On July 20, 2025, Marc Brown, a reporter for Los Angeles’s local ABC affiliate, asked Karen Bass, our current mayor, why the city doesn’t enforce laws against animal abuse on Skid Row, where dogs are routinely tortured. Without missing a beat, Bass said animal abuse on Skid Row is a problem but, in the same breath, that these animals are “not neglected.”

If you live in Los Angeles like me, you’ve likely stopped noticing this type of reality distortion. Personally, I’m trying to hold onto reality for dear life.

It helps that Karen Bass sometimes looks like a nice grandma, like at last night’s mayoral debate. I almost felt bad for her as I listened to her lie to our faces about the proliferation of homeless encampments (things are improving, you see) or explain that two separate parts of the city burned to the ground simply because of wind. But these are lies, so I don’t.

Animal abuse is happening but also animals are “not neglected,” she says. Homelessness is down, she says. One day MacArthur Park is safe for families, which is why she was enraged when ICE showed up there, but the next day (just this week, actually) the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the park, targeting its open air drug markets and arresting 25 people charged with possessing and distributing fentanyl and meth.

This discourse is abusive because Angelenos have eyeballs. We know what we’re seeing, but people who want to remain in power have a way around this: deny what is objectively true, and when that’s not possible, acknowledge the truth but claim one of two things. You are either overreacting, or you’re not giving them enough credit for already working on the problem. This strategy makes you feel demoralized and crazy, and when you feel demoralized and crazy, you give up. (I’ve had several boyfriends who’ve used this method, I’m sort of an expert.)

“Demoralized and crazy” is a pretty good description of Los Angeles right now. Nithya Raman, one of the top three polling candidates, doesn’t think twice about rolling her eyes at parents who want an ordinance banning homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools. Raman is obviously free to use her urban planning degree from MIT to explain why she doesn’t think moving drug addicts who abuse dogs and shoot up in plain site away from schools is good policy, but the eyeroll tells you everything else you need to know: she is contemptuous of her constituents, and she doesn’t see any reason to hide it. She’s also betting that Angelenos have given up.¹

As far as I can tell, Spencer Pratt — the former reality star who is also running for mayor — was at his best when he was feeding hummingbirds, practicing martial arts, and raising two kids in the Pacific Palisades with his wife, another former reality star. At his worst, he was blowing money on crystals and designer handbags, or bringing a gun to a spiritual retreat in Costa Rica. But then his house burned down in the Palisades Fire, along with his parents’ house, and suddenly he was the only person in Los Angeles who was telling the truth.

If this city, a city I love, has any survival instinct at all, it will elect Pratt for mayor, if only to restore our collective belief in facts and reality. Once that’s restored, even if the man goes back to feeding hummingbirds all day and never sets foot in City Hall, we’d still be in better shape.

I went to the same high school as Bass (go Yankees!), so naturally, I wanted her to succeed, not only because I hoped my city would thrive, but because it made me proud of my public school education. It’s therefore actually painful (there’s just no other word for it) that when I tell my friends — an educated, liberal crowd, many of whom went to private schools — that I’m voting for Pratt, they are openly contemptuous. Some have even threatened to end our friendship. At best, they look at me like I’ve lost my critical thinking skills. At worst, they assume I’ve become a caricature-y vision of a Trump supporter, who votes based on pure emotion and grievance.