Tag: Journalism

An Open Letter to Tucker Carlson

Image: RawStory

As a teenager in America, and in most people’s valid opinion, an American citizen, I do not know where to begin on the comments you have made.

I was born in Boston, Massachusetts and currently live in Erie, Pennsylvania. I have lived in the United States all my life, have a legal birth certificate, social security number, passport, and more… yet you still have the audacity to say that, because I am under the age of eighteen, I am not an “American citizen” as much as you, Donald Trump, Uncle Sam, or anybody else.

I am Jewish. I am Latino. I am American.

Being any of those things does not strip me of my American citizenship in the least, and neither does my age.

My religion is a part of who I am as an American. I love being Jewish—especially in a country that allows me to express my religion without the fear of persecution or punishment. I love getting to educate people and being the one that gets to help other people grow as individuals by teaching them about my religion and what it means.

My heritage is no less significant to me than my religion or citizenship. Being Latino is also a part of who I am. I am a product of my family who came from South America, and I love to brag about it because it makes me feel like I am a real contributor to what is the great, American “melting pot.” Nobody could ever take my culture, history, or family away from me—not even you. To me, none of this, in any way, makes me less American.

I still feel as proud to pledge allegiance to the American flag as anybody else.

I just want to know—if it isn’t my religion or ethnicity—then what is it that makes me less American than the people around me? According to you, I’m not an American—I’m just a teenager.

This is what you said a couple weeks ago:

Video: FOX News

I would like to clear the air here: We are ALL Americans.

If you genuinely think that teenagers are not Americans, then I think you are about to be pretty surprised.

Across the nation, we teens have organized school walkouts, protests, marches, and other events to exercise our First Amendment right. We are fighting together against ignorant people like you who think that, just because we are not eighteen, we cannot have an opinion, exercise our God-given right to protest or challenge arrogant people like you. We want to show that we have a say in our future and that people such as yourself do not deserve to speak for us—people who would rather let us take the fall (literally) just so you don’t have to lose your guns.

If you ever had any respect for us and stopped to listen to what we had to say, you would know by now that we never asked for anyone to lose their guns. We only asked for common sense gun laws—to put in place reasonable restrictions on the Second Amendment, just as there are the same restrictions on our rights to free speech and rights to privacy. If you think we are being unreasonable just look to the Supreme Court Heller decision, and you will see as plain as day, that while it holds that the right to bear arms is not related to service in a militia, it is not unlimited and that guns and gun ownership would continue to be regulated.

We teens have to live in fear at our schools. We don’t exactly think that this makes a ‘conducive’ environment for learning, do you? Nor do we think that arming our teachers makes for any more of a ‘conducive’ learning environment, but we already know that you don’t care. What you do care about is assisting the gun manufacturers to increase their revenue. You would prefer that you get to keep your guns—end of story.

I keep going over it in my head, but I just cannot answer this one question. I would really love it if you could answer it for me: Who exactly would it take to be killed in a shooting for you to realize that enough is enough?

Would it be a group of innocent civilians? No—we already saw that at the Pulse Nightclub, Las Vegas… (the list is way too big to count).

Would it be a group of church-goers like yourself? No—we already saw that in Charleston, Nashville, and Sutherland Springs.

Would it be a class full of high school students like myself? No—we already saw that at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Would it be a class full of kindergarteners? No—we already saw that at the tragic Sandy Hook shooting.

What would it take for you to realize that the one life person would be worth more than all the guns in America? I just struggle to understand how somebody who is adamantly “pro-life” can have such blatant disregard for all of our lives. Somebody who was really “pro-life” would care about the life of a human being after they are born. What is the point in fighting for their life before it is born if you are just going to let them be shot someday after they are born by somebody with an automatic weapon that they shouldn’t even have?

We are fighting for our rights—for our lives—and whether you like it or not, we are equal American citizens with free speech, the right to organize, the right to assemble, and the right to protest.

I would really love to learn more about what you think, and so, while I have been rather firm and harsh in this open letter, I would also like to invite you to an interview with WTP Magazine if possible to sit down and your thought process when you made the statement saying that we teens are not Americans. I am not asking this in an antagonistic way. I am only asking this because I genuinely want to learn why you believe this.

Hopefully, when we are done, you can realize that if we are old enough to be shot, then we are old enough to have an opinion on being shot.

If you are seriously interested, like I am, in taking me up on my offer for an interview, please send me an email at harrison.romero@wtpmag.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

“This Is Not a Drill”: False Alarm Terrorizes​ Hawaii

Image: The Australian

Imagine enjoying the glowing beaches of paradise one moment and fearing total, nuclear annihilation the next. Well, that’s exactly what happened to residents of Hawaii and vacationers Saturday morning.

