Let the screaming and crying commence. With recent polling now in rough alignment with the betting markets, it looks like former reality television villain Spencer Pratt has taken second place in the race for mayor of Los Angeles. While on some level I don’t think many Americans are surprised — there’s just something in the air these days, like the burning stench of Karen Bass’s smoldering Palisades, that has us all bracing for oddities in government — the panicked punditry, from our nightly news circus to the rotting carcass of Rolling Stone, is wondering: what’s driving the popularity of a professional 21^st Century clown like Pratt, with no experience in government, over a thoughtful, if imperfect, standard issue Democrat like Bass, in her nice professional pantsuit? In Los Angeles?

Well, I think it’s basically something like this: there really still just is tremendous political alpha in getting on stage and telling the truth. But in local politics it also matters what you’re telling the truth about, and a soccer mom of two will never care about Donald Trump while a meth addict’s shitting in her driveway.

Let’s start with the terrain. LA’s economy has been weakening for years. This is partly due to general Sacramento idiocy, from high taxes, union thuggery, and the total disregard for businesses under Covid to the “mansion tax” that froze development and the recent hostage-taking of the very concept of wealth. Now, the city is facing a major ($1 billion+) budget deficit, with few options left but an increase to the draconian taxes levied against the dwindling number of productive citizens in order to fund the least productive net recipients in American history, or finally reducing the number of useless bureaucrats / professional Democratic Party voters who control the local political machine. I’ll let you take a wild guess at which one of these things is more popular among the net recipients.

Homelessness, which is obviously not a housing problem but an enormous, endemic drug problem, is visibly out of control. The media insists crime is down, but the average person has eyes, and still remembers when the Santa Monica promenade was a nice place where people actually shopped. Red tape continues to hamstring rebuilding throughout the Palisades, and the city still has no coherent plan to prevent another fire of the magnitude that took the Palisades out, or anything even remotely resembling an honest account of what led to the single most destructive fire in the city’s history.

Nonetheless, our story here, according to the professional bootlickers who circle machine Democrats like those little suckerfish that live off the dead skin of a blue whale, is moderate, reasonable, experienced Karen Bass vs. radical, populist, Trumpian Spencer Pratt.

Probably the most fascinating aspect of the Pratt campaign is how angry his opponents have become in the face of the unbelievable controversy that is the mere existence of a Pratt campaign, with, from what I can tell, no actual controversial statement from Pratt. How is he “MAGA-coded” (Daily Beast)? What, specifically, makes him a “cosplaying” “everyman” racist (ESPN)? And does anyone in the press truly believe their message — that the city is “safer than it’s been in decades” — is going to resonate (LA Times)?

If you had to distill all of this criticism into something coherent, I think it might just be that Pratt reminds libs of Donald Trump, who they hate, and he talks about crime, which is bad for lib politicians? People also have a lot to say about the AI-generated campaign advertisements fans have produced on Pratt’s behalf, which many pundits incessantly credit to the candidate himself. But it’s not clear why they hate these things other than their general appearance of effectiveness, and, again, Pratt has nothing to do with them. Still, I do agree the guy’s a little bit like Trump, just not in terms of disposition or, from what I can tell thus far, any of Trump’s most popular positions.

Pratt is another funny, charismatic white guy from the world of entertainment who obsessively discusses an extremely popular issue we are not, as good upstanding people in a one-party state controlled by the DNC, supposed to discuss. In the case of Trump in 2016, that issue was immigration. To a certain extent, Trump’s winning issue continues to be immigration. But for Pratt, the winning issue is the obvious fact that many of LA’s homeless ‘victims,’ who Americans are expected to imagine as exclusively a class of sweetspoken, down-on-their-luck single mothers, are in fact violent drug-addicted criminals.

Running as a Democrat in a city controlled entirely by Democrats, from the bureaucrats who run the place to the reporters who cover the bureaucrats, is mostly a sweet gig. But when things start to crumble as badly as they have in Los Angeles, and you’ve completely defeated the neutered Republican Party you’re supposed to keep around for purposes of witch burning, the act of noticing problems becomes taboo.

An honesty taboo, if you will.