in five years. In the Senatorial election of 2008, she was the Republican nominee, losing to the incumbent, Joe Biden, by 65% to 35%. In 2006, she ran in the Republican primary for Senate, finishing third, then ran as a write-in in the general election, drawing 4 percent of the vote.

In addition to running for the Senate, O'Donnell has worked as a public relations and marketing consultant and has provided commentary on the Fox News Channel and CNN. She is politically conservative.

Larry Claxton Flynt, Jr. (born November 1, 1942) is an American publisher and the president of Larry Flynt Publications (LFP). In 2003, Arena magazine listed him as the number one on the "50 Powerful People in Porn" list.

LFP mainly produces sexually graphic videos and magazines, most notably Hustler. Flynt has fought several prominent legal battles involving the First Amendment, and has unsuccessfully run for public office. He is paralyzed from the waist down due to injuries sustained in a 1978 assassination attempt.

Flynt was born in Lakeville, Magoffin County, Kentucky, the first of three children to 23-year-old Larry Claxton Flynt, Sr. (August 16, 1919 – July 1, 2005), a sharecropper and a World War II veteran, and 17-year-old Edith (née Arnett; August 13, 1925 – March 29, 1982), a homemaker. He had two younger siblings; sister Judy (1947–1951) and brother Jimmy Ray (born June 20, 1948). His father served in the United States Army in the European Theatre of World War II. Due to his father's absence, Larry was raised solely by his mother and maternal grandmother for the first three years of his life. Flynt was raised in poverty, and claimed Magoffin County was the poorest county in the nation during the Great Depression. In 1951, Flynt's sister, Judy, died due to leukemia at age four. The death provoked his parents' divorce one year later, and Larry was raised by his mother in Hamlet, Indiana, and his brother, Jimmy, was raised by his maternal grandmother in Magoffin County. Two years later, Larry returned to live in Magoffin County with his father, because he disliked his mother's new boyfriend.