Inside the LAGOP: The Worst Political Party in America

GONZO

Why are its members endorsing Democrats over Republicans?

By Isaac Simpson · November 13, 2026 · 44 min read

“A real political party is, of course, a shadow government.”

- Curtis Yarvin

I grapevined to Valencia, some lower form of Santa Clarita, itself some lower form of Phoenix. It’s mid-July 2026, a month after Spencer Pratt lost the LA mayoral primary to Nithya Raman and Karen Bass, and three months before the Blue Wave midterms. The sky is a rainbow and the car windshields are neon green. The polarization of my Meta sunglasses clashes with the polarization of my tinted windows and so everything goes Charlie Factory. This part of the Los Angeles terrarium is pure blanched sunbeat prairie, the Iowa of California, except it’s 106 degrees outside. The dips in the landscape cut by faltering reservoirs are purple. The chaparral is blood red.

Valencia, California. Oppressively vanilla. A giant heinous strip mall. 5-over-1s in varying shades of tan. One called “The Monticello” advertises, “we are not a hotel, we are apartments!” It’s 99 degrees outside the car. I can’t breathe. Almost nobody is visible outdoors. A few fat white families waddle around drinking Arnold Palmers. The roller coasters of Six Flags Magic Mountain rumble in the distance. In the lobby of the Hyatt Regency I’m greeted by a life-size cardboard cutout of Shohei Ohtani. I’m glad he’s here.

I trudge through the Tommy Bahama hallways to the heart of darkness: Valencia Ballroom A&B. The stale air smells like fruit-scented hand soap. At the sign-in, two heavily made-up women hand me a name-tag lanyard and a giant desk placard bearing my name. This is the Leadership Institute: Where Conservative Leaders Are Made.

The California GOP is arguably the worst state party in the country. The party of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon hasn’t won a statewide election in two decades, and the last Republican to do so was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who doesn’t really count. A party of six million registered voters holds about 15% of overall state government power, down from about 40% two decades ago. The LAGOP is among the worst local bodies within the CAGOP; insiders tell me NorCal Republican groups, losers in their own right, think the LAGOP is “disrespectable rabble.” Of the 24 state assembly districts in LA County, only one is represented by a Republican, Charles Hughes, who eked out a win last week. Just one of the county's 13 state senators is a Republican, Suzette Valladares. In 1996, a third of US Congressmen from LA County were Republicans; today it’s one out of 18.

The state Dem apparatus crushes every right-leaning local hero that threatens to give the party new life in Southern California. They strangled budding stars Sheriff Alex Villanueva and Spencer Pratt in their cribs. I attended a Villanueva fundraiser for this story, and I hung out on the Pratt fundraising circuit for a prior one. Both campaigns held events in the same tawdry mansion in the Beverly Hills Flats.

I wanted to believe that the scrappy group of West Side elites that had formed around Pratt before the primary, and now Villanueva before the midterm, could stage a coup against the Dem uniparty whose incompetence so utterly fails us on a daily basis. They were certainly off-putting, with all their dusty wealth signals—the pool robots, the plastic surgery, the Scorsese suits—but I loved their stubborn Kulak insistence that their city should actually function, and their belief that they, via democracy, could save it. Boy, were they wrong.

Now the Dems threaten even small red bubbles like Huntington Beach and Newport Beach with lawfare and ballot props that always win by 20 points. Any slightly right-leaning prop, like a recent voter ID law, gets destroyed by the same 20 points. This isn’t how it’s always been. In LA County, the most populous county in the nation, the Board of Supervisors was majority Republican in the 1990s. Today, only one of the five members is Republican, Kathryn Barger, an obvious longhouse RINO. An LAGOP committee member described the Board of Supervisors as an all-female, all-powerful “coven.”

Data journalists on X are calling the California midterm results the biggest Dem win they’ve ever seen. The GOP in California, particularly in LA, was completely destroyed in every single winnable race. To add insult to injury, the LAGOP is now facing an internal fracture over perhaps the most embarrassing thing imaginable for a political party: its members are being accused of endorsing, and even donating to, Democrats over Republicans for personal gain. Absolute betrayal.

So what’s it like, being the worst GOP in the country? How did it happen? I went to find out. Given the party’s prognosis, I figured I’d find panic, anger, and turmoil. Arguments about platform and policy. Instead, I found blissful ignorance, sarcastic denial, and a total refusal to address the dying elephant in the middle of the room.

THE TRAINING

The Leadership Institute has trained three hundred thousand conservatives since its inception. My only prior exposure to the Leadership Institute was a constant influx of perfunctory, typo-laden emails sent by a woman named Carol Cocks. By paying the $30 and showing up, I am worthy of my UN-style placard. To be fair, I do deserve it, having driven to this Backrooms oven on a Saturday, so I happily display my large name card. I perch near the back, next to a young Hispanic former Marine with a curly, waxed mustache and a highlighter-yellow streak in his buzz cut. He’s an X mutual named Houston Brignano, although it takes us a little while to recognize each other. Houston is running for U.S. representative as a Republican against star Democratic congressman Ted Lieu for California District 36, covering Santa Monica and much of the best parts of western LA, a battle he knows he’s going to lose. He says, “I just want to start making people like us feel okay about voting Republican.”

