If you think LA doesn't matter to you because your not in Ca. Just remember Gavin wants to be POTUS. HC

Adeline Dimond

May 7

On July 20, 2025, Marc Brown, a reporter for Los Angeles’s local ABC affiliate, asked Karen Bass, our current mayor, why the city doesn’t enforce laws against animal abuse on Skid Row, where dogs are routinely tortured. Without missing a beat, Bass said animal abuse on Skid Row is a problem but, in the same breath, that these animals are “not neglected.”

If you live in Los Angeles like me, you’ve likely stopped noticing this type of reality distortion. Personally, I’m trying to hold onto reality for dear life.

It helps that Karen Bass sometimes looks like a nice grandma, like she did at last night’s mayoral debate. I almost felt bad for her as I listened to her lie to our faces about the proliferation of homeless encampments (things are improving, you see) or explain that two separate parts of the city burned to the ground simply because of wind. But these are lies, so I don’t.

Animal abuse is happening but also animals are “not neglected,” she says. Homelessness is down, she says. One day MacArthur Park is safe for families, which is why she was enraged when ICE showed up there, but the next day (just this week, actually) FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the park, targeting its open-air drug markets and arresting 25 people charged with possessing and distributing fentanyl and meth.

This discourse is abusive because Angelenos have eyeballs. We know what we’re seeing, but people who want to remain in power have a way around this: deny what is objectively true, and when that’s not possible, acknowledge the truth but claim one of two things. You are either overreacting, or you’re not giving them enough credit for already working on the problem. This strategy makes you feel demoralized and crazy, and when you feel demoralized and crazy, you give up. (I’ve had several boyfriends who’ve used this method, I’m sort of an expert.)

“Demoralized and crazy” is a pretty good description of Los Angeles right now. Nithya Raman, one of the top three polling candidates, doesn’t think twice about rolling her eyes at parents who want an ordinance banning homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools. Raman is obviously free to use her urban planning degree from MIT to explain why she doesn’t think moving drug addicts who abuse dogs and shoot up in plain site away from schools is good policy, but the eyeroll tells you everything else you need to know: she is contemptuous of her constituents, and she doesn’t see any reason to hide it. She’s also betting that Angelenos have given up.¹

As far as I can tell, Spencer Pratt — the former reality star who is also running for mayor — was at his best when he was feeding hummingbirds, practicing martial arts, and raising two kids in the Pacific Palisades with his wife, another former reality star. At his worst, he was blowing money on crystals and designer handbags, or bringing a gun to a spiritual retreat in Costa Rica. But then his house burned down in the Palisades Fire, along with his parents’ house, and suddenly he was the only person in Los Angeles who was telling the truth.

If this city, a city I love, has any survival instinct at all, it will elect Pratt for mayor, if only to restore our collective belief in facts and reality. Once that’s restored, even if the man goes back to feeding hummingbirds all day and never sets foot in City Hall, we’d still be in better shape.

I went to the same high school as Bass (go Yankees!), so naturally, I wanted her to succeed, not only because I hoped my city would thrive, but because it made me proud of my public school education. It’s therefore actually painful (there’s just no other word for it) that when I tell my friends — an educated, liberal crowd, many of whom went to private schools — that I’m voting for Pratt, they are openly contemptuous. Some have even threatened to end our friendship. At best, they look at me like I’ve lost my critical thinking skills. At worst, they assume I’ve become a caricature-y vision of a Trump supporter, who votes based on pure emotion and grievance.

Well, guilty as charged, sort of. I didn’t vote for Trump, but I am emotional and I am aggrieved, because Los Angeles is sick and this illness was entirely preventable. The physical symptoms are obvious, but the spiritual sickness is worse.

The evidence is everywhere: homeless encampments, fires set by people living in said encampments, and the city’s refusal to help homeowners remove squatters running meth labs, resulting in a neighbor’s entire house burning down and two dogs burning alive (watching the homeowner cry about his home and his dogs broke me in half). Worst of all, though, is the routine torture of dogs on Skid Row, where addicts put them through Nazi-like experiments and force them to ingest fentanyl. These dogs are beaten, chained, lit on fire, forcibly bred and sexually abused.

(This is all verifiably true; I looked at a photo of a puppy with his eyes glued shut and didn’t get out of bed for a day. Google for yourself, if you can bear it.)

We live in a city that knowingly allows dogs, the world’s greatest gift to humankind (fight me on this), to burn alive. If preventable cruelty like this isn’t a sign of spiritual sickness, loss of humanity, and derangement, nothing is. (Just wait until you hear about what we’re doing to humans.) I’m afraid we might never recover.

