Mahan, one of 10 candidates in California’s gubernatorial race, was back in the city to do some television hits and meet and greets, and he was sounding appropriately somber: A few hours before, the San Francisco Chronicle and then CNN had reported on several women accusing Representative Eric Swalwell, the front-runner in the race, of sexually assaulting or harassing them. One woman had accused the congressman of rape.

Swalwell denied the allegations, calling them “absolutely false,” but the long knives were out. There were a lot of votes on the line. And campaign cash. And endorsements.

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To hear it from Democrats and many reporters, that’s because the sprawling Democratic field has failed to consolidate in advance of the June 2 “jungle primary,” in which the top two vote-getters, irrespective of party, proceed to the general election.

In a March 3 open letter to the Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls, state party chairman Rusty Hicks asked those without “a viable path” to step aside.

The New Republic has warned that, unless “the state’s Democratic honchos” take action, “they’ll hand the state a MAGA governor.”

Ron Filipowski, the editor in chief of the progressive blog MeidasTouch, recently hinted that outgoing Democratic governor Gavin Newsom should intervene.

“The CA governor’s race is an absolute shit show on the Democratic side and it requires some degree of sanity to take hold at some point to get it fixed,” Filipowski posted on X. “Leadership at some point from people not in the race wouldn’t be a bad thing. Time is running out fast.”

Democrats I’ve spoken with in the past week all said a variation of the same thing.

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According to a memo dated February 19 that was sent to all 58 of California’s county Republican parties and seen by The Free Press, party leaders should “refrain from recruiting, supporting, or endorsing candidates” who “espouse,” “promote,” or “campaign” on Fuentes’s ideas. The memo also instructed local GOP leadership to “review organizational bylaws” and ensure that those bylaws empower leaders to purge members aligned with Fuentes.

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He is holding a staff, and uses it to gesture at the desert around us. His long white beard trickles over the slogan on his T-shirt: “I support sex workers.”

Wizard, in his late 70s, has lived in Slab City for more than a decade. He describes himself as an amateur sociologist, which is a polite way of saying he has spent decades watching broken people arrive, then try (and usually fail) to knit themselves back together.

Slab City is often described as “the last free place in America.” In reality, it’s a collection of semipermanent camps squatting on land in Imperial County in Southern California. There is no running water, official electricity, taxes, or real government infrastructure.

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That included the home Pratt shared with his wife, fellow television star Heidi Montag, and their two kids, ages 8 and 3.

So far, Pratt’s entry into the race has elicited mostly smirks: He’s an unfiltered, untested, totally unpolished Republican running in one of the most progressive cities in the country, and even though Democratic mayor Karen Bass is unpopular, she has managed to scare away serious potential challengers like developer Rick Caruso. (I recently profiled Caruso for The Free Press.)

And yet.

That might—just might—work in the June 2 “jungle primary.” (In California, the top two vote-getters in the primary, irrespective of party, proceed to the general election.)

Pratt has a huge following, including more than a million followers on Instagram. And he has a certain charisma. And he’s fueled by a righteous indignation that many Angelenos, astounded by Bass’s mishandling of the fires, no doubt share.

Most importantly, Pratt has learned the most important lesson of the Age of Trump—which has somehow eluded most every Democratic officeholder everywhere, including Bass—which is that authenticity is everything.

Recently, I spoke with Pratt while he was having lunch with his family at a Mexican restaurant. He was as expected: crass, funny, informed—and alleged that Nithya Raman, the progressive LA city council member who just jumped in the mayoral race, is secretly colluding with Bass to ensure that Pratt doesn’t make the primary cutoff. He was also a little miffed that a bird had picked over his carne asada tacos while he was speaking with me.

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Quorum at the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party. We’re a little over a month into an industry-wide conversation about the future of tech in California, which is largely taking place off social media. At this point, most people know the conversation was triggered by a ballot proposition floated by the state’s largest healthcare union, which seeks to legalize a first-of-its-kind asset seizure targeting (for now) billionaires. But while there’s been a bit of tabloid reporting on the existence of private group chats, where the question of whether it’s safe for founders to remain in the state is once again being litigated by industry leaders, it seems mainstream reporters have thus far failed to speak with any actual billionaires impacted by the chaos. So, in my capacity as the most well-sourced journalist in the history of technology writing (I think actually?), I decided to fill that gap.

