Reality TV star Spencer Pratt announced his campaign for mayor of Los Angeles last month after spending the last year criticizing Governor Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass, most vocally for their response to the Palisades and Eaton Fires. Pratt unfortunately lost his home in the Palisades.
I met with Pratt via Zoom on Wednesday to discuss his campaign.
As a candidate, he may strike one as an odd choice. Since 2005, he has starred in various reality shows that documented the lives of affluent young people and their dramas but has built no record of public service. Yet, he has drawn support from Republican gubernatorial candidates Steven Hilton and Chad Bianco, as well as Trump appointee Richard Grenell.
I asked him what he would say to voters who were concerned about his lack of experience.
He responded, “Yeah, first I would say the public had no problem turning over the keys of Los Angeles to Karen Bass who had no experience running a city.”
“And look how that turned out, right?” I asked.
After stating that he would contrast favorably to career politicians, he said, “I joke, like when I was younger, when you’d be playing like F-Zero on Nintendo or GoldenEye, if it wasn’t working, you pull out the game and you blow in the game. I feel like I’m coming in to blow in LA’s game and then stick it back in,” he explained, simplifying the concept of a reset for us with a helpful analogy.
We then turned to the question of homelessness. Pratt had expressed on his website that any homelessness aid would be conditional on participation in treatment programs for addiction and mental health disorders. I asked what he would do with those who were resistant to treatment.
To this, Pratt offered prison as the solution: “I don’t know if that’s a new type of jail I get to build that’s designed for that type of specific situation or if they’re just going to normal old jail, but no more just doing drugs on the side of the street.” It’s certainly a blunt instrument for a blunt man.
One would hope that he would have worked out whether he’s going to build more jails or simply stuff more people into existing ones by now, but as with every question he answered, Pratt seems to be shooting entirely from the hip.
During Pratt’s campaign rally earlier this month, he stated that he will be cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement “in a firm but humane way” and that “violent criminals will be removed from our streets and law-abiding, hard-working families will live without fear.”
Given that the majority of ICE’s targets have been law-abiding and hard-working families, I asked if his cooperation with the federal government would be conditional on them only targeting violent criminals.
Mr. Pratt revealed to me that he would strike a deal with the Department of Homeland Security to keep ICE out of LA entirely by promising to use the Los Angeles Police Department and LA County Sheriff’s Department to round up violent immigrants and “hand them off in the desert.” Setting aside the fact that the mayor of LA has no control over the Sheriff’s Department, such a proposal appears to have manifested out of his inability to grasp the cruel reality of the federal government’s deportation program.
According to DHS documents, less than 14% of those arrested by ICE so far have had violent criminal records, which means that Pratt’s fantasy where he tells the Trump Administration, “I’m going to give you more bad guys than you’re getting if you don’t come in,” will be met with villainous laughter. When only 14% of your arrests are of violent criminals, you don’t just want violent criminals, you want everyone.
Pratt wasn’t done yet. After informing me that he’s “more part of the immigrant community than anybody that’s talking,” because he only eats Mexican food, and that he’s “eaten more Mexican food in one month than Karen Bass has eaten in her whole life,” he told me all about his plans to offer Angelenos cash bounties for turning in violent illegal immigrants to him.
“I feel like there’s going to be enough money that I’m going to find that’s been laundered through the homeless […] that I’m going to be able to give cash bounties to anybody that gives me information on these rapists, murderers, child traffickers, drug dealers […] Everyone’s going to be calling Mayor Pratt and being like, I got another one for you. because I’m not going to ask who you are, just give the cash. And if it’s legit, we’re good.”
There you have it, cash bounties for all, no questions asked. How often have you encountered someone on the street that you know is both an illegal immigrant and a convicted criminal? If you were to witness someone committing a violent crime, would you have to stop and ask for proof of legal residency before calling the hotline or should you just roll the dice if they look Hispanic?
I don’t know what exactly was going on in Pratt’s head when he described his plan but I find it hard to escape the thought that he was just picturing a random person pointing at a violent immigrant and him immediately handing them a crisp hundred-dollar bill for their service.
Pratt doesn’t just have ridiculous and naive ideas, his record in the public eye also suggests that he does not have the right moral compass to be mayor of Los Angeles.
The good thing about Pratt as a candidate, is that we don’t normally have this much evidence about the corruption in a candidate’s character. Writing about his memoir “The Guy You Loved to Hate,” the Hollywood Reporter explains, “Pratt … revisits his past rumormongering of an alleged sex tape involving The Hills star Lauren Conrad — she denied it — and how, years earlier, he sold a friend’s pictures of Mary-Kate Olsen partying for some quick cash.”
None of this comes as a surprise when we look at Mr. Pratt’s upbringing. In his memoir, he described an instance as a kid when he used an unsavory voicemail of his father to blackmail him into buying him gifts. According to Pratt, he would see, “a glint of pride in my dad’s eyes,” every time he threatened him with the tape.
What Pratt fails to realize is that, to a normal person, that just sounds like horrific parenting – a good father would have corrected that behavior, not encouraged him to develop the personality of an extortionist who will do anything to get what they want.
Pratt, on the other hand, writes about it as if it was an important formative experience that was his “first master class in power — not the kind you’re born with, but the kind you create.”
LA simply has no use for an inexperienced reality TV star with questionable moral judgment and a suite of half-baked ideas.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Raised in Los Angeles, he is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.