Before you dive into Peter’s dispatch, we have two videos worth watching. In the first, Peter joins Free Press columnist Caitlin Flanagan and writer Michael Shellenberger to talk through what happened and why. In the second, Free Press video editor Austyn Jeffs goes inside the viral AI ad machine fueling Pratt’s unlikely rise, and meets one of the men behind it. — The Editors

In California’s jungle primary, it’s the Revenge of the Bourgeoisie.

With 62 percent of the statewide vote counted as of Wednesday afternoon, Republican Steve Hilton leads the pack of would-be governors, and with 69 percent of the city vote tabulated, Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt is closing in on Mayor Karen Bass and outpacing über-progressive Nithya Raman.

The message from a growing and very vocal contingent of voters is crystal clear: They want the crazy to stop.

The homeless encampments, the meth heads, the ancient infrastructure, the plummeting test scores, the stratospheric cost of everything—they’ve had enough. They hate that this place that they love, which was once the epicenter of the bold and the new, feels like a rusting, bloated, zombified shadow of its former self.

“It’s not just Republicans,” Hilton told me a few hours before the election returns started coming in last night. He was in Huntington Beach, just south of LA. “It’s a lot of Democrats and independents. Something’s happening in California. People are done with it. They’re done with the chaos and the crime and the squalor. There’s a level of rage that is very, very palpable.”

And they want a return to the old swagger, the old Ray-Ban cool, the California that imagined big and built big and knew that the rest of the world was dying to come here.

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They are still counting the votes, but as we tape early Wednesday morning, Steve Hilton, the Republican and former British political strategist, is leading the governor’s race with nearly 28 percent of the vote, more than 2 percent ahead of expected front-runner Xavier Becerra.

And in the LA mayor’s race, Spencer Pratt, the former reality television star, came in a close second behind embattled Mayor Karen Bass, and outpaced the uber-progressive City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who was described as LA’s answer to Zohran Mamdani. Pratt has done all this by waging an unorthodox, even Trumpy, war of common sense. As of now, Bass has 35 percent of the vote, Pratt has 30 percent, and Raman has 22 percent.

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From animated music videos set to Latin beats to superhero videos featuring Pratt as the city’s savior, these creations are popping up faster than ever, and helped ensure his second-place finish in the primary.

But who’s behind all of this? Video reporter Austyn Jeffs spent a day with AI creator Alex Leibow, who has helped make Pratt’s campaign messaging go viral. Leibow originally moved to LA for a career in the traditional TV and film industry, but after his Pacific Palisades home burned down, he found himself pulled into politics by Pratt. Now he spends his days trying to help Pratt turn the city around.

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“I woke up outside my apartment in Hollywood,” Alvarez, now 41, told me. “I hadn’t slept in three or four days, and I was watching MSNBC all day, and my blood pressure shot up, and my heart was beating like crazy, and then the ambulance came around, and they put me on an IV.”

Now, in a bit of a departure, Alvarez is making short, viral AI videos backing LA mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt from the two-bedroom townhouse in mid-city that he shares with his wife, 9-year-old son, and their tortoise, Spike—the headquarters of a budding online movement known as “Latinos por Pratt.”

Alvarez’s breakout video came in April, with “Spencer, Saca La Bassura!” or “Spencer, Take Out the Trash!” Pratt has taken to calling LA mayor Karen Bass Karen Basura, which is exactly the kind of politically incorrect put-down that Donald Trump (the mastermind behind “Low Energy Jeb” and “Little Marco”) might have conjured up. The nearly three-minute, animated video is meant to convey the same jaunty, angry, Archie Bunker, enough-with-these-people sentiment that courses through the whole Pratt campaign: It revolves around the candidate in a black T-shirt and pushing a garbage bin full of—well, garbage—plus Karen Bass past a cheering, multicultural throng. So far, it has racked up millions of views across all platforms. Pratt shared it. So did Billy Bush of Hollywood Access “grab ’em by the pussy” fame.

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You don’t go to war with the angry reality TV star you want; you go to war with the angry reality TV star you’ve got. And so it is that Spencer Pratt, previously of The Hills (“That’s why you’re not in my life, you crazy bitch”), owner of an online business called Pratt Daddy that trades in “healing” crystals, author of The Guy You Loved to Hate, and holder of a University of Southern California bachelor’s degree in political science, has taken it into his mind to become the next mayor of Los Angeles.

And why not? In post-literate America, the old rattle bag of accomplishments means nothing. Our next president will not be chosen from a field of contenders wreathed with meaningless laurels. What even is a Rhodes Scholar? The ideal candidate for 2028 will probably be a Golden Bachelor with Survivor experience.

Pratt Daddy’s candidacy is motivated by a singular and purifying anger—more of a hatred, really—all of it directed at the incumbent, Karen Bass. He holds her directly responsible for the burning of his and his parents’ houses in the Pacific Palisades. Unseating her is his intention. The primary election is next week, and the top two candidates will advance to the general election in November (if one of them gets more than that 50 percent of the vote in the primary, he or she becomes mayor, a scenario that is impossible to imagine. Bass and Pratt are expected to run against each other in the general. I assume he won’t win, but I never thought Richard Hatch would win the first season of Survivor. The race is volatile, with Pratt Daddy releasing TikToks (today’s equivalent of The Federalist Papers) every day. As for his secondary goal, the political humiliation of Bass, he’s already achieved it.

Call this a requiem for Los Angeles. We have nowhere else to go.

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Piker has become something of a divining rod for Democrats: Senators Cory Booker and Elissa Slotkin, among others, refuse to be interviewed by him, arguing that Piker’s disparaging remarks about Orthodox Jews and his comment that “America deserved 9/11” render him beyond the pale. Others, including Rep. Ro Khanna and, presumably, Raman, insist Democrats should avoid “purity tests.”

Seated in Piker’s West Hollywood home studio, Raman and Piker discussed public housing and street trees and sanctuary cities—all of which Raman knows a great deal about and Piker seemed to find a tad boring—until they finally arrived, around minute 50, at the “elephant in the room,” as Piker put it. He meant Israel, which has become Piker’s very own purity test. “Do you agree with dozens of human-rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, that Israel has committed a genocide?” Piker asked.

Raman, who is running against Mayor Karen Bass and former reality-television star Spencer Pratt in the June 2 “jungle primary,” must have known that this was the whole point of the interview. She did what she and her team believe she has to do to convince undecided twenty- and thirtysomething über-progressives on LA’s east side to vote for her.

Lowering her voice just a bit, she replied, “I do, yes—I’ve said that.”

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That was not how she put it, but that seemed to be the unavoidable implication of her ruling.

To Rosen, whose father was sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a baby, there was something “mystifying” about the whole thing.

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Pratt, 42, grew up in the Pacific Palisades, which, once upon a time, was idyllic: beautiful Spanish revival and midcentury modern homes overlooking the ocean, pools and tennis courts, a very quaint “village” full of pricey boutiques. His father was a dentist; his mother didn’t work. He went to Crossroads, which was known as the hippy-dippy school for the children of famous actors and directors. (Jonah Hill was in his class.)

Pratt wanted, more than anything, to be rich, and he aspired to go to Wharton, but he lacked the grades. Instead, he forced his way into reality television—ultimately becoming the bad guy on the show The Hills, where he and his now-wife, Heidi Montag, were known as “Speidi.” After the show ended, in 2010, they launched an online business, Pratt Daddy Crystals, which sells crystals and jewelry, and he developed a thing for hummingbirds. Everything, according to Pratt, was perfect, until the horrific fire of January 2025, when their home and his parents’ home, both in the Palisades, were destroyed.

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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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