Spencer Pratt, the reality television personality whose Pacific Palisades home burned down in January’s catastrophic fires along with his parents’ home and whose neighbors died across the street from his childhood residence, is currently polling in second place in the Los Angeles mayoral race against incumbent Karen Bass, and his candidacy is being read by Liel Leibovitz, editor at large for Tablet Magazine and host of the Rootless Podcast, as a meaningful indicator of a genuine shift in urban political consciousness rather than a celebrity curiosity.
Leibovitz joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss Pratt, Tucker Carlson’s increasingly bizarre public conduct, and what both tell us about the broader state of American political culture. On Pratt, Leibovitz said the core of his appeal is captured in a line the candidate offered when asked what party letter he would put next to his name if forced to choose: he said he would choose R, but that it would stand for responsible to the citizens rather than Republican. Leibovitz called that shockingly refreshing because it names something that residents of every major blue city understand viscerally but rarely hear articulated by anyone with a serious candidacy. These elected officials do not live with the consequences of their policy decisions. Residents do.
Pratt directly addressed Bass’s accusation that he is exploiting the grief of Pacific Palisades residents for celebrity purposes, noting that Bass apparently forgot that she let his house and his parents’ house burn down, that his neighbors died across the street from his childhood home, and that the grief in question is his grief and his community’s grief. He also responded to Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman’s complaint that his campaign ad, in which he stood briefly on a public sidewalk in front of her three-million-dollar home, had made her fear for her children’s safety, by pointing out that Raman has fought against residents in her own district who wanted drug addicts kept away from schools and parks, arguing on camera that there is no meaningful difference between an addict positioned one foot or five hundred feet from children. Pratt said the contrast between her alarm over a candidate standing momentarily on a public street and her indifference to parents’ concerns about their children’s exposure to open drug use in parks captures precisely what he is running against.
Proft raised the question of whether wealthy Los Angelenos who voted for Bass as a historic figure are genuinely awakening to the consequences of their choices, and Leibovitz said he thinks the Pacific Palisades fire may mark a turning point in a way that previous urban governance failures did not, because for the first time it is the people who voted enthusiastically for these candidates who are sitting in trailers while their homes are rubble. His broader argument is that American cities have been governed by a coalition of wealthy, college-educated residents who faced no material consequences from the ideological commitments they expressed at the ballot box, because their money and connections insulated them from the dysfunction their votes produced. That insulation is breaking down, not because the neo-Marxist political program has become more extreme, though it has, but because its consequences have finally reached the neighborhoods and ZIP codes where the people who have been funding it actually live.
He acknowledged Proft’s caution that Pratt is currently polling at only twelve percent, meaning a long road remains before any genuine political earthquake in Los Angeles. But he said the significance of the candidacy is less about this specific race than about what it represents historically. A candidate like Pratt, a reality television personality with no conventional political background running explicitly against the governance failures of a sitting mayor, would not have been considered a serious factor in any election five or ten years ago. The fact that he is polling in second place reflects how thoroughly the credibility of conventional urban governance has collapsed among voters who previously would have dismissed such a candidacy out of hand.
On Tucker Carlson, Leibovitz was considerably more cheerful than sympathetic. He described his reaction to Carlson’s recent New York Times interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro as bless God and pass the popcorn. The interview produced a remarkable moment in which Carlson denied having said something while being presented with a verbatim transcript of his own words and a video clip of himself saying them, specifically a segment in which he explicitly asked on air whether Trump could be the Antichrist. His response to the evidence was to say he was not sure where that came from because those words never left his lips and that he might have said some are asking that question rather than asking it himself. Leibovitz said some observers had been genuinely alarmed when Carlson began his current trajectory, treating him as a potentially consequential Father Coughlin-type figure who might reshape right-wing politics in a dark direction. He said he was among those who argued from the beginning that Carlson was simply a mentally unhinged person who is entertaining precisely because of that, and that given sufficient time and rope he would provide his own resolution. He said the interview confirmed that assessment on schedule.
He placed both Pratt and Carlson in the broader context of an argument he made in a recent Free Press piece: the last twenty to twenty-five years of American political life have essentially been one long reality show, in which a rotating cast of producers periodically introduces new storylines, pandemic restrictions, racism epidemics, whatever the current season requires, and the audience has gradually begun to recognize the genre they are watching. Trump, in Leibovitz’s reading, was the first major figure to climb through that structure explicitly and say the game is rigged. Pratt is doing something similar at the municipal level. Carlson, he said, represents the dark side of the same coin, a figure who recognized that conventional truth-telling no longer generates the attention currency needed to remain relevant in American public life, and who has been systematically upping the crazy as his primary competitive strategy. The problem with that strategy, Leibovitz said, is that eventually you run out of crazy.