If i hack up a lung, i apologize. I committed to this a few months ago, and you just never know when youre going to get sick will im here to share my journey from arizona to working in National News and politics here in the nations capital. Before i start rambling about myself, id like to get to know all of you a little better. How many for you is it your first time in washington, d. C. . Welcome. Thats kind of a lot of you. And where are you from . Any west coast eers . Yeah. Not that many. What about new yorkers . Anyone from the south . Nice. Are there any d. C. Locals here . A few. You know, my twoyear anniversary in d. C. Is going to happen at the end of april, and i notice that d. C. Is a very transient city so i never really meet a lot of people that were born and raised here who stay here. Its a tough city, but its a beautiful city and theres so many opportunities out here if you look for them and if you work hard. How many of you want to pursue a career in politics or news . Makes sense. How about just news . How about fake news . Just kidding. And politics . And those of you who are raising your hands for politics, do you want to run for office or do you want to work for the government, work for political candidates . Feel free to shout a few things. Run for office. I like it. More women in office, im for that, especially young people and millennials. Who is a freshman and junior . Raise your hand . Im sorry, freshman and sophomore. . Okay. Some young folks in here. The juniors and seniors . Okay. Very good. And the reason im asking this is because once upon a time, i was in your shoes. I was trying to figure out what i wanted to do for a living, my life, what career i could pursue and actually be good at, and how i could make a difference. I just want to pause for a second, and i want all of you to give yourselves a pat on the back for being here today, just even getting into a college that you wanted to go to and being part of this program and visiting d. C. Is a huge accomplishment. You know, dont underestimate yourselves. Its a big deal. I think youre going to learn a lot today from everything ive heard about this program ,and hopefully at least you will take one thing away from my conversation today. I wanted to tell you a little bit about what im doing right now. And then after ill give you the details on how i was able to pursue my passions. I work as a video columnist for the daily caller. You may be asking yourself what is daily caller. Does anyone know what the daily caller is . No . You will learn today. And then you might be asking yourself what the heck is a video columnist . I didnt know what a video columnist was either. That title didnt really exist when i was in college. The daily caller is an online media outlet. Its cofounded by tv commentator Tucker Carlson. Hes the host of Tucker Carlson tonight on fox news. Thats a very successful and highly rated program. In fact, tucker came in at second place as the most watched cable news host in 2019. The first place host went to sean hannity. Third place went to msnbcs rachel maddow. The other cofounder is neil patel. Hes former chief policy adviser to Vice President cheney. Patel is very involved in our daytoday operations. We get around 20 million unique readers each month, which is kind of a pretty big deal actually, so for me its an honor to have such a big, huge platform with so much flexibility on what i can cover, who i can interview and what i can talk about. For video columnist that didnt really exist when i was in college, as i mentioned and as you may have noticed the News Business is evolving fast. In college i remember actually getting a newspaper in the morning and reading it while Drinking Coffee and then walking to campus. How many of you actually get a newspaper at your dorm or your apartment or house . A few people. One person back there. Three people here. Its incredible. I mean i just cant believe it. Newspaper every day. Now were all on our cell phones. A lot of us consume our media from social media from twitter and facebook. I think the majority is something close to 70 last time i looked at the numbers. Not that im that old, im a millennial, by the way, not trying to age myself here today, so i also write and i shoot video monologues, mostly Opinion Pieces or explainers from a conservative perspective. I consider myself more of an opinion person, registered republican, but everything i talk about is fact based. Im careful and thoughtful about the things that i put together. I take issue with a lot of the journalists today who pretend that theyre unbiased or have no agenda, no motive, and thats kind of what i set out to do at first, was i wanted to just tell stories, but as my career has been changing ive decided to take a side and have an opinion. So i interview a lot of highprofile people, senators, members of congress, Trump Administration officials, political candidates from across the country. I go to protests and rallies and talk to people there. I ask them questions. I talk to regular folks who have interesting stories. A lot of stories i get people just dm me on twitter or facebook and tell me about a story, and thats also what i love about social media it connects you to people that would never really have a voice. I do a lot of my own video editing, which i used to complain a lot about in college, why are they teaching me how to use premier and eds and final cut pro. Im not a computer person. I never thought i would have to use it, but im using it every single day right now with all of my stories and a lot of people have a hard time believing i edit all of my own content. I write and publish my own articles so im pretty busy these days. I was also cohost for like it or not that airs on fox 5 in the d. C. Area. A weekly regular on fox business, fox news. Ive made appearances on msnbc, sky tv australia, local news in puerto rico, cspan which i think theyre running a live stream right now hi, mom and dad i hope they are watching. Abc 7 st. Clair, the daily caller was featured in an episode of showtimes the circus which was kind of cool. I was interviewed by abc nightline. They dropped by my