Inside the Spencer Pratt Fundraiser Circuit

GONZO

LA Corrects Itself

By Isaac Simpson · May 29, 2026 · 16 min read

I live right next to Altadena, a beautiful woodsy neighborhood in the mountainous right-hand corner of LA proper. It no longer exists. My favorite bar and favorite coffee shop burned down. Five or six friends’ houses burned down, others are still living in AirBNBs while insurance companies scrape cadmium out of their carpets and blinds. My own family fled in a hail of 100 mph fire winds, curbed Christmas trees disintegrating in mid air, mixing their dry needles with the spiraling soot and ash into a devilish spew that carpeted the street for weeks. In Altadena, the only things still standing were the brick chimneys and citrus trees. The Palisades the same. These weren’t just wildfires. They were a man-made, or at least man-allowed, disaster that destroyed two of the best neighborhoods in the United States.

During the height of the fires, the scarcest resource wasn’t water, but information. News stations gave only vague county-wide warnings, none of the granularity we needed to understand the risk we faced by staying in our specific condo in our specific neighborhood as the air inside began to smell of ash. At the moment we were maximally information hungry, all 10 million residents of LA County received a shrieking Amber Alert notification on our phones instructing us to evacuate immediately. It was a mistake. Someone pressed the wrong button. We received a corrective Amber Alert 20 minutes later. The same mistake happened four more times over the course of the fire. The City that Cried Wolf.

The scales of justice demanded a reaction, and I said at the time, as my family was evacuated into a cheap hotel in North County San Diego, that one was coming.

Rick Caruso was the right wing alternative in the 2022 LA mayoral election; a local real estate magnate known for LA’s most iconic outdoor malls. Promising a much needed correction, he played the whole election straight and accepted his 8%-loss-after-the-mail-ins with not even a whimper before announcing he wouldn’t run again. Pratt came out of the gate 180 degrees different, very directly describing Bass as a feckless apparatchik. It was obvious that he was playing to win: brash, unafraid, leaning into his reality star status. One of his early posts had “NEVER FORGET WHAT THE COMMIES TOOK FROM YOU” scrawled in red paint over a photo of MacArthur Park before it became uninhabitable. I figured that vapid, unabashed fame may be the only force in LA greater than race Marxism. I was all in.

The California uniparty seemed to understand that at some level that Bass’ failures required at least the illusion of an alternative. So they ran a “West Coast Mamdani,” a Harvard and MIT educated Masters in Urban Planning named Nithya Raman who moved to LA to begin her career as a commissar in 2013. She represented one of the choicest districts on the LA City Council and served as the chair of the homelessness committee. Appropriately brown and appropriately far left, but unlike Mamdani in that she lacked showmanship, appearing lost and reactive in debates. Too DC, too ugly, too fundamentally non-Californian. Urban Planning Masters reek of the same over-educatedness as the Public Health Masters we got to know during COVID: women who thrive in controlled academic environments until they graduate and quickly fold under real-world pressure. Betting markets saw her drop from 60% to 20% in a matter of weeks, evidence that she’d failed her trial bubble and the DNC machine would have to settle on Bass.

Meanwhile, Pratt exudes West LA—a blonde dentist’s son who went to Crossroads, the most elite Hollywood kids high school, and who spent two decades adopting hummingbirds and selling crystals after his years as a reality star. Like Trump, intellectuals assumed he was a joke.

The first Pratt fundraiser was on the Sunset Strip next to Rainbow Room and across from Soho House. $500 minimum ticket. I first noticed girl-in-car MAGA influencer Emily Saves America clapping like a seal. Like Emily, the women here treat their appearance as a weapon and fundraisers are the battlefield. They’re unbelievably beautiful, but with at least 40-50 thousand miles on them, which only makes their weapon-handling all the more impressive. The men had square jawed fireman faces, in blazers and flat brimmed hats. Tousled business surfers. Broad, tan, and handsome, but in the other direction from the women: real estate transactionalists, which is to say reluctant show horses with the quietude of pawns in the women’s fiery game. The exception were the older men with the sides of their head entirely shaved, the tops swirly grey. The brainbugs of the milieu, injecting bits of agency here and there for the women to dissipate. Mr. Brainwash-grade pop art on the walls. Chanel pillow purses. Hungry eyes. Faces stretched. Boobs impossibly huge. Waists impossibly small. One thing that I love about rich LA normies (which is to say non-artists or non-intellectuals), is how magnetically sexual they are. Each sex maximizes its polarity to an excruciating degree then gets in a too-small space together.

