Spencer Pratt’s Braveheart Against The Bass Kingdom
Los Angeles is ruled by insiders, unions, and excuses. Spencer Pratt is offering something stranger — and maybe more dangerous to City Hall: clarity.
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The Epic, The Warrior, And The Inevitable Ending
Braveheart is one of those sprawling, thunderous movies that manages to be both over-the-top and magnificent. At its center is William Wallace, a stubborn Scottish rebel who refuses to accept rule by a corrupt king. He wins victories, inspires peasants, humiliates elites, and becomes the symbol of a people who still remember what freedom is supposed to feel like. But the movie carries a terrible inevitability. Even as Wallace wins, you know where it’s heading — betrayal, capture, torture, execution. His death is painful, public, and meant to break the rebellion. Instead, it becomes the moral center of the story. Wallace loses his life but exposes the rottenness of the regime.
Which brings us, naturally, to Spencer Pratt running for mayor of Los Angeles.
Pratt is not William Wallace. He is a reality television personality, entrepreneur, social media figure, and now political insurgent. But politics is partly theater, and Los Angeles politics has become such a smug, self-satisfied mess that even a celebrity insurgency can reveal something true.
Karen Bass And The Kingdom Of Excuses
Every Braveheart story needs its morally repugnant ruler, and Los Angeles has Karen Bass. She does not arrive on horseback or order executions from a stone throne. Her weapons are less cinematic but more durable: public employee unions, activist networks, bureaucratic inertia, progressive nonprofits, and the permanent class of City Hall insiders who have made a comfortable career out of LA’s slow collapse.
Under this kingdom, Los Angeles has become a city where failure is never the fault of the people in charge. Homelessness remains a moral and civic disaster. Public safety is strained. Businesses keep looking for the exits. Infrastructure decays. Sidewalks crumble. Streets get dirtier. And Bass is presiding over a record budget shortfall while City Hall keeps promising that the next budget maneuver will finally put things right.
Then came the fires, and with them the public frustration over readiness, response, and leadership. Add the city’s posture toward illegal immigration, its refusal to prioritize residents over ideological theater, and its looming obligations to host the World Cup and Olympics, and the picture is clear. This is not a city suffering from bad luck. It is a city suffering from bad rule.
Los Angeles is not lacking rulers. It is lacking leadership. Bass has the throne, the machinery, and the institutions. What she does not have is a record that makes normal people look around and say, yes, this is working.
Spencer Pratt As The Unlikely Rebel
Spencer Pratt’s political gift is that he is not pretending to be a normal politician. That alone makes him dangerous. Normal Los Angeles politicians speak in sterile phrases about equity, stakeholder engagement, housing-first strategies, climate resilience, and public-private partnerships — a fog of jargon thick enough to quietly kill accountability. Pratt can say what ordinary people already know: the city is dirty, expensive, unsafe, overregulated, and badly managed.
That does not mean he has a perfect plan. But his starting point is closer to reality than the ruling class’. He wants encampments cleared — with shelter, not just citations. He wants cops hired. He wants permits processed in weeks, not years. The mayor’s job is not to perform empathy. It is to make the city function.
In Braveheart terms, Pratt is not storming the field with armies behind him. He is showing up with a phone, a following, a cause, and a message: Los Angeles does not have to accept permanent decline. The city can support the police. It can clear encampments. It can stop chasing away business. It can prepare for global events without pretending that every failure is caused by insufficient spending.
His candidacy also puts Bass in an uncomfortable position. She and her allies want to dismiss him as unserious. But that only works if voters think the current leadership is serious. And a city that cannot keep streets clean, manage homelessness, or prepare confidently for the world stage has forfeited the right to sneer.
So, Does It Matter?
Maybe Spencer Pratt does not win. The political odds are brutal — Democratic voter registration in Los Angeles dwarfs Republican registration by nearly four to one, and that is before the unions, consultants, donors, and institutional machinery behind Bass even enter the battlefield. In Braveheart, Wallace had a sword. Pratt has Instagram. That is nothing, but it is not the same thing as precinct operations and union-funded mail.
But remember the lesson of Braveheart. Wallace did not win because the odds favored him. He won victories, inspired ordinary people, and exposed the regime's moral bankruptcy. An insurgent candidacy can matter even when it falls short — it can force issues into the open, give frustrated voters permission to say out loud what they’ve been told makes them bad people, and make the ruling class answer questions it would rather bury under another commission staffed by the same people who caused the problem.
Spencer Pratt’s campaign may be unconventional. It may even be a little far-fetched. But in a city governed by people who have normalized dysfunction, a long shot with the right enemies can still tell the truth — and in the City of Angels, truth itself has become an act of rebellion.
Two Debates Tonight
At 5 pm tonight on NBC4 in Los Angeles, you can watch Spencer “Braveheart” Pratt do battle with Queen Bass, with a third candidate, the other progressive (besides Bass), Los Angeles Councilwoman Nithya Raman.
For those who didn’t get it out of their system last night, there is another California Gubernatorial debate at 7 pm, also on NBC4 (in LA).
I’m sure you can catch both streaming on YouTube.
