Like me, you’re probably not familiar with The Hills, the breakout reality TV show broadcast for six seasons from 2006 on MTV, documenting the lives of some young blonde Californian women. Six years into our marriage, my wife informed me that she had made an appearance on the show during one of its seasons, but even then I didn’t pay much attention.
Until Los Angeles burned. In January 2025.
By the time the fire had been extinguished I knew twelve people whose homes had been razed, two of whom had been guests at my wedding party in 2019. But the chaos, misery, loss and go-fund-me’s were quickly replaced by absurd disgust: how could this have happened in the largest city of one of the world’s biggest economies?
At once, stories of breathtaking ineptitude and madness took on the role of answering that question. A reservoir empty, for no substantial reason, in between two of the fires. Broken hydrants. Accelerated DEI contaminating the Fire Department. A mayor partying in Ghana while horror ravaged her city.
An example of this anger would quickly be found. Spencer Pratt, a star from The Hills whose house he shared with his co-star whom he had married was a casualty of the Pacific Palisades fire.
Pratt appears to have been saved from standard Hollywood fame-then-spiral by the gift of fatherhood, one of the few redemptions available to that retarded scene. In years after a celebrity apex courtesy of reality television, he had devoted himself to raising a family, and central to that family was his house.
At the end of January 2025, Pratt volunteered as an advocate for victims of the fires. Despite recognition value, the dreadful reality of unchained city progressivism meant that irrespective of who campaigned, the process of rebuilding would be almost impossible, being characterized by prohibitively expensive planning, authorizations, inspections and licensing bureaucracies, many established on an obscure, climate-adjacent basis. Sensing a losing battle, Pratt pivoted to become a mayoral candidate, conscious that he stood only a fleeting chance of victory. (He’s currently sitting at a not-unimpressive 25% on Polymarket).
To understand what he’s up against, you have to see Los Angeles as you see Johannesburg. The latter was destroyed by corruption, the former by the same, plus ideological corruption. While both cities are worth saving, ideological corruption normalizes the ordinary kind, twisting it with the help of enhanced identity politics into an acceptable feature of “resistance” or “equity”. In the eyes of people like Nithya Raman, a powerful council member also running for Mayor, the decline of a city, the unhappiness of its residents, the failure of its services and most importantly, the loss of its stature represent a kind of victory for “marginalised” groups.
Outgoing State Governor Gavin Newsom and his wife, as of this week also alleged to be on the take, knelt to these forces, then managed the entire state according to their worst excesses, enabling Max du Preez-logic to spread within every type of management. Progressive appearances are effective disguises for hideous evil. Officials subsequently ripped the city’s bottom out, chiefly through homelessness, schooling, health and feeding scams. The amount of cash defrauded from tax-paying Angelinos dwarfs any racket the Somalis operated out of Minnesota.
Housing is a big, explicit casualty. In a recent campaign post, Pratt highlighted a trial being run by the city in which modular units accommodating 64 people were budgeted at $250,000 a head. The city’s pride in announcing this project betrays otherworldly impunity.
But Pratt, with some help from AI, is campaigning with the bareknuckle confrontation only possessed by people with skin in the game. Aping what Zohran Mamdani did to Citadel’s Ken Griffin in New York, he appeared on camera outside the sprawling properties of Raman and incumbent Karen Bass, emphasizing a point: “they not like us”.
Another of his social media ads features a clip of Bass talking to an Asian media personality, uprightly compliant in her obedience to the city’s heinous regime, declaring that Pratt is “only in it for the celebrity rush”.
The scene then switches to Pratt’s mobile Airstream, where he has been forced to live, mounted on the ashen plot where his house once sat, talking to his mother who also lost her house. It was a sound rebuttal, reducing smears to the brass tacks of personal loss. Then there is arguably the most popular to date: a rendition of the state’s most recognizable song, beloved by boomers, zoomers and Gen X mothers with young children:
But why is a local campaign echoing across the Anglosphere? Because Londoners and Berliners and residents of Sydney are grasping immediate parallels with LA. Inefficiencies, platitudes, perverted priorities, censorship, corruption, local political classes obsessed with Gaza, Pride, Net Zero, bicycles or tethered bottle caps and cookie policies for every website ever.
Even more, they’re also seeing that it’s not illegal to be enraged, and that channeling that anger objectively is a critical step in rebuilding the model of politicians being scared of their constituents.
Cities like Los Angeles and Johannesburg do not belong to global ideas. They are not the possessions of initiatives such as Michael Bloomberg’s c40 climate leadership boondoggle. They are expressions of culture, tradition, commerce and memory.
If Spencer Pratt can withstand the waves of inevitable smears rooted in identity politics that come his way, and if he can shrug with an “I-don’t-care” when called racist or MAGA by his opponents, then he will have shown the world that it is possible to respond to decline. Critical, even. And name-calling officials, whether they are in London or New York or Cape Town, should be scared.
[Image: Jessica Christian on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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