On the other side of me, a handsome, ripped surfer dude named Derrick Townsend takes his seat. He, coincidentally, is also an X mutual, running as an independent for Santa Monica City Council, also a race he knows he’s not likely to win. “I’m the only one who wants to keep the airport open. They want to make it into a giant park,” says Townsend, referring to Santa Monica’s small airport targeted for destruction, along with the palm trees, by the all-powerful state Dems. The Dems accuse it of being noisy, polluting, and only catering to private fliers. Townsend is silent and serious with the wild eyes of a caged animal. He does shirtless workouts on Instagram. “I’ve got all the Republicans and all the Jews on my side,” he says.

Townsend, the autistic loner surfer Chad. Brignano, the oddball veteran who posts twee alt-lifestyle pics with his rainbow-haired wife. To run for office in California as a right-winger, you have to be a little bit of an oddball, someone who doesn’t quite fit in, but also genuinely cares. Candidates are a little touched in the head, and also a little touched by an angel, just a little touched overall. This certainly describes Townsend, who could very easily be a West Side real estate shark if he wanted, and Brignano, who could very easily be an East Side chairo. Both are deceptively smart, charismatic, and willing to put skin in the game. This makes them seem a little insane. Both have the makings of social media star power, and both are being ignored by the GOP.

Brignano placed second in the June primary, so he advanced as Ted Lieu’s sole opponent. For the only other candidate in a national race involving arguably the choicest piece of real estate in the country, I’m shocked to learn Brignano only raised $7,000 and spent a grand total of $5,801 on his campaign, while Ted Lieu reportedly raised $2.2 million and spent $1.7 million. Brignano only has 1,300 followers on X. Ted Lieu has 1.7 million.

“In reality, Lieu spent $0 on this campaign. Nearly all of it goes outside of the district,” Brignano tells me later over the phone. He, along with LAGOP committee member Lisa Cusack, became my sherpas through the hyper-detailed maze of Los Angeles Republicans. “He knows he doesn’t need to spend a dime to win here, so that money goes to the national Dem committees, which then goes to other races around the United States.”

Republicans also do this. “[Florida Congresswoman] Anna Paulina raises a lot of money from Beverly Hills,” Brignano says. “If you’re a big LA donor, you know the outcome here, so you’d rather influence a winner. You’re looking for ROI, not to build up an organization.”

He’s touching the tip of the giant iceberg of sickness replicating deep within the LAGOP.

There are 32 seats in Valencia Ballroom A&B, all taken. Rows in front of a projector screen. The crowd runs boomer and female, but diverse. Crusty old boomer NPC couples generated from dust-caked asphalt of the Santa Clarita Valley. Bald white guys with tucked-in Hawaiian shirts. Cute girl with Birkin bag and Indian boyfriend. Multiple women with blue hair, but light, nice blue, not genderqueer royal blue. Mexican gamer with Monster Energy drink. Young black guy with cowboy hat. A few rotund, chatty Karens. The vibe is office lunch birthday party, and it actually is Celeste’s fabulous birthday, which we celebrate briefly before we begin. For the next six hours, political consultants and GOP stooges educate us on how to run sparklingly successful Republican campaigns.

Every time a speaker asks a rhetorical question, I wince at the ragged treble of the girl chorus chant back.

“Core or crowd?” one Neocon sensei asks. He’s talking about formulating your platform to hit both “core” voters who are educated on specific issues, and “crowd” voters who just care about fluff and narrative.

“Core!” the chorus chants.

Which is important?

“Both!”

I’m wearing my black and orange Spencer Pratt hat. The “A” in Pratt is a Dodgers “LA” symbol. It’s a garish design, but I’m proud of it. Only a few weeks prior, Pratt had suffered a shocking loss to distant third-place candidate Nithya Raman; one of those losses that have become typical in California where a leading candidate is somehow defeated in the weeks following the election by a sharp statistical anomaly that occurs only with late mail-in ballots counted after initial votes are reported. Every election cycle, local media publishes standard warnings about ignoring “red mirages.” The reason this occurs, an insider tells me, is because ballot harvesters wait for election night to determine who votes in person, then take those votes out of harvested mail-in piles so nobody votes twice.

You would think that what happened to Pratt—the brightest glimmer of hope for Republicans in California since Arnold Schwarzenegger—would impact the mood here at the California conservative Leadership Institute, or at the very least be cause for a strategy debate. The speakers don’t address it at all. In the weeks after the election, the LAGOP influencersphere, which is far more prodigious than its power level would suggest, mostly blamed the voters: “If only we’d gotten more of our registered folks out to vote!” was the typical refrain, I’m told, for fear of looking like election deniers or sore losers.

I do, however, get compliments on my hat.

“That’s a great hat! Can I take a picture of that hat? Wow, never seen that hat,” says a guy in his 50s with slicked-back grey hair.

The air conditioning must be down to 58 degrees. Terrible huge bucket of watery coffee. Slippery fridge cigarettes bobbing in melted ice. Scones made out of cardboard. Fruit melting into black plastic.

Our first speaker is our promised VIP, the aforementioned State Senator Suzette Martinez Valladares, one of the few winners in a statewide party on life support. Not only is it hemorrhaging power in the state, it’s hemorrhaging registered Republicans, who were about half of California voters thirty years ago, and are now about a quarter.

Valladares is a normal, friendly-looking Mexican woman in her 40s. Ambitious, but considered.

“Winning and losing elections is about knowing your WHY,” Valladares tells us. “The who and the what doesn’t matter, it’s the WHY. And stories answer why better than arguments do.” The first of many reminders about the power of storytelling.

“If we’re going to change California, it’s going to come from young people.” We also hear this repeatedly. And about affordability. And about women & families. And about common sense. And just about every other stylish buzz phrase imaginable. Valladares tells a story about her first election, which she lost by only 522 votes.