I’m thirteen years older than Pratt, but it seems we share some of the same memories of what Los Angeles used to be. When I was in junior high, my friends and I took the Big Blue Bus to Santa Monica beach and stayed all day until dusk, when we took the bus home, barefoot and sandy. This is unthinkable now (drug use occurs openly on buses, and trying to kill bus drivers is a thing now, too). This is funny because, at the time, we were terrified about ending up on the side of a milk carton.

We walked alone to (public) elementary school. We walked to burger stands, we hung out in Westwood Village, which although it’s ostensibly a college town, is now a ghost town, at least compared to how vibrant it once was. We went thrift shopping on Melrose Avenue, now lined with graffiti and dispensaries.

“Why is it like this?” you ask at home in your functioning city that doesn’t allow dogs to be tortured or people suffering with addiction and mental illness to endure a typhus outbreak (yes, typhus, the disease that destroyed Napoleon’s army).

On a core level, the reason is this: no one will tell the truth.

Take the homeless population. Los Angeles leadership, especially Raman, often claims that the homeless population is driven by income inequality, high rents, and lack of affordable housing. And while that’s true for some people, it’s just not true for people we routinely see dying of overdoses on the sidewalk. Putting aside the fact that it is virtually impossible to evict anyone in Los Angeles for any reason, people on the brink of homelessness because of a missed paycheck or medical bill more often than not do end up getting assistance through the We Are LA hotline (213–584–1808), LA County Rent Relief, CalWORKs Homeless Assistance and L.A. Care’s Transitional Rent.

And for the record, these programs are pretty great! Los Angeles should keep them. The more pressing question is why Los Angeles leadership refuses to acknowledge the real causes of homeless encampments that have been on a cancerous growth spree: fentanyl, mental illness, and a new strain of meth that causes immediate psychosis. What else won’t they acknowledge? Why $2.4 billion meant to provide housing to homeless people between 2020 and 2024 is unaccounted for; why the transitional housing provided was filled with black mold, bedbugs, broken appliances, and other conditions that made the street a more palatable alternative; why some residents in transitional housing report not being allowed to have visitors or pets. (Hearing this also broke my heart.)

Talk about contempt. It has become painfully obvious that Bass cares about the optics of solving the homeless crisis and nothing else. One encampment I often drive by (under the underpass on Hoover a little north of Temple) is cleared, then returns, then is cleared… in a predictable meaningless cycle.

I got an inkling of Bass’ mastery of reality distortion during the LA fires, but I was mostly hitting refresh on websites to see if my friend’s house in Mandeville Canyon was going to burn down. (It didn’t, but now they have to evacuate when it rains in case their house gets swept away by a mudslide.)

I started to pay more attention to the reality-is-optional vibe in July 2025, when ICE engaged in an operation in MacArthur Park. Karen Bass took to X to express her outrage, because, you see, according to Bass, MacArthur Park is a family-oriented park, filled with children playing.

Before I dive into how batshit this is, let’s be clear: being anti-ICE is not the issue. The issue is that Bass expressed her performative outrage by pretending MacArthur Park is somehow safe for kids.

Because Bass has eyeballs and knows Angelenos do, too, she couldn’t come out directly and simply say “MacArthur Park is safe.” Instead, she invoked images of children, writing “Minutes before, there were more than 20 kids playing — then, the MILITARY comes through!” She repeated a variation of this on every news program that would have her, and didn’t seem to rest until she could get the city to collectively agree that MacArthur Park is just a normal, ho-hum, nothing-to-see here public space. After that ICE operation (I’m still waiting to see how she spins Wednesday’s operation), Bass snagged a photo-op with the children she claims had to leave the park when agents arrived:

Here are the facts: MacArthur Park is a swamp of perpetual gang activity (until the last time FBI recently stepped in, not to be confused with Wednesday’s operation, the 18th Street gang ruled it, using tents to blend in with the homeless population), drug use, prostitution, homelessness, and black markets for fake documents. In 2024, Langer’s — a 77-year-old Jewish deli — threatened closure because the city wouldn’t address the ongoing safety issues in MacArthur Park.

Sometimes, I drive by MacArthur Park on my way home from work. For the last six years (at least), the corner of 7th and Alvarado has been filled with trash, homeless people, and open-air drug use. I know this because I have the power of perception. But no matter, Bass’ insistence that the city reject reality did work on some people, mostly my well-off, private-school educated liberal friends who gasped when I said something mild like, “yeah, but MacArthur Park is really dangerous.” One friend — a trust fund kid with a loft in the Arts District in Downtown LA — practically yelled at me, saying that because he lives downtown, right next to MacArthur Park, he can see it from his window and knows it’s safe. (There’s one problem with that narrative. The Arts District is 12 miles from MacArthur Park. So either my friend actually did lose his grip on space and time — a win for Bass — or he was falling in line with what he thought other liberal-leaning, private school graduates would be saying at the next dinner party.)