office last year to interview me about a twitter feud i had with rapper cardi b. The feud was over twerking. And im not kidding. Like this actually happened. I never imagined in a million years that, you know, i would be on nightline talking about twerking. Before the daily caller i was an adviser for National Diversity coalition for trump. In a nutshell its a group that strongly supports the president and his administration. The coalitions mission is to recruit, mobilize and educate citizens of all backgrounds. It was to be the voices for minority communities. The list goes on. I am bicultural, so dont let my highlights and my last name fool you. My mother is an immigrant from mexico. She comes from the state of halisko and comes from a very small town outside of guadalajara, the second biggest city, and the farm town like 300 people live there. And she came to the u. S. Many years ago to come live the american dream. She did it the right way. She applied for citizenship, and it was history from then. My dads side of the family is from michigan and i si habla espanol, better than beto orourke. It was important for me to communicate with my family that still lives there and i visit mexico quite a bit and still communicate with my family there. The reason i talk about all of this, take a break for water for a second, a lot of people ask me or suggest to me that maybe i came from privilege or that my parents must be like well connected, and thats not how i got my foot in the door in politics at all or in the National News at all. Its not even close to my story. My family wasnt well connected. I grew up in a middleclass family. Ive worked at least a parttime job since i was 16. I was the first to actually graduate college in my immediate family. I didnt have anyone to guide me through the process. I just figured it out along the way. I give my parents a lot of credit for being supportive and always inspiring me to do more and be my best. Youll find that a lot of people want to be a critic, they dont want to empower you, they want to tell you no, you cant do it or its too difficult, its impossible. I mean, even just wanting to study journalism, people are like, oh, youre not smart enough to go to college. Journalism school is too competitive. You wont get in. Our teachers in Journalism School, a lot were great, but they were very honest and said, you know, a lot of you if you want to do tv broadcast, youre not going to make it, youll never find a job, its low paying. If you want to be poor the rest of your life, this is the career for you. Its not worth the struggle, run, do Something Else fast. But i didnt like those answers, and i think that you have to ignore the negativity thats around you because even the people closest to you sometimes will hurt your feelings, shut you down, step on you, et cetera. Ive had a million doors closed on me. Ive had some like extremely soul crushing moments through my life. Im sure i still have a lot more to overcome. Things are going pretty well right now, but you never know. A lot of you raised your hands when i asked who wanted to pursue a career in news and politics. We all have our own reasons and motivations. Hopefully theyre good ones. Yes. Okay. These are important careers and they both shape and influence the direction of our country. Somebody has to step up. So i think its really important to take on these roles. Journalists, theyre supposed to be the watchdogs of our nation and the world. Theyre supposed to expose corruption. Keep politicians in check. Keep us informed. Theyre supposed to be the fearless voices for our communities, among other things, and as for the state of the news media today, well, we can get into that in a bit. I can just say that im very concerned and very disappointed. Now politics, as you already know, our political leaders play a key role in the creation of policies and all of those policies affect the way we live our lives. So that goes from how much we pay in taxes, from the health care that we receive, the quality of water, gas prices, education, our national security, the air we breathe, literally everything, even the food on the shelves at the grocery stores. If youre at the National Level in politics, of course that affects everyone in our country, state and local, that affects our communities. I think you get the point. So all of that was fascinating to me when i was around your age learning about it and to be honest, i really couldnt articulate what our politicians did or our local officials did. I didnt know what the difference between the city council, the state legislature and our members of congress and the state senate. Like that was very confusing for me when i was your age. Maybe youre a little smarter than me when i was in college. You never know. I remember one of my classes they would have us cover the city council meetings, we would write stories as if we were real working journalists and we would interview some of the City Council Members, and they would give us quotes. We would turn in our articles. It was very legit. Most of the students in my class thought it was really, really boring, but for me, it was like an eye opener on how everything works in our towns and cities and showed me what an Important Role that the people we elect have. From there i got lucky. One of the City Council Members saw that i had an interest in city government, so he invited me to intern for him. His name was rodney glassman. He was a democrat. I wasnt always a registered republican. My views have changed over the years, as i have had more time to examine some of the issues i care about and carefully think about what matters to me and what i think is best for this country. At the time i was a registered independent, and i was an independent up until around 2016. After that, i was approached by one of my university of arizona professors who told me about a paid internship at the state legislature in phoenix with arizona capital television. The state version of cspan, sort of. We ran the live feeds of all the floor debates and votes. We also did feature pieces on the elected officials, and this was so their constituents could get to