Like most parents, Clash Radio host and Townhall.com columnist Doug Giles is proud of his children. His daughter Hannah helped take down ACORN in 2009, when she partnered up with James O’Keefe to produce revealing undercover videos. Giles’ other daughter, Regis, started the campaign “Girls Just Wanna Have Guns,” which, among other things, aims to instruct young women on how to protect and defend themselves against predators.
He has every reason to brag about his no-nonsense girls, both of whom partially inspired his new book, “Raising Righteous and Rowdy Girls,” which provides 14 chapters on how to rear females in today’s world. The Townhall.com contributor advises parents to teach their girls classiness and the value of intellect, but it’s not all work and no play for the Giles clan. Giles thinks it’s important for young women to know how to hunt, fight, rebel, date decent guys and even party.
Giles recently agreed to answer some questions about his new book and other topics of interest from TheDC:
TheDC: What inspired you to write this book?
Doug Giles (DG): I wanted to have something that contrasted the mayhem that is the “Jersey Shore” way of raising kids, you know, allowing your kids to be pirate hookers on television, letting Snooki and J-Woww and The Situation parade, smoking bongs upside down, taking tequila shots from girls’ cleavage, and just typical debauchery and that has somehow become normative for today’s youth. I wanted to show that parents are raising kids in a culture where Mayberry RFD is no longer a reality, and that in order for them to raise girls in particular to be sharp, solid, and smart, they’re going to have to have a creed so that they can row against some of this [“Jersey Shore”] culture. That’s why I wrote “Raising Righteous and Rowdy Girls.”
TheDC: Would you raise a woman differently than a male? Is that necessary in our society?
DG: Yeah, and case in point, something that’s near and dear to my heart…When you get married and if you have a little girl, and I guarantee your husband will echo the same things, daughters are the proverbial apple of a father’s eye. One of the things that concerns me, especially being a transplant from West Texas and moving down to South Florida, which is notorious for vice and violence, I wanted to make sure that my daughters were able to throw down and fight should some ham-fisted 16-year-old do the gratuitous grab for their breast or some Hannibal Lecter freak wanted to duck-tape them when they’re shopping at Target and stick them in his trunk and take them out to the woods for a “Silence of the Lambs” rendezvous. I wanted to make sure that my girls knew how to fight. You know, most boys, even though metro-sexual madness has taken over this youth, most boys are pretty scrappy, at least where I hail from, and they know how to pretty much defend themselves, but you know girls being smaller and weaker than men, I wanted to make sure the playing field was leveled. So what I advocate in my book is that girls know how to throw down and shoot the crap at the fan. I’ve taught my daughters to be the fan in that situation.
TheDC: So what makes a “righteous and rowdy girl?”
DG: Well, a common misconception among evangelicals, which I’m one of them, is that if your daughter is righteous, she has to be this petty-coat wearing damsel in distress who says, “Oh my, I need a knight in shining armor to come and rescue me.” The problem is that there are no knights in shining armor. A lot of the guys have bought into the misandrous fly and they’ve become more feminine or effeminate and more of a dandy instead of the historic Clint Eastwood type who can kick butt and take names.
So I wanted to want to show that girls can be righteous, they can be classy, they can excel in academics and at the same time they can have a rowdy good time rebelling against this cultural swill that is shoved up their tailpipe and down their throat 24/7 by this Godless culture. The rowdy aspect is, like in my book, I teach them again how to fight, how to shoot guns, how to protect themselves, because especially in the state of Florida, I believe nearly 80 percent of the abductions that occur with young people happen to females, so I don’t like that. I want to make sure my kids don’t have that scenario play out on them and they become victims of some weirdo.
If you’re going to put your kids in public school or university, there’s such anti-American sentiment there that I didn’t want my kids to be some sponge and that professor be the Super-Soaker who tries to erode what my wife and I have taught them, so the rowdy aspect comes into play where we tell our kids they have a right to rebel, question, and rage against the machine to be the James Dean, Harley Davidson-wearing rebel against secularism, socialism, slutification and the wussification of our culture. Yes they can be righteous to where they can live clean lives, but that doesn’t mean they live in some kind of sterile environment separated from culture. They can infiltrate the culture with comedy, class, wisdom, intellect, but also with a rebellious attitude that says we’re not going to allow our nation go down the crapper because it’s what everybody else is doing.
TheDC: So did your daughters go to public school and have to deal with this sort of propaganda and anti-American agenda from their teachers?
