Will Spencer Pratt Realign California?
By every reasonable standard of governance, California’s elected politicians have made a mess of the Golden State. Reciting the litany of failures has become so common that it’s hardly worth the trouble. Chaotic, unsafe downtowns. Retail businesses giving up and relocating. Chronic government budget deficits, despite the nation’s highest taxes, set to go higher still. “Needle exchanges” and “safe injection sites,” funded by taxpayers. Kids encounter drug zombies on the way to school. Parents dodge psychopaths in grocery store parking lots.
We’ve heard it all. We’ve seen it all. We’re desensitized. We just avoid certain parts of town the best we can and tell ourselves it can’t be helped. When we choose which candidates to support, we know nothing is going to change. This is life in California.
Even after preventable superfires ripped through several neighborhoods in Los Angeles in early 2025, destroying an estimated 16,000 homes, nothing seemed likely to change. The initial frontrunning candidates for mayor this year merely offered different downward trajectories. With incumbent Karen Bass, the decline would continue along a predictable path: more taxes to fund programs that were not failing for lack of funds but because the programs themselves rested on preposterous assumptions. Get homeless drug addicts “indoors,” and they will begin to recover. Keep giving them clean new needles. Don’t demand sobriety in exchange for benefits. That’s inhumane! Bass’s opponent, democratic socialist Nithya Raman, embraces the same flawed assumptions and supports the same failed programs but promises to expand them all even more rapidly.
California is an experiment in socialism that is slowly descending into bankruptcy, paralysis, and mass poverty, and Los Angeles is at the center of it all. But into this tightly choreographed exercise in manufactured consent posing as voter choice, Spencer Pratt decided to run for mayor of Los Angeles, turning it into a three-way contest that now offers voters a genuine alternative. Whether Pratt wins or loses, he is ushering in a new era in both the tools of campaigning and the messages that resonate.
The tools are obvious. Incredibly creative videos, produced in abundance at negligible cost using AI. But beyond the vivid hilarity of these videos, or their most obvious message—clean up the city or watch it burn—these videos are also sending a far more sophisticated message, and they are doing it in a way that skirts the intellect and goes straight to the id. Crucially, many of these ads don’t even come from Pratt’s campaign organization. Independent content creators, delighted with the popularity of his message, have rolled out hundreds of videos building on themes that define Pratt’s campaign.
Consider the imagery in one of the most viral videos supporting Pratt’s campaign, “LA Is Worth Saving.” Nearly every frame is iconic. It opens with a rendering of the famed Hollywood sign in flames. It then shows a quick image of Los Angeles City Hall, then a posse of masked, black-clad thugs with “DSA” (Democratic Socialists of America) lettered across their uniforms. The camera then looks upward at Karen Bass sitting high on a throne, her face painted like the Joker, laughing derisively. Bass is flanked by Gavin Newsom, clad in royal garb while eating cake, and Kamala Harris, drinking from what looks like an upturned wine bottle, with a DSA thug standing behind her.
Unlike most ads from opponents of the status quo in California, the main intent of these images is not to highlight the chaos in Los Angeles or the failed policies coming from our governor or the mayor of Los Angeles. They assume the viewer already gets that. These videos go much further. They convey the complete indifference California’s ruling politicians feel regarding the havoc their policies have unleashed. The video goes on to show Bass, Newsom, and a host of cronies dressed in garb reminiscent of the Court of Versailles, eating cake, drinking champagne, and laughing at a mother who is thrown to her knees in front of them begging for help, exclaiming, “There’s homeless drug addicts in front of the school; my children aren’t safe.”
The video, at 90 seconds in length, has time to make a lot of points, all of them over the top, all of them abandoning normal political restraint. Only 16 seconds in, with the scene still depicting California’s ruling politicians as debauched French aristocrats, Gavin Newsom peers into the camera, a plate of cake in his hands, frosting smearing his face, saying, “Look, if you were a transgender migrant, I could get you a free pussy.”
This is a movement that has thrown away caution. The shock value of these ads gives them power and reach, but they’re also appreciated because they’re true. The literal truth of city services providing free needles to drug addicts and free transgender surgery to migrants, along with communicating the underlying truth of concepts in a manner that exemplifies the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words. California’s ruling elites, who hide behind the rhetoric of good intentions, are profiting from failed policies. Squandering literally hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money is enriching them, along with every special interest that supports them.
This is a concept that has eluded most Californian voters for decades. The special interests that control California through its ruling political party have become parasitic, not because their core missions are illegitimate but because, in their urge to expand their power and profit, they have become rackets. These include the state’s innumerable trial lawyers, all-powerful public sector unions, extreme environmentalist NGOs, tribes, an overhyped and bleeding-edge “renewables” industry, the “climate” lobby, the homeless industrial complex, welfare bureaucracy, and heavily subsidized “affordable” housing developers. They all want to continue to collect hundreds of billions of dollars per year from state and local governments and to extract additional hundreds of billions of dollars per year from California’s consumers, who are paying artificially inflated prices for virtually everything.
You can repeatedly explain the corrupted reality of California’s political economy. You can patiently argue that the ruling politicians in California are supported by a coalition of oligarchs and politically connected corporations that are centralizing power and wealth and have engineered the most relentless and shameless transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the super-rich in the history of America, and the harder you try to provide evidence and logic, the more you will be perceived by the average voter as boring and vaguely conspiratorial. Spencer Pratt’s ads blow through the clutter of logic and hit viewers with a visceral truth: California’s ruling politicians are out-of-touch aristocrats. While our cities burn and our children dodge spent needles littering the sidewalks on the way to school, they eat cake.
The power of these ads, the absolute next level of political discourse they herald, can also be illustrated by comparison. The most effective campaign in California today is being waged by billionaire Tom Steyer, a ruthless cynic who has hired one of the best campaign teams in America. While Pratt and his supporters have inaugurated a revolution for a few thousand dollars, Steyer is attempting to buy the governorship of California at an expense, so far, of well over 100 million dollars. But Steyer’s ads, for all their professional polish, are old news. They are the past. What Spencer Pratt has done makes Steyer’s campaign appear mundane.
Can Pratt win, or will Los Angeles be treated to another four years of Karen Bass? Can one of the Republican gubernatorial candidates win, partially by riding on the revolution ignited by Spencer Pratt, or will another avatar of the oligarchy saddle up to become a Newsom clone for four more years? In deeply progressive California, to expect overnight realignment would reflect unreasonable optimism. But ever since Pratt, a man who lost his home in the Palisades fire, declared his candidacy for Los Angeles mayor, there has been a ripple in the force. There are new tools, and new ways to more effectively convey a message that reality always ultimately embraces—you clean up the city, or you watch it burn.
It may take a little longer, but thanks to Spencer Pratt, California will never be the same again.
This article originally appeared in American Greatness
Edward Ring is the Director of Water and Energy Policy at the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).