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Notification sent to all phones in Hawaii at 8:07am HST

BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

That’s the message that was sent out to all of Hawaii via emergency alert notification. Many people began to panic, and wonder if North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un had finally reached his boiling point. As all activities came to a sudden halt, residents and tourists called loved ones, took shelter, and were preparing to die. Little did they know, in spite of what the message said, this was a drill, but it was also a colossal failure.

Moments after the alert was sent out the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency tweeted out that there was no missile threat to Hawaii, but it wasn’t until almost 40 minutes after the initial alert that a second one making the correction was sent. How could such a mistake be possible? A human error, according to officials.

“It was a mistake made during a standard procedure at the change over of a shift, and an employee pushed the wrong button,” stated Hawaiian Governor David Ige, while speaking to CNN on the alert broadcasted through television, radio, and emergency text message to all of Hawaii. Later, in a tweet, Ige has also promised to never let it happen again, but to many Hawaiians, his promise seemed empty and blame began to fall upon Ige, and his Twitter began to fill with angry responses like this one,

Responses like this are justified, considering that over a million people believed that today would be their last day on earth, all thanks to a careless mistake that could have been prevented.

To see the type of impact this alert had on Hawaii, this is a video from the Univeristy of Hawaii at Manoa showing people in a full sprint for safety after seeing the notification:

 

A Dictator Damned

Image: CNN

Since 1987, Robert Gabriel Mugabe has been the President of Zimbabwe, a landlocked country located in Southern Africa. At the old age of 93, Mugabe was the oldest active head of state and government in the world, but that all changed after a military takeover resulted in his resignation on 21 November 2017.

On 14 November 2017, armored personnel carriers were seen on the outskirts of the African nation’s capital, Harare. That night the military took over the nation’s state-run broadcaster, ZBC. The next day, while Mugabe was under house arrest, the military announced via a spokesperson on ZBC that Mugabe is safe and that they are only arresting criminals around him. Their statement did not settle any rumors of the coup and just added fuel to the fire. Over the next few days, anti-Mugabe demonstrators gathered in Harare to protest the dictator, a move that would have cost them their life just days before the coup.

Mugabe’s government has been known to silence any critic of the President and was even accused of abducting a protester back in 2015, but ever since the coup took place, millions of Zimbabweans have taken to the streets to show solidarity with the nation’s military. This coup, however, has nothing to do with free speech, something guaranteed in the nation’s constitution. Instead, it’s politically driven—a grudge against the elites of the country. Just days before the coup, Mugabe fired his Vice President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, the favorite to replace Mugabe. His reason for removing Mnangagwa was disloyalty, but the nation’s ruling party ZANU-PF believed it was to make room for Mugabe’s wife to succeed him.

Grace Mugabe, also known as “Gucci Grace” by the people of Zimbabwe for taking lavish shopping trips to South Africa, married Mugabe on 17 August 1996. This came after Mugabe had a secret affair with Grace, who worked as his secretary at the time. The couple married after Mugabe’s first wife, Sally Hayfron, passed away from kidney failure. Ever since then, Grace Mugabe has moved up in the ranks of the ZANU-PF party despite criticism from other party leaders. Many leaders of ZANU-PF despise her for being a foreigner, her inexperience, and that she’s only there because of her relation to Mugabe, but these critiqued failed to silence the woman they call “Gucci Grace.”

Grace Mugabe has very little support in the ZANU-PF party, where many of the party leaders call her “Mad Women” and mock her openly. However, she does have support from the party’s youth league and the G40 Faction, but this support isn’t enough for the First Lady of Zimbabwe, just days before the coup began she attended a ZANU-PF rally on 4 November 2017 where her own party booed her. Instead of leaving the stage or remaining silent, Grace Mugabe began to shout back at the protesters.

The only person ruling this country is the President!

Grace Mugabe wasn’t in Zimbabwe the night of the coup, however. She reportedly fled to Namibia and hadn’t returned since or made any public comment on the situation. President Mugabe, unlike Grace, did speak to the public. While under house arrest he made a public appearance at a graduation ceremony and made a statement on ZBC. He managed to cause chaos with his ZBC appearance. Thousands of people around the country waited in anticipation for Mugabe’s arrival, where he would reportedly resign as President, but that moment never came. Instead, the President asserted his power and stated that he would stay in office. This triggered the nation’s elites to give Mugabe 48 hours to resign, or they would move to impeach him.

Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe for over 37 years and stopped anyone who came in his way. Over his tenure, he fired two vice-presidents who he considered disloyal and muzzled the independent press. To many Zimbabweans his resignation seemed unlikely, that is until 21 November 2017. On this day something unexpected came, Robert Mugabe announced his resignation.