“People would tell me they forgot to vote! Every candidate counts those votes in her head. Could I have gone to one more event, met one more person?”

But she dismisses these fears.

“No, I couldn’t have done more, I had no regrets, that lesson was so vitally important. I may have lost, but I wasn’t defeated. You can only control your integrity and effort.”

She promised earlier to unveil the all-powerful secret to winning elections as a Republican in California, and now it’s time for the big reveal.

“Here’s the secret: to win, you have to leave everything on the field, and you can’t leave everything on the field if your WHY isn't stronger than your worst days. Campaigns get nasty, the lies and the attacks start coming, you’re missing birthdays and your campaign isn't going to carry you through. Your WHY is going to carry you through.”

She tells us about her very own WHY. She keeps it in a cage in her chest like Bukowski’s bluebird, drawing on it for power when necessary.

“My first WHY was my niece diagnosed with autism. Then my mom was diagnosed with stage four cancer. I left the workplace to care for my mom, fighting with hospice bureaucrats on her deathbed, then people leaving because they can’t afford to live here. I didn’t want my daughter to only have relationships with her cousins on FaceTime.” I’m a little surprised that none of these disjointed WHYs have anything to do with the GOP platform. “I wasn’t going to complain about it, I had to serve. Your WHY has to be stronger than your worst days. Your WHY isn’t your consultant’s WHY,” one of many digs at consultants. “It’s your WHY.”

A consultant named Ron Nehring presents the next section, “The Core Is Not the Crowd: Strengthening Your Political Brand.” He is the most hated of political animals, even more than lobbyists: “The Consultant.” A real member of the “old guard consultant class” that Spencer Pratt rails against in the flesh. He calls himself a “seasoned public policy leader, strategist, and communicator,” code for consultant. Mr. Nehring is the caricature of a Neocon; a dapper, besuited DC person, clean shaven with wavy grey hair and glowing peach Bush Administration skin. The Dick Cheney archetype is usually only really visible in DC, maybe parts of Dallas, but if they’re going to be anywhere in LA County, it’s Santa Clarita.

To let us know he’s truly from the Bush era, he consistently cracks jokes about our enemies, the evil liberals, being vegetarians. His out-of-touchness astounds me. He tries to include a new enemy, “communists,” but he winces every time he says it; it’s a little too unhinged-sounding for the mild-mannered GWOT-era politico, whose core essence is wolf in sheep’s clothing. He avoids the words “woke”, “Spencer Pratt”, and “ballot harvesting.” He’s an impresario. A magician.

I’ve given these sorts of lectures before, communications courses where you present strategy diagrams and made-up ontologies; they’re mostly an excuse to take people’s money. The more accomplishments you have, the easier it is to take said money. A big part of the show is constantly reminding your marks of your accolades.

Nehring is the former California Republican Party Chairman (2007-2011). According to his Ballotpedia entry, Nehring chivalrously saved the party from a “bent toward ideological fratricide.” He “put a stop to the practice common in many political groups – including the state Republican Party – of lashing out at assorted bogeymen by passing resolutions that provoke bitter arguments but have no practical consequences." He tried to pass the California Paycheck Protection Act to stem public union corruption and failed. He ran against Gavin Newsom for lieutenant governor in 2014 and failed. As a consultant, he represented an opponent of Dianne Feinstein and failed. In 2016, he ran Ted Cruz for president…and failed.

“A party’s strength is not registered voters, the best indicator is the number of seats it holds in the state legislature,” says Nehring. “And in California that number has been dropping every year since 1958, besides 1994. This is what happens when the demographics of the state bump up against national trends. Missouri is the opposite, becoming more and more Republican.”

With the unpleasant realities out of the way, we’re on to branding. Branding is everything!

“Your brand is not a logo, it’s the sum of emotions, visual, and behavioral perceptions that people have,” he says, to the furious scribbling of 100% of the women in the room. Nehring talks about how political theory is useless and not how “normal people” think. He is a politician from the movie Digger ranting about the injustice of the lazy and unrefined, condemning the bums without any consciousness whatsoever of the fact that in America, he is the loser. He is the loserest loser of the loser party in the state it loses the most. But this doesn’t stop him from spreading the gospel.

“Normal people need to have a good impression of you. Do you make a good impression on people by yelling? No.” I think of Hitler. Nehring flattens his crisp shirt over his gut. To one accolade he keeps returning, again and again, his narrow loss to Gavin Newsom for lieutenant governor. “I got 3 million votes, he got 4 million!” He tells us to put political messages in non-political wrappers. He tells us never to make an acronym part of your branding. I think of the DSA. I think of MAGA. “The moment you put a MAGA hat on, you’re not going to win them over that way. Lower their resistance to talking to you. Remove threat signals. Ask light questions.” Stop standing for what you believe.

“First you win the argument, then you win the vote,” he quotes Margaret Thatcher. “If you build your base, you will defeat the vegetarians.”

He finishes with “I’ve been in politics for 35 years, this is my sign that I’ve run out of time.”

Lucky for us, before lunch we still have in store what I’ll call the Pyramid Scheme and the Looksmaxx Lecture.

The fundraiser, Brent Lowder, is the most appealing speaker of the bunch, understated and the least obviously cretinous, but he is, if you read between the lines, the most insidious. A former investment banker, Lowder is known for running a big money super PAC and a California-based political strategy group.

“You should be calling 5-10 people every day,” instructs Lowder. “Start with the people you know, start with your family, start with your friends. It’s got to be your first and ongoing focus. Great candidates spend 70% of their time on fundraising.”