Over the last week, I spoke with 21 billionaires about the looming prospect of a wealth tax. We discussed whether they left or are planning to leave California (most of them are), what a wealth tax means for the technology industry, and finally how, if at all, they plan to fight back. The men I spoke with include founders of companies working on a diverse range of technologies including artificial intelligence, defense, cryptography, security, biotechnology, finance, and general software development, as well as prominent venture capitalists at several of the most famous firms in the world. In total, these men are responsible for something like 50,000 employees, running companies in California roughly worth a combined $1.3 trillion.

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In a press release, Lurie emphasized that the legislation did not actually allocate any money to the fund and said he was signing the bill merely “in recognition” of AARAC’s work and of the Board of Supervisors’ unanimous vote in support of the fund. The statement suggested that he was unaware of the broader context of cronyism from which the reparations push emerged. Yet in fact, on the campaign trail, Lurie levied multiple bracing attacks on then-mayor Breed for enabling “blatant corruption” through precisely this kind of identity-based grant program.

The point Lurie made back then stands. As I reported at the time, the Breed administration funneled nearly $100 million a year to a handful of activist-staffed departments that functioned largely as make-work and vote-buying schemes. I called it the city’s “DEI-industrial complex.” These city-funded fiefdoms included AARAC, but also the city’s Human Rights Commission, Department on the Status of Women, Office of Transgender Initiatives, and Office of Racial Equity. Under Breed, these departments ran programs offering thousands of dollars in monthly “guaranteed income” payments for select people who identify as black or transgender, with plans to expand to other groups, such as women with criminal records.

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The speculation—among politicos, reporters, and longtime denizens who pine for LA’s fading glitz—has reached a boiling point as the city has inched closer to January 7. Today marks the one-year anniversary of the fires that ravaged the Pacific Palisades; Altadena, north of downtown; and parts of the Hollywood Hills.

The fires left countless Angelenos—and Californians more broadly—wondering who was in charge and how this could have happened.

The politics of this place, I wrote the morning after the fires broke out, “will be upended.”

Now, we’re fast approaching the first big elections since then. The mayoral election in LA and the gubernatorial primary in California are both scheduled for June 2.

Officially, Caruso—who’s spent the past few decades building high-end shopping centers like LA’s The Grove and The Commons at Calabasas—hasn’t made up his mind. Last month, when I inquired about his political plans, he sounded vaguely surprised—as if I had paid him a visit to discuss his next construction project.

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The first thing you notice, before the blackened palm stumps and fenced-off lots, before the empty quiet of a neighborhood that still hasn’t quite returned to itself, is the bunny.

Or rather, what used to be a bunny.

It stands defiantly over the ruins of The Bunny Museum, as if to attention. This strange local wonder once held the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of rabbit-related items in one location, a labyrinthine warren containing more than 40,000 specimens. Today, its scorched remains are ringed by temporary fencing. Its sole survivor is charred down one flank; an American flag pokes forlornly out of the other.

Beyond it are more empty lots, dozens of them, their foundations scraped clean. It looks less like a Californian suburb than the blank starting map of RollerCoaster Tycoon, a world waiting to be built.

Only here, the world was built. And then, overnight, it wasn’t.

A year ago today, a fire ripped through Altadena.

It’s probably not the fire you’re thinking of. Not the Palisades inferno that dominated the news cycle for weeks because it licked at the edges of multimillion-dollar cliff-top estates. Not the one that produced spectacular aerial footage for television editors and panicked quotes from residents with recognizable surnames.

This was the other fire, the Eaton fire, which despite killing more people and destroying more homes than the Palisades fire, feels like it’s playing second fiddle. The second-most destructive wildfire in California’s recorded history, it burned with such speed and strangeness that even lifelong Angelenos struggled to understand what they were seeing.