My decision to resign is voluntary on my part and arises from my concern for the welfare of the people of Zimbabwe and my desire for a smooth, non-violent transfer of power.

All over Zimbabwe, millions began to celebrate, the day they’ve been waiting for finally came. Over his reign, Mugabe crushed the countries economy, silenced the press, and jailed opponents of his. But the incoming President, Mnangagwa aka “The Crocodile,” is just as bad as Mugabe. While many Zimbabweans believe that they have found new freedom in their country, they might have just pushed themselves into a corner.

Alabama: A Man Who Allegedly Molested Eight Minors Is Probably Your Next Senator

Image: ABC News

A man who convicted a man of the murder of four children is currently losing to a man who allegedly molested/dated eight minors in a Senate race in Alabama—what a time to be alive!

It has been such a crazy month with the countless sexual assault allegations ever since #MeToo started trending. The charges of sexual assault on Roy Moore dropped a little over a week ago, but there’s no sign of them slowing down. Just last night, four more women came forward with claims against the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama.

Moore, born in 1947, was the oldest of five. Following high school, he attended the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in 1969. He subsequently served in the US Military, stationed in Vietnam, returning to his hometown of Gadsen in 1977.  That year, Moore began working for the office of the district attorney. He quit his job to run for the county’s circuit-court judge as a Democrat. He overwhelmingly lost in the primary to a fellow attorney, Donald Stewart. Shortly afterward, Moore left Gadsden to live in Australia for a year. He returned to Gadsen in 1985, the same year he got married.

In 1986, Moore decided to give it another shot and run for Etowah County’s district attorney, but he lost to fellow Democrat Jimmy Hedgspeth. Following his defeat, he decided to simply return to private practice in the city.

In 1992, the year that he had switched to the Republican Party, Etowah County’s circuit judge, Julius Swann, died in office, and the Governor of Alabama was to make a temporary appointment to fill the vacant seat. Jimmy Hedgspeth, Moore’s former political opponent who ran the D.A.’s office, recommended Moore, and Moore was installed in the position that he had failed to win in 1982. Moore ran as a Republican in the 1994 Etowah County election and was elected to the circuit judge seat.

Roy Moore was known as the “Ten Commandments Judge” for his refusal to take down a  plaque of the Ten Commandments that hung behind his bench. In 1995, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued him over the religious plaque and Moore’s tradition beginning sessions with prayers, saying such actions were unconstitutional and disregarded the separation of church and state. Moore told NPR:

Separation of church and state never meant to separate God from government. The First Amendment never meant to divide our country from an acknowledgement of God. It’s time to stand up and say, we have a right under our Constitution to acknowledge God.

The original case was dismissed, but in 1996, a Montgomery County Judge, Charles Price, initially ordered Moore to stop the prayer but he allowed the Ten Commandments plaque to be displayed. However, Price ordered the plaque removed after visiting Moore’s courtroom the following year. The case was again dismissed.

When Moore was elected to the Alabama Supreme Court in 2000, he took his fight over the Ten Commandments even further. Now, he was designing and planning a two-and-a-half ton granite obelisk inscribed with the Ten Commandments to be placed in the lobby of the Alabama Judicial Building. The Montgomery Advertiser states:

Moore had not told his fellow justices he was planning to install the monument, but brought a company into tape the installation of the monument in the Heflin-Torbert Judicial Building. Sales of the tapes later helped pay for his legal defense fund.

In 2002, a federal district judge ruled that the new statue was unconstitutional, violating the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. A deadline for removing the monument was instated and ignored by Moore in August 2003. A panel ruled that Moore had violated the judicial ethics code, and Moore was removed from the bench.

Just after a decade after being removed from the bench, Moore successfully won back his seat on the Alabama Supreme Court in 2012. No, he didn’t resurrect his Ten Commandments monument, but with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2015 that legalized same-sex marriage, Moore ordered state judges to protest it and enforce the state’s ban on same-sex marriages instead. In response to Obergefell v. Hodges, Moore wrote:

The Court’s opinion speaks repeatedly of homosexuals being humiliated, demeaned, and being denied ‘equal dignity’ by a state’s refusal to issue them marriage licenses.

That attempt to defy yet another court order resulted in another appearance before Alabama’s Court of the Judiciary, and he was suspended for the rest of his term in 2016, however, Moore’s age has prevented him from any chance of running again in 2018.

Now, Moore has decided to run for Senate in Alabama, and many shocking and revealing allegations have been put against him. He has been accused by eight women of sexual assault, and people are not happy.

This story was broken by the Washington Post, but the saddest part of all this is that Moore will probably still win.

Nate Cohn, a writer at the Upshot and the New York Times’ political data guru, said:

I don’t see any reason to assume Moore is in serious jeopardy.

