Spencer Pratt, until now best known as a reality show actor, is making a maverick run for Mayor of Los Angeles. His creative and effective video ads have gotten a lot of attention. It looks like a three-way race, with incumbent Karen Bass, Communist Nithya Raman and Pratt the contenders, with a great many undecided voters.
Scott posted one of Pratt’s videos here. Another highly-produced–stunning, really–video is also getting a lot of attention:
Maybe the best political ad of the year. https://t.co/cgu2Y0yJ86
— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) May 5, 2026
I am not certain whether this is an official ad by the Pratt campaign, but it is being treated as such. Regardless, it will help to promote Pratt’s campaign.
More impressive to me than the videos is Pratt’s Substack essay titled Lost Angeles. The essay begins with some of Jesus’s little-remembered words on the road to Calvary and draws an analogy to contemporary Los Angeles. I recommend reading the whole thing; here is an excerpt:
It is a verse that lands differently 2,000 years later, in Los Angeles, the city that still dares to call itself the City of Angels. Here, amid the fading palm-lined paradise, a quiet, secular echo of that ancient lament has taken root. Fertility rates in California have plunged to historic lows; just 10 births per 1,000 residents, with the state’s total fertility rate hovering around 1.48 children per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement level. Los Angeles County has often outpaced the decline; births have fallen steadily for decades. Demographers point to the usual suspects: stratospheric housing costs, the gig-economy grind, delayed childbearing into the late thirties and forties. But beneath the spreadsheets lies a deeper, more visceral reluctance. Many women look at the world their children would inherit and simply say “no”. Not because they lack love or ambition or the biological pull to mother a child, but because the future feels too broken to inflict on another generation; they’ve lost hope in our city.
Walk the streets of downtown Los Angeles any morning and you will see why. On Skid Row, a 55-block Gomorrah of human wreckage. Karen Basura and Nithya Raman gleefully distribute drug paraphernalia in the name of “harm reduction”, which simply streamlines the turning of once-living bodies into zombies, slumped in doorways with open sores, limbs rotting from untreated infections. Open-air drug markets operate in broad daylight. Just this week, next to a popular bike path in Nithya Raman’s district, where families and bikers need to dodge the hepatitis-laced drug needles that Raman handed out to the zombies, another poor soul died in the tent. Raman had disregarded her community’s demands that she address the encampment; she shrugged it off saying that the gentle concrete slopes of the LA River made it “hard to reach”.
Did Pratt actually write it? If he did, he is a lot smarter than the vast majority of people in public life. In any event, he signed it. His opponents refer to Pratt as a “former reality TV star,” which he is. But he is also a serious person, and a serious candidate for Mayor. Let’s hope he wins.