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Rinderknecht was an Uber driver, and he had been “agitated and angry” earlier that night, according to two girls he’d driven around. About what, they couldn’t be sure. It didn’t really matter. By now he was a type, someone who was increasingly familiar to Americans: young, angry, rudderless, very online, very political, but whose agenda was difficult to discern.

We have watched other twentysomething men on our screens who resemble Rinderknecht—outraged, ranting, blank-faced, in possession of some secret knowledge that the rest of us lack: Luigi Mangione, who allegedly killed the UnitedHealthcare CEO in New York City, in December 2024; Shane Tamura, who killed four people, including a Blackstone executive, also in New York City, before taking his own life, in July of this year; Robin Westman, the Minneapolis shooter who killed two children and injured 30 more people at a Catholic school before taking his own life, in August; and of course Tyler Robinson, who is accused of assassinating conservative organizer Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, in September.

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It’s true that one is supposed to root for the underdog, but the underdog, the Canadians, don’t need this the way LA needs this. And they’re not even a real team. They’re Canadian.

It’s been a doozy of a year for La La Land. The fires, the ongoing Hollywood contraction, our hapless, hopeless mayor (and the dearth of any serious challengers in 2026).

That’s to say nothing of the graffiti and the housing market and the homeless. We’re told by the powers that be that things are getting better, but literally no one here thinks things are getting better.

Now, President Donald Trump is threatening to yank the 2028 Olympics from the city, because he’s waging war on California governor Gavin Newsom, and because there are (understandable) fears that we might not pull it off. It’s unclear whether Trump can do that, but that’s not the point. The point is the city is a mess. It makes one sad to recall the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Games, which was attended by President Ronald Reagan and featured 84 grand pianos playing George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and a guy in a jet pack called Rocket Man.

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Kathleen Corradi, New York City’s first “rat czar,” pulled a flashlight from her back pocket and aimed it at the base of a trash can. She clicked off the light, almost smirking: “Yep, we’ve got droppings.”

Nearly two dozen New Yorkers—plus one concerned homeowner from Jersey City, New Jersey—raced toward the find. “Droppings!” a woman squealed, dragging her friend closer. On a summer evening in Brooklyn’s Herbert Von King Park, no one could quite explain why they had gathered to hunt vermin. The closest thing to an answer came from a 35-year-old librarian at New York University who took the subway from Hell’s Kitchen just to be here. 

“I’m starstruck,” she gushed about Corradi. “She’s my hero. There’s nothing more New York than learning about rats.”

Corradi—five feet, two inches, a lesbian, and handpicked by Mayor Eric Adams out of hundreds of applicants in 2023 as citywide director of rodent mitigation, to use her official title—has become a kind of folk hero for rat enthusiasts. She calls garbage her “first love,” has hosted more than 40 public “rat walks” like this one in the heart of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, and talks about rats the way that most people talk about dogs, even though she aims to eradicate them. Her mandate, straight from Adams himself, is to “send rats packing.”

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With only eight weeks left until election day, they got together in the Seagram Building in midtown Manhattan to figure out how to convince voters—and themselves—that their candidate, Andrew Cuomo, is the party’s future.

There were no obvious answers, but there was a dire sense of alarm about how fast the change has happened, and what will happen if Mamdani isn’t stopped.

“If we fail to mobilize, the financial capital of the world risks being handed over to a socialist this November,” an invitation to the event said. “We cannot—and will not—let that happen.”

Evidence of the change in power was everywhere I looked on Saturday night in a packed auditorium at Brooklyn College. It was a stop in the Bernie Sanders “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, subtitled “A Town Hall on Making New York City Affordable with Special Guest Zohran Mamdani.”

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“Have you heard the same rumor that I’ve heard about Adams?” he asked another power broker.

The rumor was that incumbent New York City mayor Eric Adams is about to quit a reelection campaign that he cannot possibly win, but has repeatedly insisted he will stay in no matter what. Whispers that Adams was going to drop out began to swirl on Tuesday. By Wednesday evening, the city’s one percent—some of the most prominent CEOs, real-estate developers, and politicians in the country—were wondering if the race they had written off as Zohran Mamdani’s to lose was suddenly back in play.

