To Spencer Pratt and his supporters, becoming mayor of Los Angeles first means winning the internet.
Pratt has amplified outlandish artificial intelligence videos, including one depicting lightsaber duels between him and the city's current mayor, Karen Bass and another where he's portrayed as Batman descending on a burning Los Angeles to save the day; his campaign has tapped an army of freelance "clippers" to edit short social media snippets of him bashing the city's leaders; and he talks about nonexistent "super meth" plaguing the city's streets and pushed false narratives about California lawmakers' response to the Palisades Fire.
It's perhaps no surprise that the 42-year-old former villain of the reality television show "The Hills" knows how to work the attention economy, but he's doing so by borrowing the combative and mocking style of politics popular in fringe online forums and celebrated by allies of President Trump.
"He's probably the most Trumpian candidate we've ever seen in terms of house style," said Steve Bannon, Trump's former top adviser. "Trump's superpower was bringing in people into politics who hate politics, and that's what he's doing online right now."
Pratt's internet antics are up against long odds.
On June 2, Angelenos will go to the polls for the city's "jungle primary," a nonpartisan contest where Pratt, a Republican, will face off against Democratic incumbent Bass and progressive council member Nithya Raman.
If any candidate surpasses 50% of the vote, that person becomes mayor. If nobody does, the top two vote getters compete in a November runoff. Polls show Pratt and Raman neck and neck, with Bass commanding a comfortable lead.
Yet Pratt is harnessing the web to shake things up.
He has leapt into the usually more mundane world of municipal politics with brash and extreme rhetoric, taking to TikTok, with direct-to-camera videos condemning Bass' response to the devastating Pacific Palisades wildfires that claimed his family's home. He describes Bass as "the mayor who let the town burn down."
Pratt has also blamed city leaders with enabling the deterioration of city residents' quality of life, or, as he puts it on TikTok, "a city battered by fires, homelessness and crime," a framing that would sound familiar to anyone watching right-wing influencers and streamers.
Pratt says, without evidence, that "socialists in LA city government are stealing your money." He denigrates the city's homeless as fentanyl-addled "zombies." And he has promised to clear out encampments by mass-arresting people living on the streets.
He's accused Bass and Raman of "running a grift with the Homeless Industrial Complex," a vague and unsubstantiated claim aimed at whipping up his fans online, according to Dan Cassino, a professor of government at Fairleigh Dickinson University who studies masculinity and politics.
"These are the sorts of things that play very well in red-pilled forums where there's this idea that everyone is in control of their lives and 'we need to embrace hard truths out there that they won't teach you in school,'" he said.
Pratt's endorsement from podcaster Joe Rogan, Cassino said, is proof of Pratt's credibility in the manosphere, the bro-friendly world of male influencers who wage war against polite society.
"Focusing on this audience is a way to target young men," Cassino said. "Just as Trump did in 2024, and now we see Spencer Pratt doing the same thing."
Former LA Councilmember: 'winning the internet' doesn't equal an election win
Former Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin has been watching Pratt's campaign morph from unserious long-shot to top three contender.
Pratt had a megaphone of millions of social media followers before he ran for public office. That has helped supercharge the spread of the AI slop videos his fans have made. So has Elon Musk's repeated re-sharing and replies to Pratt's content on X, the platform the tech mogul owns, to his 240 million followers.
When Pratt wants his incendiary campaign messages and AI content to spread even farther, conservative influencers like Laura Loomer, Ben Shapiro and Benny Johnson are at the ready, commenting and reposting to juice Pratt's reach.
"Winning the internet is not the same thing as winning the election, but it can help," said Bonin, who now directs the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles.
He points to how the kinetic digital campaign of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani inundated Instagram Reels and TikTok with videos showing how natural and conversant he was with the format.
More close to home, Los Angeles Controller Kenneth Mejia won his 2022 election using his two corgis on billboards and in social media videos as a way of appealing to those terminally online.
The difference with Pratt, Bonin said, is that he's using the leverage of the well-oiled right-wing online media machine.
"Unlike left-leaning candidates, right-leaning candidates come into an internet ecosystem that is well-practiced in promoting itself through its various networks," he said.
Also giving a signal boost, Bonin said, was the launch of California Post, a West Coast edition of conservative New York Post owned by Rupert Murdoch, around the same time Pratt launched his campaign. The outlet has "been reinforcing the supposed dystopian crisis Los Angeles has been living through, and that is a big part of Pratt's narrative," Bonin said.
Pratt and his campaign did not return requests for an interview. Bass did not offer any comment.
Raman, through a spokesman, dismissed Pratt's online tactics, saying the AI slop videos show how out of touch he is with something that's an existential concern to the city's entertainment industry.
"Hollywood jobs are being devastated by AI, meanwhile Spencer Pratt is using his platform to promote AI-generated content amplifying the very technology replacing the workers he claims to care about," Raman said in a statement. "Our videos are made by working film and television professionals who believe Los Angeles can be better."
The MAGA tightrope walk
There are two ways to respond to this: Try to meet Pratt on his level, or don't participate at all.
Cassino, the government professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said Raman and Bass are taking "the Rose Garden strategy" by not trying to match the intensity and absurdity of Pratt's online campaign, which he said is probably politically wise.
"He's more chronically online than they are. He has fans who generate this stuff for him in a way that they don't, so any attempt for them to do this will make them look inauthentic," he said.
It is difficult to gauge how much of Pratt's content and rage-baiting is coming across the social media feeds of Los Angeles voters, but, at least on X, he's been praised as the candidate who is the most "anti-woke" and "based," internet slang for being unapologetically one's self and unafraid of offending others.
His favorite pejorative for Bass is "Karen Basura," which is Spanish for trash. And he calls the mayor's supporters "Bassholes" — cruel, bully-like language that Cassino said is catering to young men online.
"If people are voting for Spencer Pratt because they think it's funny versus because they seriously want him to be mayor, the vote still counts," Cassino said.
However it is resonating or not with voters, Pratt is not slowing his inflammatory language and pugnacious tone.
It's a posture being lapped up by the online MAGA sphere. It also represents the new template for right-wing political candidates, both national and local, Bannon added.
"Pratt knows it's not politics, it's drama," said Bannon, who was a Hollywood financier before he got into politics. "He's got a warrior mentality."
If Bannon found any criticism of Pratt's campaign, it would be Pratt's shameless promotion of AI slop.
A fierce critic of Silicon Valley, Bannon said the videos are entertaining, but they risk turning off voters who can see them as trivializing the race, not to mention how the internet is already glutted with AI junk and fakes.
"On the AI slop, he's one inch away from jumping the shark," Bannon said. "It can be effective, but it's starting to get tiresome, and it could backfire if you promote it too much."
Internet notoriety, though, cannot dislodge one fact about Los Angeles: registered Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one, presenting Pratt with a serious challenge if he advances to the November runoff.
Trump on Wednesday signaled support for Pratt. Unsurprisingly, the mayoral hopeful did not immediately blast this out to his social media followers.
That's because, while Pratt is a registered Republican, he has tried to separate himself from the MAGA movement and has repeatedly highlighted how the mayor's race in Los Angeles is nonpartisan.
It's a tightrope walk that Bannon, one of the chief architects of the MAGA movement, is keenly attuned to as he offers conditional praise for Pratt.
"Tell him I would endorse him," Bannon said. "But I don't want to hurt his chances of winning in LA."
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