Cult-like. Pyramid scheme-esque. He reveals that he won’t even consider taking you on as a client unless you’ve raised over $100k. “The first thing we say is go raise 50k or go raise 100k 'cause we want to see if you can do it,” he says, shrugging unapologetically. “Hey, if you don’t like asking for money, don’t run for office.” In the pimp game, this is called pratting.

To be a great candidate you should spend all your time raising money from your friends and family and then give it to him. There will be no resulting capital, no underlying asset, that could feasibly attain permanent value. There is only a brief, fleeting chance at office, a moment in the Sun, and then, if you’re a Republican in California, a shameful loss guaranteed.

To wrap up the relevant speeches, we have what I’ll call the Looksmaxxing Lecture from Roxanne Hoge. Roxanne Hoge is the Chairman of the LA County GOP. She’s the big enchilada for Republicans in the bottom half of California, overseeing the 100+ GOP committee members in massive LA County. She gives the right-leaning responses on local and cable news. A former actress and face lady, she’s a mixed-race Jamaican from a wealthy family. Her LinkedIn describes her as “Quarterback and Head Cheerleader.” She has that perfectly-balanced West Wing look, like Kamala Harris, but with a depth in her eyes and a wry, quirky sense of humor. She says her mom’s friends were raped and murdered during a democratic socialist takeover of Jamaica.

Hoge explains that her career in politics derives entirely from selfless worries, and not a desire to claim the spotlight. “We don’t want to be running for office!” she says with a sassy wiggle. “We want to be schlepping our kids around!”

Her slideshow begins with “When you get into the end zone, act like you’ve been there before,” a Vince Lombardi quote. I like Hoge, but she seems like an anachronism. A throwback to a time when a beautiful black lady dropping unvarnished truth nukes still felt fresh.

“The people you need are not watching Fox News,” she says, for some unclear reason. “There’s these things called newspapers. You have to be adept at podcasts and newspapers.”

She puts up a slide that reads “the eyes are the windows to the soul,” and describes how the three little dots in the middle of your pupils attract people to you. She instructs us to eat a Granny Smith apple before going live on TV. She shows a cautionary tale slide with a candidate’s head blocking a letter in the background so it says “cocks” instead of clocks. I think of budding GOP email talent Carol Cocks. She talks about how social media typos can sink campaigns, referring specifically to poor Benjamin Ryan who accidentally tweeted “This is misinformation about #monkeypox. The outbreak is occurring almost entirely among men who have sex with me.”

“I’m very good,” Hoge says, “I don’t say a long sentence that can be cut into something else.”

Finally it’s lunch. The Hyatt bathroom reeks of piss. A tall black guy in a suit says “that’s the worst smelling bathroom I’ve been in, like a friggin’ porta potty.” There’s no hand soap. I put two and two together: Valencia Ballroom A&B smells like twilight-berry-shea Softsoap because the toilets have erupted. Lunch is the saddest, most rubbery buffet I have ever seen. The fajita meat is grey and tastes like straight dog food. The pico de gallo is pale brown. The guacamole is chartreuse. Spindles of lowest-bidder lettuce evaporate into the air like a gas. When I think of my day learning to be a GOP candidate, the first thing I remember is steak the color of elephant hide.

Most of the young people are smart enough to leave at intermission.

“How was lunch? Nobody losing weight today huh!” A wrangler introduces the afternoon program, which amounts to very little.

The boomers immerse themselves in an elaborate discussion of AI.

“AI is a way to save time and have more votes. If you’re a Dem, they find them in weird places!” The sole mention of election interference. Slides say AI can:

1) increase efficiency

2) expand productivity

3) make additional time for personal connection.

Bullet point politics for geriatrics. A man talks about uploading sign-up sheets. “I add my sheets with a picture, and what would have taken 30 minutes took 30 seconds… although of course you have to check it.”

A political operator named Mike Netter mean mugs me in the hallway. He runs Netter News, a California conservative newsletter boasting over 100k X followers and perhaps the worst digital aesthetics in internet history. He’s the kind of mega-Boomer politics poster who recalls a crazed HAM radio conspiracist from the 1990s. I think these guys fancy themselves mini Matt Drudges, sleuthing out embarrassing facts and posting their findings via the ugliest media possible. Of the mistaken belief that sheer force of informational effort is enough to move the needle, which of course it isn’t if everyone thinks you’re a nutbag. Netter is running for state senate.

Netter chimes in on AI: “Remember AI is AI for a reason. It’s only as good as the question you ask it.” I have no idea what this means.

The long day closes with the Power of the Profile, a lecture on ballot designations and candidate statements from Sadie Foster, one of the made-up women who handed me my placard this morning, all those eons ago. Foster also describes “the hard BLUF,” meaning The Bottom Line Up Front. Will lower taxes. Will fund schools. “Give me your hard BLUF!” she demands. Will provide free drugs. Will kill white billionaires. “Ask ChatGPT for your hard BLUF.”

Roxanne Hoge comes back up and shows us a clip from the Netflix show The Diplomat where two powerful women played by Keri Russell and Allison Janney talk about how important their outfits are. “And that ladies and gentlemen is why looks matter,” says Hoge. “You’re broadcasting something about your political philosophy every second. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”

“Since my party knows what a woman is,” she continues, “I’ve decided to divide this into slides for women and slides for men.” For women, her advice amounts to don’t dress like a slut. For men, she instructs “don’t drink in public,” “worry about your breath,” and “don’t resist them putting makeup on you.” If your face looks greasy and you find yourself without your “In Case of Emergency Kit,” you should wipe your face with a toilet seat liner. “It’s blotting paper, people.”

