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Writers and journalists
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Russian novelist and Nobel laureate whose books, especially The Gulag Archipelago, exposed the Soviet camp system and the moral cost of communism. Ayn Rand Russian-born novelist and founder of Objectivism, a defender of laissez-faire capitalism who refused the conservative label and rejected religion. Booker T. Washington Born into slavery, he led Tuskegee Institute and became the leading Black American voice of his era, preaching education, thrift and self-help. C. S. Lewis Oxford and Cambridge literary scholar and Christian author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters and Narnia, and a defender of natural law. Charles Krauthammer Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and former psychiatrist who named the Reagan Doctrine and the unipolar moment and argued for democratic realism. G. K. Chesterton English journalist, novelist and Catholic apologist, creator of Father Brown, whose Orthodoxy defended tradition, common sense and widespread property. Irving Kristol Editor and essayist called the godfather of neoconservatism, co-founder of The Public Interest and author of Two Cheers for Capitalism. Lord Acton English Catholic historian and liberal politician remembered for the warning that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Phyllis Schlafly Attorney, author and founder of Eagle Forum who led the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment and wrote A Choice Not an Echo for Goldwater. Russell Kirk Michigan author whose 1953 book The Conservative Mind traced a tradition from Burke onward and gave postwar American conservatism its intellectual identity. Whittaker Chambers Former Soviet underground courier turned Time editor and National Review writer whose memoir Witness became a founding text of Cold War conservatism. William F. Buckley Jr. Founder of National Review and host of Firing Line, who built the postwar conservative movement by joining traditionalists, libertarians and anticommunists.