There is no cigarette smoking. No one here has dreamed of smoking a cigarette in their lives. Two real estate-y Jewish guys, one a short bald guy named Michael Baruch and one a dashing Fox News prince named Matt Bilinksy, host the event. I ask Bilinksy if I can smoke on the outside patio where everyone is gathered to hear Spencer speak. He says “smoke what?” and I say, “a cigarette,” and he recoils in horror. This is the land of Apollo. Correct lines, correct phrases, correct ideas, people who play life as it lays and are unashamed about it. Yet here they are doing something odd: supporting a guy who spews crass insults at the powers that be on Twitter. How could this possibly be? This isn’t helping anyone’s real estate portfolio.

Or is it? As it turns out, zombies (Spencer’s term for the homeless) on every street actually does, over a long enough timespan, make capitalists a lot poorer. Baruch gives a speech saying that COVID changed the city. We’re now facing record crime, record homelessness, businesses closing. “Half my friends left LA to go to Aspen, Miami, and other cities.” He says the reaction began with Nate Hochman, the vaguely right leaning but still staunchly Democrat who ousted Soros activist George Gascon for LA DA in 2024. “We need it and we need him,” Baruch says about Pratt.

I’d estimate about 200-300 total hotties packed into the plasticky green backyard. No stage, just a stand up microphone with a grass wall backdrop, the kind that usually comes with a quote in neon pink cursive. As Pratt walks to the microphone, I’m standing with a guy named Adrian Alvarez. About a week before this fundraiser, Alvarez, an entrepreneur and trained lawyer, had spent a couple hours toying around with AI and made a song and cartoon video called “Spencer, Saca La Basura!" It went viral, millions of views, and sparked something truly unprecedented in political history: a series of organic fan-made videos in support of Pratt. They used AI to position Pratt as a rebel standing alone against an empire of corruption led by Bass, Newsom, and Raman. Adrian, a big jolly Cuban, suddenly found himself at the vanguard of what political consultants have spent hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to manufacture in a lab—an organic grassroots social campaign ignited by UGC. Reeling in response, the LA Times rushed out a piece by another “real latino” condemning Alvarez’s video as more “Miami sounding” than LA sounding because Alvarez is Cuban. Easily the most pedantic and stupid regime takedown in history, only proving the Pratt campaign’s point: that we are governed by incompetent communists happy to see the city destroyed so long as they can keep cashing their sinecure checks.

Pratt opened his speech by referring to Bass as “Karen Bass-ura” to which Adrian whistled Mexicanly, “Saca La Basura!”

“The only way to stop these people is to go in and take their power from them,” said Pratt, to great applause. He blamed the Bass administration for burning down his house in the Palisades, but that’s sort of the superhero background story at the heart of his narrative, and less of a platform. His platform is basically single issue. Homelessness. LA has been destroyed by it. Pratt’s position is that permissiveness and failure to enforce simple laws are to blame for the vagrancy scourge, not a “housing crisis” or similar academic bullshit. He’s the first mayoral candidate in recent memory to take this position.

Angelenos have stopped listening to reports of supposed statistical improvement, because they have eyes and ears. In his endorsement of Pratt, actor Dennis Quaid said only “Look around.” Not only is Skid Row overflowing, its residents are torturing dogs with fent needles. An activist named Joey Tuccio has brought the animal issue to light on Instagram, and Pratt has deftly made it central to his messaging. In one excruciating post, Tuccio shows a cardboard box on the ground in Skid Row. “If only you knew what was in this box…” the caption reads. Someone comments, “What is it?” Tuccio responds “A dog…split in half.”

“I love animals,” Pratt declares in his fundraiser speech. “If people knew what I got sent of animals being tortured in the street!”

He moves from dogs to humans.