She finishes with the best quote I’ve ever heard about public performance: “Charisma is public self acceptance.” How this comports with literally every single thing she’s said prior to it, who knows.

Shohei watches me burst out the gold double doors in search of whiskey. In the Santa Clarita Valley you just cook. Crossing the highway or is it a street is an ordeal. There is no hope. It’s so hot. Your family is a million miles away. You’re an ant alone in a desolate hostile environment. It takes thirty minutes for the walk light to change. Homeless white prostitutes are accosting you. Someone says “it’s 103!”

Across the street at the bar, there’s no internet. Another clean-shaven white man, he’s handsome, he’s wearing an elaborate Hawaiian shirt with Egyptian looking designs, green and copper, he’s got beautiful twirling grey hair. A Republican, an alpha, a chief silverback. He holds court with daughter and husband, the husband also clean-shaven, pristine peach skin, in shape, holds a three-month-old infant. This area is full of Jimmy Buffets. Overt “Conservatives.” But the silverback has a giant black skin cancer in the center of his lips. Right on the philtrum. Here in this spacious desert. Bartender drops a shaker glass. “Just making sure you're still awake!” Chris Stapleton plays in the bar. John Mayer, waiting on the world to change. Blonde mother and daughter wait tables in all black, piercing green eyes. This is white land, white world. And it’s not threatened. It’s too hot. It’s too difficult. We’re pioneers. We hate our homes. We love the muck. This is the problem with Vikings running your society. Sea peoples, raiding peoples. The weird thing about Valencia? It’s only 51/49 Republican Democrat.

In the evening, back in Valencia Ballroom A&B, there was a happy hour featuring former LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, once the sole right winger in LA County with any real power. Villanueva was a DINO, a Democrat In Name Only, an obvious Republican, i.e. Caruso or Spencer Pratt, running as a Dem. During his one term as sheriff, 2018-2022, his preternatural effectiveness scared Dems so badly they not only ousted him in the election, they passed Measure A giving the Board of Supervisors (“The Coven”) the power to remove a sheriff for cause. He switched to Republican and ran for sheriff again in 2026.

As I mentioned, I attended a Villanueva fundraiser in Beverly Hills at the same uncomfortably opulent mansion I’d attended a Spencer Pratt event months before. It was boomer as hell. RFK moms, divorcees like walking pancake makeup hitting on each other behind glasses of Chardonnay. Aging British and Australian guys in expensive linen suits cackling in booming real estate baritones. Really the thing of note was the suits, there must have been a half a million dollars of bespoke businesswear in there sticking sweatily to orange boomer skin. They talked about congregate living facilities (the new word for nursing home) and juice cleanses; nobody knew what peptides were. Derrick Townsend showed up. Villanueva gave an absurdly long, rambling, over-detailed speech that everyone stopped paying attention to thirty minutes in. He was followed by Michael Gates, a Republican running for California Attorney General, a big, red, charismatic man who gave a more succinct and relatable speech.

At the Leadership Institute, Villanueva was also joined by Gates. The Batman and Robin of the GOP. Villanueva is much shorter than Gates and a far worse speaker, but he’s clearly Batman. He’s got a natural, intense gravitas. You want your sheriff to be a steady-handed murderer. You can tell he’s a serious man.

There’s a cash bar. Before Villanueva begins talking, we say the pledge of allegiance. He speaks in front of a slide that says “Got Public Safety?” in the Got Milk font.

He’s again too wordy for the audience. He calls the California Dems “the most corrupt political operation in the United States.” He says they demanded he fire 4,000 unvaxxed employees. When he refused, they destroyed him. “The war against law enforcement has been waged for years,” he says. “They call deputies gang members. And now we have the conditions we have.”

“Help is On the Way” was his campaign motto. “There’s one person who’s gone through what I’ve gone through…he’s sitting in the White House right now,” says Villanueva. “They [the Dems] have a vested interest in having a corrupt sheriff in office.”

During the question and answer session, a skinny, bushy-headed woman who looks more DSA than MAGA asks the first question.

“I’m afraid,” she says. “How will you stop antisemitism?” Both candidates respond with their canned lists of mitsvahs.

Villanueva and Gates both lost by roughly 40 points. So did Houston Brignano and Mike Netter. Derrick Townsend lost too, coming in 10th out of 12 candidates.

THE MECHANICS

“They have so much power, so many decisions,” committee member Lisa Cusack told me, referring to the dreaded LA Board of Supervisors. I met her at the Leadership Institute, and a couple of months afterwards she agreed to help me sort out the extreme nuance of the LAGOP. “There is one Republican, very moderate. All of LA county is run by women. The metro CEO. There used to be men. Yev and Antonovich. No longer.”

As far as LA Republicans go, what the establishment Dems and internal RINOs haven’t crushed is quickly being destroyed by the insurgent DSA.

The DSA dominated in LA. Parts of Los Angeles will now have a DSA mayor, city attorney, city councilmember, and member of Congress. In Burbank, a five-person city council, two out of the five members were DINOs. DSA “endorsed” candidates gained two seats there, joining two DSA-affiliated incumbents, one “endorsed” and one “recommended,” making the Burbank city council now four out of five DSA. DSA “endorsed” comes with a requirement to co-govern, meaning it’s a commitment to govern with a DSA-directed platform, while DSA “recommended” is a looser designation without a commitment to the party platform. If you are DSA endorsed, and don’t strictly adhere to the platform, the DSA will ruthlessly drop you.

