On March 10, 2012, Hannah Giles was among the featured speakers at a rally of the Faith & Freedom Coalition at the Sugar Creek Baptist Church in Sugar Land. It was described as a kick-off event for the Texas primary “filled with great speakers and loaded with fantastic information about getting our Conservative Christian Candidates elected. Giles spoke to the rally about her creation of the American Phoenix Foundation. Watch and listen above, or read the transcript after the jump.
Speech by Hannah Giles:
We, as liberty’s advocates, we’re playing a game of chess. Our problem is we are playing with half the pieces. We’re losing the narrative war every day, and when we lose the narrative war, we’re losing the culture war, we’re losing the political war, and this results in unchecked corruption and rampant moral failure.
The media used to expose these things, but now the mainstream media has become part of a corrupt power structure. Journalism schools are hopeless, because in America they are trained to destroy the courage and creativity of justice-seeking young people that come into their programs. They replace that justice seeking behavior with a desire to join the power structure rather than speaking truth to power.
I believe we must be in the business of changing hearts and minds. This is very, very different than a 50-50 political battle. Luckily most issues are not 50-50. Instead, the media creates this illusion, this impression that there is a split right down the country and we have to fight for that one percent to win elections. These efforts have never ever moved the ball forward and it traps us in that 50-50 fight. We have to go over the heads of the media. We have to jump over that imaginary 50-50 barrier in the political realm and show America the truth. We have to disrupt false narratives.
Let’s look at my ACORN investigation as an example. Why did it work? … We disrupted ACORN’s narrative. For too long, ACORN got away with the story that they were helping low-income families. Never mind that ACORN’s leaders were directly robbing those same people they pretended to help; never mind that they had been investigated for years for fraud, especially voter fraud.
But the moment my videos came out showing ACORN all too willing and able to facilitate an under-age prostitution ring, the U.S. legislative body acted immediately to defund the group, the United States Census cut ties and ACORNS private personal investors backed out, distancing themselves from the organization, causing them to go bankrupt.
Our videos posed a clear and undeniable evidence of 30 years of their corrupt practices. And I’m going to ask you something: was my ACORN investigation efficient?
Let me prove to you how much it was. Obama spent over $700 million winning the 2008 election. McCain spent over $300 million losing the 2008 election. Between James and I, we spent less than $1,500 making our ACORN videos. I think it is arguable that if we had done those videos in the fall of 2008 rather than the fall of 2009, we would have an entirely different president.
This is why I’m recruiting and training a farm team of investigative journalists. That’s why I funded the American Phoenix Foundation, or founded the American Phoenix Foundation. And our plan is over the next 50 years, young journalists such as myself will be breaking stories like ACORN every week. I want you to imagine what kind of culture and what kind of political climate that would create for us.
So is it too much to ask all of you to stop wasting your time and money defending progressive Republicans. What I’m asking you to do is use your time, your talents and your treasurers to disrupt the narratives that are ruining this country. And I’m asking you to join me, as I start my life’s work of narrative disruption, in the pursuit of justice.
