KTLA Screenshot.
Spencer Pratt is running for mayor of Los Angeles and has gained some attention for a series of Artificial Intelligence-generated social media postings/advertisements that depict current mayor Karen Bass as uncaring while the city behind her burns and the homeless take over the city. President Donald Trump has commented that, “I heard he’s a big MAGA person. He’s doing well” (LA Times, 21 May 2026).
Pratt’s mayoral run generates two important points. First, the effectiveness of AI in attracting attention to a campaign. These “commercials” seem amateurish and unreal, yet some people apparently find them interesting in that they trash Mayor Bass so effectively by combining images of her with the fires of Pacific Palisades and homeless encampments in downtown LA. Pratt is understandably upset that his home area was destroyed, reconstruction is crawling at snail’s pace, and insurance companies are great at collecting payments, less so in paying out money to help people rebuild their homes and their lives.
There have been some who have warned against the future of AI and the still-emerging quality of deepfakes in politics. It will become commonplace that candidates will appear to say things that they really did not say, that their voice will have been altered (recall Nancy Pelosi’s voice slowed a few years ago to make it sound like she was slurring her words), or that politicians will be put into sexualized positions through the use of deepfakes using their faces but not their bodies.
Deepfakes really took off when famous celebrities were depicted in various sex acts; the future is still wide-open when it comes to politicians and combining heads with naked bodies. Instead of worrying about the future, however, there are those who have apparently embraced Pratt’s use of AI to the point where his critiques of Bass are taken seriously. They’re “interesting” because they are different, or so it would seem.
Though Pratt is often credited with having a solution to the problems facing Los Angeles, a closer look reveals something altogether different. To expedite the rebuilding of Pacific Palisades? Relax or ignore building codes. The bigger problem would seem to be insurance companies who are slow to release funds needed to rebuild, with many companies backing out of California because they do not want to incur the risks associated with wildfires.
Insurance companies averse to risk? Yes, that’s what we’re seeing. So why isn’t the same metric applied to houses that have been flooded along the Atlantic or homes smashed by tornadoes in the Midwest? Maybe after disaster strikes, they too, get dropped.
The second reality behind Pratt’s mayoral run is perhaps more problematic. The number of undocumented people in California needs to be addressed by the Department of Homeland Security moving around, detaining, then shipping people out of the country, which is precisely what the Trump administration has been doing all along. More importantly, Pratt wants to arrest homeless people as a “solution” to people living on the streets.
Arresting people can only mean that they are in violation of trespassing laws. Fair enough, but these laws are usually misdemeanors and the person(s) involved would be cut loose in a day or two. That’s not a solution.
Maybe what Pratt envisions is a return to the poorhouse system that existed in the United States and Great Britain up to the turn of the 20th century. Put people in poorhouses, give them shelter, and let them work off their indebtedness for housing and food that way. There was arguably a more humane solution that evolved in the past century: public housing, but that was ultimately rejected because it was seen as being too socialist or simply too caring by creating systematic protection for the most vulnerable in society. Pratt, it seems, does not want the latter, but might be amenable to the former.
It should not come as a surprise that there are so many homeless, particularly in places where the climate is reasonably mild. When the world embraced neoliberalism about 50 years ago, that was to be expected. Let everyone work to get ahead but remove the so-called social safety net so that if they failed, society—government—would not be there to help support them.
So what do we get? Lots of people living on the streets and candidates willing to exploit them by arguing that they should be locked up. Even if laws were changed to imprison people for longer periods, would that solve the problem? Who will pay for all the poorhouses? Back in the day, they were often supported by charities and churches. Can that happen now?
The bigger concern is AI. If Spencer Pratt has been reasonably successful in Los Angeles, expect to see more of the same in the next ten years.
Burning fires and people living in boxes, tarps, and tents. The sex acts come next.