“The Lincoln Club got completely smoked by the DSA in Torrance. The city council in Santa Barbara, one of the richest cities in the country, also got taken over by endorsed DSA members,” says Cusack. “Same thing happened in Whittier. DSA totally cleaned their clock. The DSA is doing something… I don’t know what they’re doing. They do do the work. They door knock. They canvass.”

One of the big taboos among CA Republicans is talking about election fraud, and it’s for the same reason you can’t talk to a fat person about their weight. At the Villanueva fundraiser, one attendee, an aging Australian guy in a fancy suit, stomped off when I raised suspicions about the Pratt results. He insisted that American elections were the freest and fairest in the world. I see these sorts of social immune system reactions as evidence that the party is a textbook case of managed opposition. The Pratt race and recent tax increase propositions (Measure ER, Measure FD, Prop 3 and the billionaire tax) produced obviously bizarre and contradictory results, yet are totally unacceptable to challenge even within the losing party itself.

Cusack, Brignano, and every other LAGOP politico I encountered has stories of mistakes and manipulation by the Dems, the state, and the County. Cusack’s team once even did the impossible: it proved a fraudulent ballot in Glendale.

“When you’re curing ballots, you get a list of names from the County of voters whose signatures were rejected, then you contact the voters and ask them if they’ll sign something saying yes they would like their vote to count. In at least one case, when we went to the voter they said, no, I did not cast this ballot, someone fraudulently cast it on my behalf,” explains Cusack. Her team suspected two other ballots were fraudulent, but they didn’t have the time to get affidavits.

What many people don’t know, weirdly, is that our GOP party officials are elected. Not only the candidates, but the people who vet the candidates and control the campaigns are elected. Keeping these secondary elections quiet is, according to Houston Brignano, the Santa Monica ex-marine with the highlighter streak in his hair, one of the ways failing GOP leadership clings to power.

“If you want real change, you focus on the elected members of the GOP in the central committees. This is what’s never discussed,” says Brignano. “The people that run them purposefully don’t talk about them because they want to keep their power. There’s a million registered Republicans in LA county! But I had no clue about the elected committee members until I got into the race.”

The GOP in California, and in most states, is run on a county-by-county basis. In LA County, there are 114 elected committee members, seven (or less, if fewer than seven run) in each assembly district of each county, and these committee members develop candidates, run messaging and strategy, and control budgets for local races. Elections are held during the primary elections in March every four years, with the next one in 2028. These intraparty candidates appear on the ballots of all local registered Republican voters.

Lisa Cusack is one of them. She is the chair of the 44th assembly district of the LAGOP which covers Glendale, Burbank, Tujunga, Studio City, and NoHo in the San Fernando Valley. She’s pretty, in her forties, married with three kids, dirty blonde hair with golden highlights. Her dad owned restaurants, her mom was a hippie girl turned stay-at-home mom of five children. She grew up in the Palisades. Her parents and grandparents’ houses burned down in the fires last year. She exudes a mix of breezy old-school beachiness—she was a Malibu lifeguard growing up—mixed with girl boss intensity. In conversation, she is based and funny. Refreshing. In on the joke.

“When Kevin McCarthy ran the CA GOP, it had money,” Cusack tells me over 4pm margaritas at Checker Hall. “You don’t get to the Third House until you’re viable. Very few candidates get to the Third House”—she means big corporate funders—“in California because we don’t win anymore. Before, Kevin McCarthy was known for doing the One Ask. He would One Ask the Third House to give to the candidates, but also the party. He’d say can you give 60/40 to both. So that’s why he was able to fund the CA GOP so well.”

She’s explaining here that without strong and persuasive party leadership and without compelling candidates with a chance to win, a party’s funds are going to dry up very quickly. That is happening in California and particularly in LA.

“Donors want to give to PACs and specific candidates. Since we have Citizens United they can give as much as they want to the party or the PAC, just not the candidate,” Cusack explains. To boil it down, nobody wants to give to the GOP directly because its brand is weak and its chairpeople aren’t famous. This is why Anna Paulina Luna and MAGA PACs have big money while the CAGOP is going broke. It’s also why the DSA is successful; it’s got a sexy brand and sexy social media savvy candidates that people want to give money to.

How does one become an elected LAGOP committee member like Cusack?

”I was recruited for it. I was volunteering for the party in Glendale, and was recruited by Tim O’Reilly, the past LAGOP chair. It was eight running for seven seats. You really just need a handful of votes. It was never stated, but I suspect now I was recruited to be a vote for Roxanne Hoge (the LAGOP chair who gave the looksmaxx speech in Valencia). But then I got in and there was so much to be done. And then I realized the whole thing is designed to fail.”

I ask her about consultants like Ron Nehring. Are they to blame for the "designed to fail” nature of the LAGOP?

“There was a consultant who fleeced everyone. That happens all the time,” she says. She’s referring to a hotshot who came up from the OC when Glendale received national attention after Armenian dads fought pro-trans Antifa protestors outside a public school. He sold the local candidates a false bill of goods, took the money, and delivered no results. “But my experience with consultants has been very good. A consultant is half a campaign manager, they do all the advice, but none of the groundwork. A campaign manager is just a more expensive consultant, without the bad rep. The money does all go to them, but if you’re gonna send out mailers, there’s so many layers of compliance, you need someone reliable. There are consultants that are very slimy, but it’s more the party politics that are to blame.”