“They let six people a day die in the streets. People who want to be drug addicts? They can leave. The jig is up in Los Angeles. No longer am I going to let people profit off drug addicts in LA. Normal people can’t get 911 cause they’re taking all the zombie calls.”

A large bald fat man in the audience raises his hand during the Q&A and identifies himself as a Palestinian, which makes the heavily Jewish crowd bristle. He asks Spencer about accusations of him being a secret Republican, which according to common wisdom makes him unelectable in LA.

“I went to Crossroads,” Pratt responds. “I don’t know any Republicans.”

He’s got real talent. When receiving a question, for a moment his face lights up, but then he contorts it into a charming grimace, as if to say “ok, we’re all having fun but now it’s time to get down to business.” It is Trump-like, projecting his internal monologue outwards. It goes well with his cherubic face. He’s aged well. He hasn’t succumbed to plastic surgery. His hairline looks authentic, but he also seems appropriately tired and fatherly. Like an actual real guy. He rallies the crowd for real. He talks about sex offenders. Nightlife coming back. “Everyone wants to be in Los Angeles but it’s impossible right now. It’s impossible because no one wants to step over zombies and feces.”

Unlike Caruso, Pratt identifies “them,” as in a corrupt uniparty regime for whom Bass is merely the latest face puppet, squarely as his enemy. “Once I’m in I’ll bring heat like they’ve never seen in their lives.” It’s effective. People tend to misunderstand LA as a northern city. In reality, LA belongs to the equatorial world. It’s the same latitude as North Africa. Like its South American cousins, it wants to exist in a constant fluctuation between fascism and communism. Spencer is far more LA than Caruso.

The second fundraiser I attended was held two weeks later in The Flats section of Beverly Hills, supposedly the most expensive and desirable neighborhood in the world, where normal sized mansions routinely go for $20 million. That status is waning however, maybe why tickets were only $200. Like the last one, the venue is a gorgeous hybrid house/party space. At a certain income level maybe all homes are venues. Not quite the same crowd. Stuffier. Much older. Astounding amounts of plastic surgery. A grey cleaning robot burbles in the pool. A painter paints Pratt hummingbirds in the corner. Women at the end of their maximal beauty, playing it up, always somehow making an entrance. Clinging. Huge rocks on their fingers like cakes of smeared diamonds. Men trying to figure out how to age. Velvet blazer, aviator glasses, slicked back hair porn producer? Inquisitive grey beard creative director? Middle aged genie?

Walking in, a large woman with a Greek name on her nametag taps the mizuzah on the doorway and says to her friend “Do you know what this is? This is to remind that they’re Jewish! Yes yes, this means that they’re Jewish! Did you know that?” Black is the color of the day. Everyone in black. But I see Spencer in an eggshell white suit as I walk in. The pale hummingbird. The Greek woman beelines to him. “Where’s Spencer! I want to meet Spencer!” I camp in a corner and drink my quadruple whiskey, so generously poured because I bothered to tip the bartender. “Thank you so much, God bless you!” She says to Spencer when she finally reaches him. Pratt has presence. He manages to give each approacher a little piece of his soul.

The morning of the second fundraiser, TMZ released a hit piece reporting that Pratt was staying at the Bel Air Hotel instead of a trailer which had appeared in some of his viral ads, the most viral of which depicted Spencer standing outside Bass’ and Raman’s multi-million dollar houses during LA’s iconic golden hour lamenting that they didn’t have to live with the consequences of their bad policies. The ads were shot by a documentarian named Gabriel Mann, a former hot shot firefighter known for his film Hotshots about California wildfires. TMZ framed it as a big gotcha story. Dems declared it the end of his campaign. But at the fundraiser it was barely mentioned, taken with a sort of grin. “Yeah well they burned my house down. What do you want me to do?”

A member of Plymouth Brethren Christian Church in Playa del Rey tells me about homelessness all the way down at the beach. Real estate developers and doctors, private equity people, media owners, Korean families, all part of the same class of did-it-myself LA money people. Scrappy sharks. People who are not to be fucked with. And fucked with, they have been. A surgeon tells me his drive to Tarzana from Hancock Park used to be 20 minutes, now it’s 50. “They want people to be slow. I used to hit a few red lights, now I hit two thirds of them. Easier than enforcing the speed limit.”

