I hate to be the guy who throws on the spandex and a mask to play Captain Bringdown, but Spencer Pratt is not going to get elected mayor. That’s not dooming. That’s objectively assessing the situation. Spencer Pratt is a political superstar—there’s no doubt about that. He’s injected something that’s totally missing from the LA mayoral race, which is common sense. His innovative AI-aided ads and his ability to inflict something the Democrat overlords don’t ever get—public pushback—is highly entertaining. But Los Angeles is not coming out of its death spiral anytime soon. I wish it weren’t true. But it’s true.
And the spiral is spiraling. I just came back from my Houston house to spend some time here, and what struck me was the malaise. It’s dingy. It’s old. It’s dirty. This isn’t the California of my youth with swinging palm trees, sunshine, and endless opportunity. The sun still comes out, but there’s a vibe here I’ve never felt before in my 50+ years in Cali. It’s depressing. I grew up in a northern California San Francisco suburb (the same one and at the same time as Greg Gutfeld, though we didn’t know each other), and that had its unique problems, but it was a cool place to be. Then I went to college in San Diego in the 80s, and that was really cool. But after going off to the Army and the Gulf War, I knew I wanted to come back to Los Angeles because I knew Los Angeles was the place I could do whatever I wanted to do. And I did. I became a bunch of things: a senior Army officer, a partner in a law firm trying and winning multimillion-dollar cases, a best-selling author, a columnist, and even a stand-up comic. That was the California dream. If you wanted to do it and were willing to work for it, you could do it. This is where the great Andrew Breitbart chose to make his splash at the end of LA’s prime. Then, Los Angeles was a place of opportunity.
But that LA is gone, replaced by Palm Tree ‘n Fire Detroit. And it’s reasonable for you to ask why I’m not gone, at least not yet. Here’s what you need to know about California, and Los Angeles as well. It’s a feudal system. People asked me why I live here. I live here because it’s really good to live here, except for the taxes and the irritation I experience knowing they’ve managed to take the Golden State and turn it into the Gelded State. See, it’s semi-tolerable because I’m not a serf. I was a lawyer. I’m a nobleman. I don’t live in the City of Los Angeles. That’s not for people like me. The people like me—affluent professionals—live in the surrounding cities. I live in the Beach Cities south of LAX. It’s very nice here – good restaurants and very few bums. There are a few who wander in, but the cops are all over them. We don’t defund the police. We fund the police. All those ladies with the “Hate has no home here” signs? They see somebody who doesn’t fit in, and they’re on the phone to the local 5-0 before you can say “No Kings.” Oh, and when there are No Kings rallies, and there occasionally are, it looks like Sunny Acres has been issuing its residents day passes.
Of course, if you go five miles to the east across the 405, you get into where the poor people are. It’s Serfin’ USA. It’s a dystopian scene full of misery and decline. The high schools in my area send kids off to the Ivy Leagues and the UC system, provided they’re not white. The high schools in the hood might have five or 10 students who are grade-level proficient in reading and math. That’s not a percentage. That’s absolute numbers. But you know, their mom and dad voted for it or didn’t vote at all. Maybe the local Democrats just filled out their ballots for them—LA is as fully corrupt as Capone Era Chicago was. But it doesn’t matter. Not my problem.
Nope, Los Angeles is not my problem, and I’m not going to give it another moment of thought. If it wants to drown in a cesspool of hobo dung, it can dive in. Spencer Pratt is absolutely right about everything he says, from the fires to the junkies to the gross incompetence. Moreover, everybody knows it’s true. But nobody cares. You need to understand something. This isn’t about competence. When Karen Bass, a black communist mental defective, looks baffled at Spencer Pratt explaining how she’s helped run Los Angeles into the ground, that look of confusion is not because she’s stupid. She is, but it’s because he’s speaking a different language. She’s a literal communist. She’s gone to Cuba and taken notes. Her purpose isn’t to create prosperity and security for the people of Los Angeles. Her purpose, like that of all communists, is to secure power. The same is true of her bizarre, real competitor, some South Asian communist named Nithya Raman. As is endemic to the Third World, they fetishize power; these Marxists want control. That’s it. It’s not about filling in potholes. It’s not about safe streets. It’s not even about keeping half the city from going up in flames. It’s about control. There is no bottom to Los Angeles. It’s not going to get so bad that people are going to generate some sort of backlash, no matter how clever Spencer Pratt’s ads are, and they are clever. Those ads are only scoring with those of us on the outside. They give us false hope that something can be done. But nothing can be done. The decline is not the point. It’s literally irrelevant to them. Take Detroit, once also a rich and powerful city. Do you think that at some point, the leftists who control it looked at it and said, “Wow, we have become Detroit. Yikes! Should we try something else”? No. The dysfunction is the function; the squalor doesn’t matter to them. Not at all.
And it doesn’t matter to the vast majority of the inhabitants of LA. Almost all of those people who got burned out along the Pacific Coast Highway and in the Pacific Palisades are leftists who voted these people into office. And here’s the thing. They’re going to vote for them again. Raman ran an ad calling Spencer Pratt a “fascist.” It’s hysterically funny to the rest of us, equating the idea that safe streets and your house not burning down is pretty much the same thing as being Mussolini. But you know what? Those people whose houses burned down are going to listen to her, and they’re not going to vote for Spencer Pratt. They’re going to vote for her.
You can’t help somebody who won’t help himself. And let’s not fool ourselves into thinking we can.
What’s it going to take to fix Los Angeles, California, and the rest of the blue hellholes? Gosh, you don’t want to ask that. You’re not going to like the answer. They will never fix themselves. Never. All the normal people are gone. You’ve got a few rich leftists and a bunch of welfare cheats, and that’s it. It’s going to take something from the outside to fix them. It would have to be imposed upon them and not gently. It would take an American Franco, but then you would need to have an American Spanish Civil War to get there, and I’m not up for that—nor should you be. There are plenty of things I’m willing to fight and even die for, like my own personal freedom. After all, at my age, I’m too old to live on my knees, and I prefer to expire on a pile of expended brass. But I’m not willing to risk death to save people intent on destroying themselves.
Sorry to be depressing, but I’ve got to be honest. I’m not going to tell you the sun’s out like on an old-school California summer day. It isn’t. But that doesn’t mean Spencer Pratt isn’t performing an important service. The guy is a patriot. The guy isn’t giving up. He’s staying in the fight. And even if he doesn’t win this battle, and he’s not going to win this battle, he’s doing something for the rest of us. He’s shining the spotlight on the complete failure that the Democrat Party has embraced as it has invited the socialists and communists into the highest echelons of its ranks. Los Angeles won’t save itself, but the cautionary example that Los Angeles provides may help other places save themselves.
Thank you, Spencer, for sounding the alarm, and good luck to you even though you don’t have a chance in hell.
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