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Yes, it’s hard to get those signatures. It costs about $15 a piece to hire professional canvassers, and you need 330,000 valid signatures, or 15 percent of LA voters, which means you actually need closer to 400,000 signatures, since some of those will not be valid. In other words, you need upward of $6 million.

But that should have been surmountable given that Nicole Shanahan, the billionaire ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergei Brin, was spearheading the recall effort. (It’s unclear how much money Shanahan spent on the recall; she estimated it would cost $4 million in total.)

It didn’t help that Bass’s former rival, developer Rick Caruso, had come out against the recall. (He’s keeping his powder dry, given that he has his eye on a Bass rematch in 2026.) But still.

In mid-January, in the immediate wake of the fires that devastated the Pacific Palisades and Altadena (which is not in LA proper), there was a tremendous amount of anti-Bass sentiment in the city. A Change.org petition demanding Bass’s resignation garnered 125,000 signatures by January 12. (That did not count toward the recall.)

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But there have been few signs of help, either for Fleming or his neighbors in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, from the highly publicized “FireAid” benefit concert, which raised $100 million for what organizers said would be “direct relief” to victims and communities.

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San Francisco, which has seen this Shakespearean tragicomedy many times, is watching and wondering.

If ever there were a great American city that had experimented with radical chic—open-air drugs sites? Check; defund the police? Hell yes—it’s fog town, which has long imagined itself at the progressive vanguard. 

That experiment, which started decades ago and reached a roaring, cataclysmic nadir over the past five years, has had some unhappy, unambiguous results: more homelessness and drugs and drug dealers, fewer retailers, the exodus of the working and middle classes.

Now, New York has apparently decided it wants some of that—and San Francisco, which recently elected a mayor whose job is basically to undo the past decade, is smirking.

That would be Daniel Lurie.

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The chaos in Southern California could have been designed in a lab to exploit Democratic weak spots, combining the issues of illegal immigration, crime, and public disorder. Yet their most visible response to the anti-deportation riots in Los Angeles has been to denounce President Trump for sending National Guard troops to quell the riots. The situation, they insist, is under control—or at least it was, until Trump intervened.

This view is not shared by some in charge of actually doing the quelling. As Los Angeles police chief Jim McDonnell admitted at a Sunday evening press conference: “We are overwhelmed. . . . Tonight, we had individuals out there shooting commercial-grade fireworks at our officers. . . that can kill you. . . . They’ll take backpacks filled with cinder blocks and hammers, break the blocks, and pass the pieces around to throw at officers and cars, and even at other people.”

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“I’ve only watched three innings,” he tells me. By tomorrow or the next day, he explains, he’ll be laser-focused on the game, but this past Tuesday, it’s like a reunion for Ballers fans like him. “You run into everyone you know,” he says. “So I’m out here talking to the community.”

Raimondi Park is located in a mixed residential and industrial neighborhood not far from the city’s massive shipping port. It looks like the love child of a major league stadium and a high school ballpark. The city’s biggest homeless encampment was located just around the corner until it was cleared last year. “We used to sometimes have to take needles off the field,” said Paul Freedman, one of the team’s co-founders.

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The mayoral contest comes at a brutal time for Oakland. Crime is rampant, businesses are pulling out of the city, and residents are increasingly frustrated by brazen crimes such as “ram raiding”—crashing cars into store entrances to loot—and “sideshows”—stunt drivers taking over streets to do doughnuts. To top it off, the city’s major league teams—Raiders, A’s, and Warriors—have all fled, a symbol of Oakland’s precipitous decline.

Like many of America’s big cities, Oakland is a one-party town. The city’s Democratic voters tend to follow the lead of the local Democratic political leadership. But this year may be different. As in Chicago, New York, and other Democratic strongholds, the political establishment has dragged Oakland into a state of near-catastrophe. The mayoral election may be a litmus test of how much failed leadership the party base is willing to tolerate.

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