Pratt Fall

The latest right-wing hero pops up in the City of Angels

As a resident of Los Angeles County, but not the city itself, I have more than a passing interest in the upcoming mayoral election. But I don’t have much of a rooting interest: I am neither a particular stan nor hater of Karen Bass, the incumbent seeking a second term, or of her more serious challengers.

I have, however, become rather fascinated in one of the most absurd candidates, Spencer Pratt, who has emerged as a darling of national right-wing meme-swapping, too-online MAGA types. Or, I should say, I have grown interested in the interest in him — Pratt himself strikes me as singularly uninteresting. But I keep discovering interest facets of his campaign and the reactions to it.

Pratt is a celebrity of sorts. Back sometime in the aughts, he became the boyfriend of the roommate of the main character on the bizarrely compelling quasi-reality series The Hills, itself a spinoff of another reality show — please, don’t try to follow the dotted lines; the point is that, at least to my recollection, Pratt became famous for playing the big prick that audiences couldn’t stop watching. To the best of my (limited) knowledge he has never done anything to suggest he is capable of running a hot dog cart, let along the second-biggest city in America, but on the plus side he remains married to Heidi Montag after all these years, and has ended up neither destitute nor imprisoned, so good on him.

Pratt lost his home in the horrible Pacific Palisades fire of early 2025, became an outspoken critic of Bass (among others), and on the anniversary of the fire declared himself a candidate for mayor. Aside from complaining about the city’s inadequate handling of the fire and its aftermath, Pratt has become a general-purpose raging id candidate. His primary form of campaigning is to toss together AI videos (not cut as potential ads, just intended for social media sharing) depicting an apocalyptic Los Angeles consumed in flame and overtaken by violent meth-addled street lurkers. In one, Pratt depicts himself as a Star Wars Jedi battling a Karen Bass clad in Darth Vader’s armor. In another she is the Joker and Pratt wears a Batman suit.

I’ll skip past the obviously intriguing racial undertones of Karen Bass as Darth Vader, and merely gesture here to the head-spinning ironies of usurping Star Wars and DC Comics intellectual property from their respective owners, Disney and Warner Bros, the two biggest titans of the signature industry in the city Pratt is seeking to lead, the latter of which is currently undergoing governmental review for a merger intended, in large part, to gain competitive position against the former, at a time when that industry and thus the city is simultaneously threatened by, and attempting to profit from, the new video-making AI that Pratt uses to steal their property to promote his candidacy to become the city mayor. (I’m telling you, there are a lot of interesting angles to the Pratt thing.)

I will, however pause to consider a point raised by Shelby Grad of the Los Angeles Times, who points out that Pratt’s roughly minute-and-a-half epic videos fit in place among a long tradition of filmmaking “portraying Los Angeles as a wasteland ruined by wimps…. There is perhaps no other city on earth that has been vaporized, invaded, flattened, overrun (by criminals, aliens, drugs, frogs, chemicals) more on film than Los Angeles,” Grad wrote in his newsletter earlier this week. “Often, the destruction comes with a message: This decadent, over-tolerant city fueled its own demise.”

Grad cites or shows stills of The Day After Tomorrow, Blade Runner 2049, Independence Day, and Volcano; he might have added War of the Worlds, Escape From L.A., Airport 1975, Terminator, 2012, Hancock, San Andreas, and many more. Wikipedia lists three dozen movies just under the subheading “Los Angeles destroyed in films.” And how about Speed? The TV series La Brea? Or all the crime-fighting films set in L.A., including Chinatown, Drive, Training Day, Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon, even Who Framed Roger Rabbit? So, so many dangers waiting to get you in that city.

But I’d agree with Grad’s argument that the best corollary to Pratt’s videos is probably Falling Down, the 1993 movie in which ordinary man Michael Douglas snaps under what some might now diagnose as woke oppression of the white male, and goes on a deranged shooting spree.

In that film, Douglas encounters the terrors not of natural or extra-terrestrial dangers, but Mexican gang members, a Korean store owner, an ex-wife, a panhandler, and loafing public employees. The impulse to revel in such ills that beset or await Los Angeles residents presumably explains the MAGA popularity of Pratt’s absurd videos.

And of course, today’s populist right-wingers love a hopelessly unlikely candidate who is willing to speak the unpopular “truths.” For one thing, such a figure validates their own preferred belief that public policy does not require study, professional dedication, trial-and-error, and negotiation; that such nonsense is meant by elites to obfuscate the clarity of common sense and scriptural guidance. The existence in the political sphere of Spencer Pratt — and Tommy Tuberville, Kari Lake, Donald Trump, and so many others — allows one to denigrate and vote against RINOs and lefties who insist that governance is more complicated than deporting all illegal immigrants or bombing Iran back to the Stone Age.

(Some on the left are prone to this as well, in my view, but not to nearly the same degree. Perhaps the contemporary left just values intellectualism too much to feel validated by Joe the Plumber types?)

Such truth-telling candidates can sometimes lose their appeal by exposing the limits of their ability to discern the truth — anyone remember Herman Cain? But interestingly, sometimes they stumble by becoming, or revealing themselves to be, more savvy than presumed. That might have happened to Pratt at the mayoral debate last week. In his rehearsed and curated posts and videos, Pratt has played to his audience’s desire for a political bad boy — much as he slyly played up the bad boy character on The Hills. On the debate stage, Pratt seemed eager to prove himself legitimate; he impressed many local commentators by appearing less shallow and ignorant than they previously believed. That may have helped land a string of mainstream interviews and articles. I wonder, however, if it might have hurt him with his core followers.

There are so many more things I could say about the Pratt phenomenon, but I’ll close with just one more. It concerns an “attack” ad — at least, cut like an ad, I don’t know for sure if it’s airing — from the L.A. County Federation of Labor. That group backs Bass. It is abundantly obvious to anyone with excessive political sophistication, like myself, that the Federation and its allies are trying to boost Pratt into a runoff against Bass. (Assuming no candidate tops 50 percent of the June primary vote, the top two face off in November.) They believe, presumably correctly, that Pratt would be the easiest one-on-one opponent for Bass. The much-circulated ad not only boosts Pratt’s profile and makes it appear that he is being taken as a serious candidate, but it criticizes him for positions that figure to be popular among a decent percentage of Angelenos: tougher policies toward the homeless, more police; weaker public employee unions. Not necessarily enough to reach 50 percent, but perhaps enough to boost him to second place in a multi-candidate primary,

We’ve seen this kind of thing before, often with Democrats running ads before Republican primaries “criticizing” a far-right candidate for being, say, too devoted to Trump.

In this case, the national right-wingers fanboying over Pratt are eating it up, taking it as an example of clueless liberals who are so out of touch they don’t realize that they are, shall we say, praising Pratt with faint damnation.

I’m never entirely comfortable with this kind of deliberate playing of voters for fools. I know instances when it has worked, giving the desired candidate an easy punching-bag opponent. So I get it. But still, it’s one more interesting aspect of the Pratt phenomenon playing out in my back yard.