know them a little bit better. It was really a great experience and im so thankful for that professor who approached me and asked me to apply. It was a very competitive internship. I was one of two students from the Journalism School who was selected that semester. The reason i bring this up is because sometimes we dont realize how important it is to talk to our professors, have them get to know who we are, what were interested in, because theyre very connected. They can help you guys. They can connect you to these internships similar to what my professor did for me. It was life changing. I hope that you guys take those advantages. Obviously youre here today, so like i said, step in the right direction here. How many of you have done an internship or are interning right now . Nice. For those of you who didnt raise your hand, why are you not doing internships yet . Anyone want to comment . Exactly. Yeah, working part time. It was tough to balance all of it. But i would say that internships are so important, and its really where you develop your skills and learn about your strengths and weaknesses and learn about responsibility. And the more you do, the more connections you make, the stronger your resume is and youll have a better idea of what youre really interested in. So i know it is really tough to try to balance work and school and socializing and Everything Else about being college students. But you really got to make that sacrifice. So whether its just an internship a couple hours a week, that will make a big difference. So how many of you who didnt raise your hand for internships might consider trying very hard to get one in the next year or two . One person. Two, three, four, five. Okay. Cool. So from the State Capitol i was after my internship at the State Capitol, i was asked by the same Council Member from tucson to join his statewide senate campaign. We ended up winning the fourway democratic primary, which was cutthroat. It was vicious. It was really difficult to win that in arizona. Unfortunately, we lost against the republican candidate which was the late john mccain. You may have heard of him. It was an unforgettable experience. I traveled all over the state from the Navajo Nation to the border cities like nogales, arizona. I had a chance to talk to elected officials. Across the the state, meet with people and realize how big our states are and how different each community and county is and each state. Its so incredibly different. You realize what a challenge it is for our state senators who have to manage an entirely state. Not just members of congress who have our districts with needs. Our plans to go to washington died with that failing campaign. I was hoping that my candidate was going to take me to d. C. If you guys know how campaigns work, usually you dont get paid much, you work a lot of hours a week. I think i was working 80 hours a week or more. I put everything into that. Usually campaigns will pick from volunteers or workers and give them their first pick of workers or jobs in the district they are representing. So i had to kind of figure out where i was going to go from there. So i started sending out video reels and doing standups for news packages because i studied journalism. So what else would i do . I included some of the work i had done at the state capital. No one was biting. I think i was maybe sending my demo reel to the wrong places. I thought i was ready for primetime news. I didnt realize you had to start in small markets and work your way up. No one told me that. So wasnt having any luck. Out of the blue i reached out to the person who inspired me to study journalism. Her name was lorraine rivera. I talked to her a couple years ago and saw her in tucson. She works for pbs in tucson. At the time im not going to go into the whole story how we met. Its kind of a weird story. At the time she worked as a local news anchor in tucson. She told me directly, your reel sucks. You need a reel, by the way, is just a montage of your best work as a journalist. And she hated it. She told me to come to work with her one day and shadow her. She was kind enough to let me interrupt her workday. She let me borrow a videographer and let me to the standups for her stories and they gave me my own video. It was one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me, an she had no reason to do it for me. She eventually ended up helping me land a job in yuma, arizona, a cbs affiliate. We covered the desert southwest, which included parts of mexico and california. As a reporter i didnt really have a beat. I covered the border, crime, court trials, agriculture, politics, education, pretty much everything. I was also a weekend anchor and the weather girl. The meteorologist taught me how to put together my own graphics. Luckily in yuma, arizona its pretty much clear skies all the time if youve ever been there. Is anyone from arizona, by the way . Any wild cats . Bear down. Did anyone go to the asu game over the weekend . Okay. Well, it was a home game. U of a crushed the sundevils and it was awesome, and i was there. Great homecoming for me. So anyway, from there i went on to work for one America News Network in san diego, california. It was a new conservative leaning news network. I was a writer, producer, booker, reporter, and fill in anchor. I was so busy, it was like i didnt have time to use the bathroom. It was like hard to eat and get a break in. Probably not very fair, but thats life. And i actually started at this network before it even launched. It was a huge decision to leave the cbs affiliate. It was pretty risky. I remember having a conversation with my parents. Its always good to bounce ideas of things you want to do in the future with the people that you love. My dad is like thats really risky. Why would you leave cbs to go work for some network that no one has ever heard of. Thats crazy. My mom is, you should do it. Go to san diego, National News. Thats what you want to do. So this was a big back and forth. I just to roll the dice and how i did even find out about this network that wasnt on air yet. Well, there was a person i had had interned with at pbs in college