DG: Yeah, absolutely. They went to public school all the way until high school and then we yanked them. It’s so bad down here that the best schools look like Leavenworth. I mean literally, strewn with barbed wire, there are cops parked up on the sidewalk right by the doors, it’s 186 percent overcrowded, so we said screw this. The girls started homeschooling with Florida Virgil School and they just excelled academically. But they were part of the mucked-up mix for several years and during that time period, they would hear all this stuff that we hear on Fox News, just America completely denigrated. If you didn’t dance to their call, you were made to be the weird person. I just refused to have my daughters feel like that when traditional values, Judeo-Christian world view, and conservative principles and capitalism caused America to be the great American experiment, so I made certain that as much as I could from their little tiny hearts and little tiny minds that they were educated to our great foundations, to our Christian worldview, and when they heard the other stuff coming from the teachers ridiculing those things, that they had the right and the moxie to question that and confront it when it was served to them on a regular basis.
TheDC: Do you think it’s possible for girls without both parents to be “righteous and rowdy?” Do you think it’s more of a problem if they don’t have both parents raising them?
DG: Absolutely. I mean girls who don’t have a dad, it’s way tough. Meg Meeker did an incredible job in her book, “Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters,” where she talks about everything from weight issues to education to promiscuity to eating disorders, she goes on and on the part and parcel of some poor girl who doesn’t have a strong father or a father figure in her life. No matter what Rosie O’Donnell and her lesbian crew say, and no matter how mannish some of those women look, a dad is irreplaceable, period. Psychological statistics from the greatest schools in the United States say that the girl who has a dad, and he doesn’t have to watch Oprah Winfrey’s show or read parenting magazines, he just has to, as I say in my book, care, be there, spend time, and stay involved.
TheDC: What sort of suggestions do you have for females who would love to be “righteous and rowdy” but for whatever reason don’t have dads? Perhaps their fathers died or abandoned the family, but how can these girls become “righteous and rowdy?”
DG: Well, the first thing they can do is go to righteousrowdygirls.com, click your mouse, melt your plastic, and buy my book. The second step is to read everything I write on Townhall.com. Hopefully there’s some uncle who has his crap together and can take [the fatherless girls] on board, or possibly an older brother who somehow navigated from the metro-sexual madness and he has a good masculine protective vibe about him and can show her the ropes. Then you have the back-ups of a church or synagogue or something like that through a youth pastor, preferably a married youth pastor who can take them on board and mentor them through the madness of the big teenage fart cloud that’s looming over the United States.
TheDC: Is there anything specific that your girls have done that has made you the proudest?
DG: That one is easy. My oldest daughter Hannah Giles infiltrated, conceived the ACORN sting [with James O’Keefe] and pretended to be the prostitute in the nation-shaking video expose of that seedy organization, which was on President Barack Obama’s short resume and caused that thing through those videos to implode and save taxpayers, I think, an estimated $8.5 billion. That was cool.
Regis is a Second Amendment activist, she owns her own business,”Girls Just Want to Have Guns,” she is a public speaker, she spoke at CPAC, she has been on CNN and ABC News, and she has a hunting show in the works right now called “Primal Urge” — and she’s 19. She’s also a writer for a NRA magazine.
TheDC: So how can a “righteous and rowdy” girl find a nice man who can handle her?
DG: Yeah, now, as I’m sure you’re well aware, it’s panning for gold [to find quality guys]. I mean, we’re talking about needle and haystack because parents have become these absentee landlords who have allowed the stupid, Babylonian idiot-box called the television or the Internet or clueless peers to be the primary source and substance of their kids’ upbringings. To find a young man with the classic values of provider, protector, hunter, and hero, I mean you’re talking about a rare bird. My oldest daughter Hannah, just through the intensity of what she does as a profession as an undercover journalist, the rigorous environment and intense situations yielded up a pretty good crop of young men of which she latched onto one, and now they’re happily married and living a cool life.
It was funny because people said, “Hannah, you’re so young, why don’t you wait until you’re 30? You have so many things you can do as a single girl.” She said, “Look. I found a butt-kicking guy who is sharp, solid, and smart. You guys can wait if you want to wait but I’m happy, why don’t you leave me alone?” Regis, who is not a big dater even though she’s ridiculously gorgeous, hasn’t found a man amongst the boys. That’s from people who are 18 to 40 [years of age]. When somebody sets their sights to greatness, and that’s whether they’re male or female, you can’t compromise that. And so they’re looking for somebody to bring their A-game, somebody with a credible lifestyle and vision. You have to place yourself in those environments, and I’m really pleased with the group of people that Hannah and Regis have been a part of all their lives, from Young America’s Foundation to their Jiu-Jitsu school to their Christian surfing environment. They have been around class-act kids. I mean, there have been creepers, but they’re so serious and so fun-loving and have such cool lives, so if you’re a dork loser, you get curbed really quick.