When asked how much does he think this scandal might affect Moore’s chances to be elected, Cohn said:

My honest answer is that I don’t know. Alabama is an extremely conservative state that is deeply polarized along racial lines. Hillary Clinton might not even have received 15 percent of the white vote in Alabama last year. For Doug Jones to win, he might need to double that number. So this is not an easy task at all for the Democrats.

Cohn was asked by Slate whether there is any other state in the union that would be more likely to elect Roy Moore than Alabama. To that, he responded:

No. In Mississippi, the white vote is more conservative, but black voters are a much larger share of the electorate. If you had a revolt against a Republican candidate and black turnout was high, I think you can imagine how the Democrats get over the top there in a way that is tougher to imagine in Alabama. The argument the other way is that Alabama has better-educated metropolitan areas like Birmingham or Huntsville where maybe you can imagine that a Republican revolt would be modestly more likely than it would in Mississippi. But no, I think Alabama is basically as tough as it gets for Democrats.

Seeing what the political expert has said, it’s heartbreaking to think that an alleged child molester could beat a perfectly qualified Democrat just because of the political polarization in our society.

Yes, it is possible that he could win and be kicked out of the Senate, something that hasn’t occurred in over 150 years, almost immediately, but it’s not about whether he serves or not. It’s about whether the citizens prefer a child molester and a man who has been kicked off the bench of the Alabama Supreme Court not once, but twice, over a perfectly qualified candidate, simply because they are too dedicated to their political party. I truly hope Alabama makes the right decision, but it’s their decision to make, not mine.

While the Alabama Republican Party has not taken back their endorsement of Roy Moore, many Republicans and Democrats alike have called for him to drop out of the race.

In the end, who knows whether he will win or not? This entire election is ensured to be a toss-up, even though it should just be handed on a silver platter to the one who is not a child molester.

Filipino President Meets Trump for the First Time

Image: Newsweek

On June 30, 2016, Rodrigo Duterte was inaugurated as the Philippines 16th President. His campaign was one that had promised to end corruption, drug abuse, and deterioration of law and order. The following day, not too long after his inauguration, four people were shot dead for being suspected drug dealers. This was when Duterte’s mass-slaughtering of suspected drug dealers and users began, and when his popularity began to rise.

Rodrigo Duterte was born on March 28, 1945, in Maasin, Southern Leyte, Philippines. His father was a local mayor and governor, and his mother was a teacher and activist. As a child, Duterte misbehaved and was expelled twice. After learning to control his behavior he attended Lyceum of the Philippines University. It was at the Philippines University that he became influenced by Communist Party of the Philippines founder José María Sison. He studied law at San Beda College where it was reported that he shot a classmate of his. In 1988, he was elected mayor of Davao City where he used a vigilante group known as the “Davao Death Squad” to crack down on crime and drug abuse. It was estimated that his team killed more than 1,000 suspected drug dealers during a 20-year span. In 2015, Duterte announced that we would be running for President of the Philippines.

Duterte was an unlikely candidate for President, he was a seven-term mayor who was tough on crime and ran a weekly television show. During his presidential campaign, he had often promised to massacre criminals and even joked about raping an Australian missionary. Because of his unpredictability, thousands of Filipino’s showed support for his campaign and embraced the change he offered.  After a year in office, it was reported that 80 percent of Filipinos have “much trust” in their President despite numerous reports of human rights abuse. His unfiltered speeches often drew comparisons to United States President Donald Trump, who didn’t seem to be bothered by the comparison. In fact, President Trump offered an open invitation to Duterte to visit the White House back in April of 2017. This surprised many voters and drew outrage from human rights groups. Duterte, however, turned down the invitation, but the two had a chance to meet at the East Asia Summit and ASEAN Summit.While in the Philippines for the ASEAN Summit President Trump had a chance to meet Duterte for the first time. While there was very little detail on the meeting, the topic of human rights was expected to be brought up. It’s still unclear if it ever was discussed. Before the meeting between the two Presidents, there was an open session for reporters. One conversation between the two leaders stood out the most to reporters. Duterte said:

We will be discussing matters that are of interest to both the Philippines and … with you around, guys, you are the spies.

To that, Trump laughed, and Duterte responded with “You are.” It’s unclear if Trump was trying to be respectful to his host who has a long history of hatred towards journalists. In 2016 after the deaths of two Filipino journalists Duterte stated:
“Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination if you’re a son of a bitch. Freedom of expression cannot help you if you have done something wrong.”
This wasn’t the end of Trumps odd night with Duterte, later that night while attending a dinner Duterte performed a famous Filipino love song “on the orders of Donald Trump”. So far no statement has been released on whether or not Trump had actually requested the song. What we do know is that it was unorthodox, strange, weird, unheard-of, and just absurd.