Then Cusack reveals the heart of the problem. Maybe not the problem itself, but the key to understanding what’s wrong with the LAGOP in the most fundamental sense.

“There’s a hack to controlling parties. Candidates who compete in partisan races get to vote ex officio in the party leadership elections,” she explains. “So you [as local GOP chairman] recruit enough voting members to have your faction control the county party, and you run whoever you can find in partisan races, and then they in turn vote for you to stay in control, even if they lose. You [local party Chairman] can pay their filing fees, and even help the candidate a little with PAC money. So then it just becomes an intraparty fight. That’s what I mean when I say it’s set to fail.”

So to break down what she’s saying: To get appointed chairman of a county GOP unit, like Roxanne Hoge and the LAGOP, a person is voted in by the committee of elected GOP members, like Lisa Cusack. However, there’s another way to qualify to vote: running as a Republican in a “partisan” race. Partisan races are only for the state or US legislature. Anyone who runs in one of those races, even if they lose, gets to vote for the party chairman and board on an ex officio basis. So say you want to control the Party. You do two things: first, you run friends or allies for all the committee seats—the 114 in LA—people you know will be thankful and loyal. Second, you also run friends or allies in the partisan races because, no matter how little chance the candidate has of winning, they still vote for you in the GOP elections. And in a state where Republicans win so few partisan elections, a lot of the friends and allies you run are low quality, unserious candidates who you know will be eternally loyal. They lose, but they still keep their status in the party, until replaced by the next cycle’s losing nominees, and vote for you to keep your power. The party quality degrades and loses, degrades and loses forever into eternity. It’s incentivized to prevent itself from gaining real power. This is the definition of managed opposition, and it’s a microcosm of the same pattern with the CAGOP.

“There’s a lot of this at the state level too,” says Cusack.

Even worse, since the only ex officio voters are for partisan positions, that means the lower-level local nonpartisan positions, the ones Republicans might actually have a chance to win, get ignored.

“At least in LA, a lot of people in the Party don’t spend their time on nonpartisan races like school board, city council, water board, neighborhood council. The party is incentivized to focus on races they can’t win. That way you stay in control forever. A County GOP chair (like Roxanne Hoge) is forced to spend all her time trying to stop her enemies from gaining votes.”

But guess who does want to win those lower level nonpartisan races?

“And so then the DSA sweeps all of those little races, because they actually want to win them.”

Houston Brignano agrees with Cusack’s diagnosis.

“It’s no secret that the LAGOP is a weak organization. There’s the establishment people very much interested in being the chair or having a title. It’s these petty partisan games. They’re not playing to win influence within the electorate, they’re playing to have power within the partisan apparatus.”

He calls out two elected LAGOP committee members in particular, Elizabeth Barcohana and Frank Scotto, for using the party to gain personal power while openly supporting or donating to Democrats over Republicans, a flagrant violation of party rules.

“On the right, you have these establishment players gatekeeping right-leaning or even moderate members from coming up into the GOP because of ego and holding onto the power they have. They have this consulting, lobbying framework that they want to keep hold of,” says Brignano. “That’s why you’re seeing LAGOP members supporting and giving money to Dem candidates, not just endorsing but actually giving real money to Democratic candidates, because they know that that candidate is going to win and they want that influence. One is Elizabeth Barcohana. A second one is Frank Scotto.”

Brignano is incorrect here, but only on a technicality. One instance he’s referring to is the newly elected mayor of Torrance, Sharon Kalani, who is truly a RINO in the sense that she is endorsed by the Beach Cities Dems and mega Democrats Maxine Waters and Janice Hahn. Technically, Kalani is (or was? It’s difficult to determine her current status) a Republican, but she’s endorsed and supported by all the major Dems. So Scotto, the former Republican mayor of the formerly Republican city of Torrance can technically say he didn’t donate to a Dem, even though he did in practice.

The other instance is LAGOP AD42 committee member Elizabeth Barcohana endorsing Democrat Nazarian for Beverly Hills City Council. Barcohana’s name bubbles up in the blame game more than any other. I’d met her briefly during my time on the Spencer Pratt campaign circuit, and tried to reach out to her for this story, but received no response.

Barcohana is hot. She’s a Real Housewives type Instagram influencer, a Millennial car-talking hot girl in the vein of Emily Saves America and MAGA Barbie, both of whom I also met briefly on the Pratt circuit. Several people I spoke with for this story accuse Barcohana and MAGA Barbie of being thinly veiled Zionist propagandists. At least one blogger publicly condemned Barcohana for the Nazarian endorsement and for using her position as a LAGOP member to make deals with an Israeli lobbying organization, then turning around and promoting its slate, which included Dems, across her large social media channels.

The same Groyper/Incel v. Zionist/Shill dichotomy that plagues the online right is also plaguing the vapid internecine politicking of the LAGOP. Several sources also lamented the “incel Twitter weirdos” running for local party positions “because they can actually win them.” The former group views itself as Last Honest Men fighting against sellout bimbo war hawks, while the latter views itself as the final line of defense against hateful Brownshirt incel darkness descending upon Beverly Hills. Say what you will about either side, but this dichotomy is inescapable, and that’s for a reason.

In any case, a party whose own members can endorse the other side and still maintain their positions is quite obviously not going to survive. When Nithya Raman barely flirted with the DSA line, it threatened immediately to oust her even while she was favorite for LA mayor. More than the consulting pyramid scheme, more than shallow buzzword longhousery, this is the reason for the chronic failure of the LAGOP. Leaders focus their energies on shouldering each other out of the way for personal power and image instead of collective power and principle. This is what Cusack means when she says “it’s designed to fail.” Without a real opportunity to win, the party’s driving force becomes self-interest. It’s a death spiral.

