Daily Beast Blasts Former GOP Candidate For Having A Job
A Daily Beast post on Friday demonstrates how out-of-touch journalism on the American Left has become with political reality at the grassroots.
Policing a brief four-minute segment on a Fox News Channel show on crime, a writer for the leftist blog site seems to be entirely unaware that on the local level regular working folks and business owners are the ones who often run for office — and that candidacy does not define them.
Stories concerning the uptick in crime in Austin, the capital city of Texas, are by no means controvertible. The urban decay is taking place, as the projected No. 10 largest city in America is dealing with the fallout from having cut its police force by a third and a homelessness experiment that resulted in a 74.5% increase in the city’s unhoused population. It’s a story repeating itself in many large cities, e.g. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Democrats and Republicans alike are concerned.
Addressing the swell in crime statistics, Rupal Chaudhari appeared on The Faulkner Factor on Fox News Channel Friday morning. Her family owns two hotels in the same parking lot as a planned Housing First shelter in a converted Candlewood Suites purchased by the city in 2021. She described to host Harris Faulkner scenes of vandals breaking in to the neighboring under-construction shelter to steal the copper and flat screen TVs — calls to 9-1-1 being completely ineffective to to low call center staffing. Twitter, she said, was what finally signaled law enforcement. She once watched in disbelief as thieves slowly drove off with her hotel porch furniture. Watch the segment here.
The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona, who routinely trolls conservative-friendly cable news shows, had nothing to say about a minority and female business owner unable to stop crime on her own property. Rather, Baragona wrote:
“While presenting Rupal Chaudhari as merely a local hotel owner negatively impacted by liberalism, Fox failed to disclose she ran for office as a Republican.”
“What was not disclosed in the interview, however, is that the woman is a conservative community activist who unsuccessfully ran for Travis County judge last year as a Republican.”
Baragona, a St. Louis-based writer, was able to Google that much in an attempt to disqualify Chaudhari and/or throw shade on Faulkner. But he missed that the Candlewood hotel conversion is not earmarked for “transitional housing” for the homeless as he reported. The Candlewood is an example of decentralized Permanent Supportive Housing — a model that has been intensely criticized.
The writer correctly noted that Chaudhari lost to Democratic incumbent Andy Brown last year with around 30% of the vote in a low year for Republican turnout in the city. But he failed to disclose that Chaudhari faced an uphill battle in a largely Democratic county while still managing to outraise the incumbent. For similar reasons, there are not many professional conservative politicians seeking local office, as the Travis County GOP noted in a tweet. Translation: former Austin GOP candidates likely all work day jobs.
Chaudhari’s community activism is largely apolitical nonprofits and a neighborhood group designed to find a better spot for the planned shelter named MOVE Candlewood. She’s hardly the political operative Baragona envisioned.
Baragona also missed that Judge Brown lacks the business background Chaudhari has. Brown ran for the county’s top administrative spot after a career in Democratic activism and a stint as county party executive director. He has had to learn on the job.
[Editor’s note: Speaking of jobs, that’s a good thing to have between campaigns. If Baragona thinks jobs are so optional, perhaps he should move to Austin and sign up for a room at the Candlewood. We would also point out that Fox is not exactly the bastion of MAGA conservatism he must imagine it being.]
The Beast article noted Fox News did not return a call for comment. But they did not contact Chaudhari or even bother to tag her in a related tweet on X. We’ll let Mrs. Chaudhari have the final word below on her alleged “masquerade.” But the dunking that follows Baragona’s Twitter/X post is comedy gold — below are a couple of the best hits.