Influencer MAGA Barbie is here, who, much like the real Barbie, is the idealized doll version of a vivacious American blonde, created by a Jewish woman. “I became the terror of Karen Bass’ neighborhood,” she says. “My whole neighborhood is clean.” Her friendly-faced husband wears a yarmulke and tallit.

Pratt supporters are the bottom half of the top; a little less concerned about cocktail parties and a little more concerned with their accounting to God. I’m told that Jeff Katzenberg, the liberal Hollywood executive who founded the failed short form content platform Quibi, is the main guy behind Bass…while living in a gated community. Katzenberg is traditional liberal Jewish Hollywood power, which is deteriorating rapidly in LA as Hollywood is eaten by Big Tech. During the reign of Katzenberg’s brand of liberal, LA never really became a city. They were too flighty, too checked out, too head in the clouds. The elites behind Pratt are more urbane and municipal. They own car dealerships and strip malls and jewelry stores. They’ve never been on a studio lot. They might actually care how clean the streets are because they own buildings. Like Spencer’s dentist family, they’ve got the money, but not the high status jobs. So they can see more clearly the rotten morality of the tonier elites.

I ask MAGA Barbie how she cleaned up her neighborhood. She lives in Hancock Park, full of mansions owned by a more modest and level-headed sort Jew than Beverly Hills. They have scheduled cleanup days in Hancock Park where any encampments must vacate for at least 24 hours. “You wait for a cleanup day, then you build something near the house that blocks them from sleeping. They’re not allowed to block the sidewalk for disabled accessibility, so the police do have to actually enforce the law when they block the sidewalk. Do it a few times and it sticks.”

This sounds harsh. The Katzenberg class simply cannot feel the reality of vagrancy. They can think about it. They can read about it. But until you’ve got a guy shitting on your lawn, until you watch your kids stepping over needles, it remains an abstract concept. And the solution to an abstract problem is never force. But, ugly force is the only way to make the streets usable for normal people, just as ugly sending-your-kids-to-a-white-school is the reliable way to get a usable education.

During Pratt’s chipper, off-the-cuff speech, he seems confident and relaxed. Someone asks if the election could be rigged. “You can only cheat so much,” he says. “I plan to win in a landslide.”

Before my exposure to Pratt world, I’d never quite understood Gavin Newsom. Now I think I do. The people who attend Pratt fundraisers are Gavin Newsom, dashing California real estate princes with beautiful skinny wives, impossibly good looking, impossibly energetic, impossibly retardedly California-ishly successful. Apollonians who play the game of life in its fullest form. It’s not hard to hate people like this. They are not humble, they are not creative, they are not gritty, they seem to own everything with an effortlessness that feels assaultive. “Could they really be that special?” We want rich people like this to remain stuck at the eyes of needles. And you can see how people like that, in today’s world, develop self-hatred. The Newsoms, in their own minds, turn far left as a reaction to their own beauty. They find cure in their naive obsession with black people or poor people or Mexican bodegas. You can read a yearning for proletarian, Dionysian swagger in everything they do.

The irony is that while Newsom and Bass are Apollonians who seek Dionysian feeling, Trump and Pratt are Dionysians who seek Apollonian order. Newsom knows the boundaries, but his outputs aim for chaos. Pratt has intuitive charisma and emotionality, but he seeks order.

The first fundraiser ends with a performance by a flowy hippie country artist named Annie Bosko. She looks like she comes as a perk with a $12,000 sofa purchase at Restoration Hardware. Like the women in the audience, she’s an exquisitely crafted aging avian, but a little more brunette to accentuate her artisan role. She sings a song about driving through the destroyed Palisades.

“Goodbye, California, look at the mess you made.

Would've done anything for you, but you left me betrayed.

Tears keep falling down, watching you go up in flames.”

After the performance, I finally get to smoke my cigarette on Sunset Boulevard. An immaculately dressed man with shaved sides and a flowing grey top walks out of the fundraiser and hops into the driver’s seat of a beautiful green Bentley. I can see people on the balcony of SoHo House above. A cockroach skitters by as the sidewalk receives my cigarette.