REVOLUTIONARY CAPITALISM

There is a difference between controlled opposition and managed opposition. Controlled opposition entails a domestic regime or foreign enemy secretly sponsoring a resistance group. When it’s a foreign entity, e.g. the CIA sparking a color revolution in South America, the motivation is straightforward and obvious: to either put pressure on or actually overthrow a state enemy. In these instances, “controlled opposition” is actually a legitimate threat to state power.

When a powerful regime creates an opposition movement in its own country, however, the motivations are murkier. Like a spit valve on a trumpet, the objective is to create a discharge mechanism for the anger building up against a hegemonic uniparty.

The most famous example of controlled opposition involved a Tsarist police chief named Sergei Zubatov in the years running up to the Russian Revolution. Zubatov, a hardcore monarchist, launched a series of resistance groups, like the Independent Jewish Workers’ Party, that he could manipulate and control. Initiating a controlled rebellion and acquiescing to small, incremental changes, the theory goes, is better than shutting down rebellion because if there are no countervailing forces, the disgruntled commoner’s only option is to become a full-on revolutionary. Zubatov’s approach is also known as “police socialism.”

The far more common type of political spit valve, however, is managed opposition. In controlled opposition, a regime creates its own enemy. In managed opposition, the enemy naturally occurs and is encouraged to exist, but its power is handicapped. Genuine threats are affixed with load limiters–you can talk and organize up to a point, but beyond that point you shall not step. If we agree, for the sake of argument, that the Republicans are in fact managed opposition, then Charlie Kirk could be an example of managed opposition that stepped too far into actual power.

The key to managed opposition is systemic structural control; implementing subtle weights, balances, and perverse incentives that keep the counterparty unstable and impotent, without realizing it’s being controlled. Oh you know, maybe things like having 114 electable party positions in a single county. Or allowing party members to support opposition candidates. Or making challenging suspicious election results a cancellable taboo. Or incentivizing donors to skip small winnable races. Or training leaders to avoid social media and be the opposite of Donald Trump.

Managed opposition is all about image. Managed opposition parties are, in their essence, illusions, and thus their cultures obsess over image, not substance. In all my dealings with the LAGOP, policy or principles were almost never discussed. It was how things should look, not how things should be. This is the polar opposite from DSA meetings, which, while in their failing days were all about woke signaling, are now dictated by serious discussions of policy and planning. Managed opposition achieves the simulacrum of power sharing—the oppositional parties appear to be always on the verge of grasping power, but, like Tantalus, they can never quite reach it.

In controlled opposition, the regime risks a golem scenario, where the monster they created turns on them and becomes a real threat. In managed opposition, however, no such threat exists, because the monster is already shackled from the start. The only way it can become a real threat is to break its shackles. With Charlie Kirk, we saw what’s at stake doing so.

What’s the opposite of “police socialism?” Revolutionary capitalism. After the blue wave, this is the only approach I see for the bombed-out dregs of the LAGOP going forward.

If a sovereign, or the Dem party in the case of California, really has total power, then who cares what the people think or say? If zombies have taken over the streets and a regime refuses to do anything about it, yet still somehow cannot be dislodged, then who cares what anyone thinks? Remember, the DSA started out as a joke, a lolcow whose meetings—”point of privilege please!”—were mocked relentlessly on X. Now they’re the most powerful insurgent political force in the country, largely because they focused on platform and principle, not perception. Perception is in fact the least important thing, while the GOP will train you to believe it’s the most. The last thing you should worry about is making your audience like you.

So where, then, does this lead the disenfranchised GOP voters who don't actually want to serve as paypigs for our socialist overlords for the next century? There are a million of them in LA County. That’s a lot of money.

“The LAGOP needs to get involved primarily in the nonpartisan races like city council and even neighborhood council,” says Houston Brignano, referring to the currently-ignored races that Republicans might be able to win. “The DSA holds themselves accountable. The GOP can’t. If you endorse a Democrat and there’s a Republican in that race, then don’t be a delegate of the GOP. The institution of the GOP isn’t going anywhere, but it needs to be entirely rebranded, or forced to change from the outside, like what the DSA did to the Dems.”

“It’s not that there’s no hope for the Party, but you need to give people some wins,” says Cusack. “I think registration, recruitment, and money would start to come in if the Party started by winning some of these small local races.”

An all-powerful single-party state isn’t good for anyone; it needs a counterweight or else it starts doing really crazy shit. Crazy shit like unleashing more homeless in the middle of the worst vagrancy epidemic probably in human history. And crazy shit like ending palm trees, LA’s single most iconic symbol, because white people planted them. A communist that can’t lose is an extremely dangerous thing.

The logo of the LA Democrats is an Obama-type sun over a highway. For the GOP, it’s a palm tree. The California Dems have no logo at all. For the California GOP, it’s a grizzly bear.

“The bear is facing left because it’s going to eat the left,” Ron Nehring said about it.

For Dems, and now the DSA, it’s power that matters: the concrete, the road, the sun. For the GOP, it’s the perception: our beloved dying palms, our beautiful extinct grizzlies.

There are six million registered Republicans in California pouring money into image consultants and pyramid schemes. They will stay in Disneyland while the state declines towards third world status unless they learn to throw off the mantle of managed opposition and accept what they actually are. The losers. The outcasts. The real revolutionaries. Imagine DSA members wiping their faces with toilet liners. Dress for the job you have, not the one you want.