Hannah Giles (who took down ACORN) and her husband Joseph Basel sit down with Texas Monthly and explain the motive behind this summer’s exposè of the Texas Legislature.
byR.G. RATCLIFFE, Texas Monthly
At age 19, Hannah Giles became a rock star of the conservative movement after she and provocateur videographer and conservative activist James O’Keefe posed as a prostitute and her pimp to run a 2009 hidden-camera sting on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ACORN. Republicans often accused the left-leaning organization of committing voter fraud, and the Giles/O’Keefe videos seemed to show ACORN workers were encouraging them to set up a child prostitution ring. Official investigations in three states found no criminal wrongdoing by ACORN workers and reported that the videos were heavily edited to put ACORN workers in the worst light. But the damage was done, ACORN lost both its government and private funding and went out of business. Giles’s husband later was arrested for attempting to enter U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu’s office disguised as a telephone repairman. They have been conservative activists in the past.
Giles and Basel afterward moved to Texas and set up the American Phoenix Foundation to promote investigative journalism by young conservative activists. Giles in speeches tells audiences that there is a need to bypass the mainstream media with investigations that “disrupt the narrative.” As part of that, they say they have hired 16 workers to use hidden cameras to investigate Texas legislators, an investigation that has angered both lawmakers and lobbyists.
Giles and her husband, Joseph Basel, sat down with me in the Texas Monthly offices for an hour this week to discuss their project and philosophy. My approach to the interview was to be a neutral solicitor of information so the readers can decide for themselves the motives behind Giles and Basel: Whether this is a pure investigation; is intended to oust House Speaker Joe Straus’s conservative allies; is a real scandal of lobbyists and legislators; or, whether the Texas Capitol’s legislators, lobbyists and journalists have all just been punked. We’ll know if the first video is released in June.
To make reading easier, I have broken the interview into topical parts. I have tried to be as light-handed as possible in the editing for brevity and to increase the clarity of my questions.
…
RGR: Why the name American Phoenix Foundation?
HG: We thought long and hard about our name … We liked the concept of the Phoenix rising from the ashes, and that’s the goal of the American Phoenix Foundation. We really wanted to reboot honest muckraking journalism in the United States, hard core investigative journalism that reveals hidden truths.”
RGR: What were the ashes the Phoenix had to rise from?
JB: Media is hurting. It is struggling. When we work with our national TV outlets, NBC, ABC, CNN, their investigative budgets have all been gutted. The lawyers won’t even let them look into anyone. So they end up being big fans with us, even if they sense an ideological difference, because we’re allowed to do what journalists used to be allowed to do: deep long dives and win awards for revealing stubborn hidden truths.
RGR: You’ve talked about wanting to disrupt the narrative. So what is the narrative of the Texas Legislature that you want to disrupt?
HG: One of the biggest things I’ve personally seen is little old ladies that organize and cheer-lead for certain politicians and they think, “Oh they are the greatest and they’re going to go to Texas and represent us.” And then being in Austin and having people who’ve worked in the Capitol and keeping an ear to the ground, I tell people, “No, that politician is just not a good person. They’re not who you think they are.” That person is in Austin partying, and first of all not a Christian like they think – which is fine; we don’t care – but it is just the hypocrisy of representing themselves one way to their constituents and then acting a totally different way, filing bills that aren’t consistent with things they’ve said they’d do.”
JB: “The party realignment has been fascinating…I grew up in Minnesota where JFK and FDR Democrats are still campaigning on that, and the voters are still voting for the Democrats because FDR saved the farm. It’s fascinating to look at Texas in that light. You have a number of good JFK Democrats who would be aghast at what the people they are voting for are doing up here, and you have a much larger number of the modern Republican coalition that would be aghast to see what their Republicans are doing once they get to office, policy wise and otherwise.”
Read more: Texas Monthly
SEE ALSO: THE GIRL WHO DESTROYED ACORN: Says She Has Scandalous Videos Of TX LAWMAKERS
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