TheDC: In your book, you talk about the importance of showing girls how to sniff out BS. How do you advise someone how to know when something isn’t right so they won’t be naive or fall for bad things happening?
DG: Well, I talk about a BS detector [in my book], and one of the things God hard-wired everyone with is what Gavin de Becker calls the gift of fear. I tell people your BS detector is this: When you’re picking up on something, you’re picking up on something, whether it’s a bad date, you know, here’s Rico Suave at Starbucks and he wants to ask you out for a drink later on or for dinner and something in your gut is telling you “don’t do it.” You need to listen to your gut saying “don’t do it.” If you’re looking at a car and it looks great and is the color you want, I teach my daughters to walk around, check the tires, and bring in experts. One of the things that really hones a kid’s BS detector is to hang out with someone who is older and successful because they can really show you the ropes because most girls’ BFFs don’t have the shrewdness that alone comes with age.
TheDC: Did you hear about the latest James O’Keefe video in which he exposed former NPR executive Ron Schiller calling the Tea Party racist?
DG: Yeah, I’m not a big NPR fan obviously. I think O’Keefe and his investigative work, I know it has been hammered by Media Matters and some other conservative sites, I believe, but at the end of the day, they [NPR] are anti-semitic, pro-Palestinian, anti-conservative, and they are left of liberal. The fact that James got them on tape, even though people say the tapes have been heavily edited, you know, Schiller is on tape shilling to the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted to take $5 million to reassure them that they’ll keep their anti-Israel agenda alive and well. I think it’s cool [what O’Keefe did]. It’s a sticky business what James is doing, and gosh, when I was 25, I was still an idiot, so hats off to him to try to bring truth to light and expose things that people have known for decades have gone on behind the scenes.
TheDC: In your book, you say girls need to know how to party. Can you explain that? Is that simply knowing how to drink responsibly?
DG: What’s wild is that, for that chapter, I really took heat from my Christian brethren because they thought it was inappropriate for me as a Christian to be talking to my daughters about drinking, which I responded to them in my Christ-like behavior, “Whatever.” What I tell my kids is that, when the majority of kids get away from their parents, most of them will try alcohol and stuff like that. To try to give them some preventative medicine and stuff, I told them, “Look, never drink more than two drinks. Make sure you’re loaded up with grub so that when you have the second cosmopolitan, you’re not doing a Girls Gone Wild video on the top of the bar at Coyote Ugly.” There is practicality in how much you drink, you also have to have self-control and discipline. It always begins and ends with the person being in self-control mode. Why are you drinking to begin with? Are you trying to drown your sorrows? Listen, if you’re in a depressed state and you drink depression, it just gets worse. Load up on food, drink water between drinks, and watch out for your drink because roofies and other date rape drugs are out there and there are a lot of losers who can get your hand or you digits because they’re so abysmal that they’ll drug you in order to take advantage of you. Also, surround yourself with about the biggest guys who are credible and have integrity that you can imagine so that they can beat the crap out of anybody should he not understand what the word “no” means. And always have a designated driver.
TheDC: One of your daughters is married. How do you continue to stay involved in the life of your “righteous and rowdy” daughter once she has tied the knot?
DG: Yeah, it’s, you know, I look at it as my job as alpha male is done. I’m a big proponent of “leave and cleave.” I don’t want to meddle in their marriage, I don’t want to be a busybody at all, so I step off and allow her and her husband to grow and mature together. Yeah, we keep in contact quite often, she doesn’t live in the same state that I do here in Florida. We do a lot of Skyping and texting, and she is still daddy’s girl but is Joe’s wife, and I respect that bond of matrimony and want them to make their decisions, good or bad or success and fail, and let them grow together to be the powerful couple that they already are and will be.
TheDC: If you had to sum up the advice you’d give to parents for raising “righteous and rowdy girls,” what would you say is the most important thing they should know?
DG: Well, stand on their own convictions. Stand on the principles that God has hard-wired us with of right and wrong and that infrastructure that our founders afforded us in this great American experiment and do it un-ashamedly. To the dads, play the man. I know that this man-hatred 21st century culture makes them out to be Homer Simpson or Adam Lambert, but God has hard-wired him to be the hunter, protector, and hero, and if he’s just that and shows up and cares, I know his kids are going to be fine.
