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Last week Joe Rogan welcomed Spencer Pratt to his podcast with a endorsement.
“What’s going on … Mr. Mayor,” he said with a smile.
In another world, I’d laugh at the political anointment of a crystals-obsessed reality-show villain who once shared the nickname “Speidi” with his plastic-surgery-loving wife, Heidi. But in 2026, I find myself making a case for him.
If I lived in Los Angeles, Pratt would have my vote. Even if he is the guy who ruled the mid-aughts gossip industry by being a shameless agitator on an MTV show.
Pratt has long copped to a desire for fame. He now admits his antics on “The Hills” was all an act to feed his unquenchable thirst for attention — and money.
Politics, though? He insisted to Rogan that it was never in the cards. But in 2025, Pratt’s entire life burned to the ground in the Palisades fire. He lost his home, as did his parents and so many others.
From the ashes has risen a man on a mission. Conveniently, that man has a large social media platform and a very big mouth.
He became the unlikely face of the fires, demanding accountability for the gross incompetence of LA’s leadership. On X, he chronicled the fecklessness of Mayor Karen Bass, so much useless red tape and the star-studded Fire Aid concert which raised $100 million — much of it shoveled to NGOs rather than victims.
But Pratt said he became sick of being just a “yapper.” In January, the 42-year-old, a registered Republican, entered the mayoral race, saying, “Business as usual is a death sentence for Los Angeles, and I’m done waiting for someone to take real action.”
On Rogan he taunted the creatures who have been parked in politics for decades.
“I’m going to go into your headquarters, and just take your job and remove all these toxic entities that are destroying our way of life in los Angeles,” he said.
Now he finds himself running against incumbent Bass. Or as he calls the woman who was in Ghana as the city burned, Karen “Basura” — aka, Spanish for garbage.
He’s also taken aim at his rival Nithya Raman, a Democract City Councilwoman who has been endorsed in other races by the DSA.
“What’s she going to change? She’s had six years,” he said of Raman. “The best part is she’s had six years to not say any of these problems until she’s running for mayor.”
Speaking with Rogan, Pratt laid out the case for pragmatic governing: Empower the police and fire departments, dismantle the homeless industrial complex. Turn it a place of law and order, because once you enforce rules criminals and drug addicts go elsewhere.
He described the bottomless pit of money being sunk into homelessness, a problem that has only grown in LA.
He wants to shift from the faux-compassion model that coddles mentally ill drug users, or “zombies” as he says, and get them real treatment.
“My wife was ready to move because every morning … across the street [from] my son’s preschool, there was a lady cleaning her private parts in front of kids at 7:45 in the morning,” he recounted.
If he has a social agenda, he doesn’t really say — which is also refreshing. Pratt speaks not like a politician, but a regular person who has come to fix a problem.
It’s effective. Instead of growing bureaucracy, he wants to cut it away like the cancer that it is.
He also wants to revive the industry of Hollywood and make it easier to film there.
Urging a return to the basics is not an audacious proposal. It’s only audacious that it’s the guy from “The Hills” doing it.
And you know what? I’m convinced that being a reality television villain is actually fantastic training for public office.
“Spencer actually told me, from the beginning, that he wanted to be the most hated person on the planet,” his best friend Brody Jenner told Esquire in 2022. “And he did it. He really is a master of manifestation.”
Pratt, who once thrived on being a heel, is joining the good guys. Why not?
He changed reality television. Maybe he can change politics — and Los Angeles, too.
English (US)