It doesn’t really matter, because whether Angelenos permanently break from reality or just want to fall in line in the service of tribal politics, both scenarios work for Bass, who bragged (?) in last night’s debate that homelessness in LA was down by 17.5% while also claiming that it was up 18% nationwide.

Putting aside the fact that this isn’t a statistic to be proud of given the scope of the problem, it’s also not true, or at least not verifiable.

See, the official homeless count is a visuals-only count. Volunteers aren’t allowed to speak to any of the homeless people they see, an inexplicable rule that was confirmed by a friend of mine who volunteered this year. They can only count visible bodies and tents. If a volunteer sees a tent and hears multiple voices inside, they aren’t allowed to assume it contains more than one person. This is Los Angeles math.²

Angelenos who actually go outside will tell you plainly: there has been no meaningful reduction in homelessness. Even if the overall numbers are indeed down (doubtful), the homeless people who remain are dangerous, both to themselves and others, because they are in the throes of drug addiction and mental illness.

Last week, a man wearing a garbage bag wielding two knives ran up to me and a friend when we were walking near Pershing Square. We didn’t bat an eye because this is simply unremarkable now. After all, children walk to school through underpasses filled with drug users and people having sex in cars.

Bass has failed Knife Guy, the dogs on Skid Row, and the children working as prostitutes near the Crypto Arena. Witnessing vulnerable populations (addicts, dogs, children) routinely abused permanently scars the collective psyche of a city, and Los Angeles won’t survive on a steady diet of despair.

And yet, there’s more.

When running for mayor, Bass said she would not travel internationally, and would only travel to New York, Sacramento, D.C. and San Francisco. She then, famously, traveled to Ghana right before the cataclysmic wildfires in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. But she also traveled three times (THREE!) to Paris for the 2024 Olympics and to Mexico for the inauguration of Claudia Sheinbaum.

Bass later admitted it was a “mistake” to go to Ghana, but as far as I can tell she hasn’t explained the Paris or Mexico trips. No matter. Apparently, admitting that traveling to Ghana was a mistake is supposed to be sufficient, our signal to shut up about this already. (This is familiar to anyone who’s been in an abusive relationship. She said it was a mistake, okay? Why are we still talking about this?)

Bass actually wants a few more people to STFU. Seven months before the fires, Bass cut $17.5 million from the Los Angeles Fire Department, though she likes to claim she increased its budget because after that original cut, the city spent more on firefighter salaries, resulting in more overall spending. But that doesn’t change the fact that the department has lost civilian positions (like mechanics) and equipment. Bass’ insistence that she actually increased the fire department’s budget has no relationship to reality (remember, we are using Los Angeles math) — but at this point we know reality distortion is a feature, not a bug.

In a lawsuit, former Fire Chief Kristin Crowley claimed she warned Bass multiple times, in writing, how screwed the city’s fire department was. (Approximately 1,300 water hydrants were reported broken months before the fire.) According to Crowley, after she spoke to the media, Bass summoned her and said, “I don’t know why you had to do that; normally we are on the same page, and I don’t know why you had to say stuff to the media.”

Then, like a mafia boss, Bass fired Crowley.

Bass claimed Crowley failed to warn her about the dangerous fire conditions, though anyone with an iPhone weather app knew the Santa Ana winds were coming… and every Angeleno knows what that means. Later, a 13-page confidential memo from the Los Angeles Fire Department emerged, stating that its goal was to “to prepare and protect Mayor Bass, the City, and the LAFD from reputational harm associated with the upcoming public release of its AARR [After-Action Review Report].” The LAFD Foundation — which collects donations to provide necessary safety equipment for firefighters — then spent $65,000 on a PR firm.

Had enough? Or should I tell you about the CEO of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), who entered into contracts worth more than $2 million with her husband’s non-profit? Or the IT specialist at LAHSA who says she was fired after refusing to delete emails sent from Bass’ personal account? Then, there’s the nonprofit that used taxpayer money to buy luxury real estate, legendary institutions like Clifton’s and Cole’s (restaurants from 100-plus years ago that can’t survive because they’re surrounded by crime) shutting down or threatening to, 60,000 broken street lights that Karen Bass is just now getting around to fixing, potholes, three-minute-long wait times for 911 calls (California requires someone to answer within 15 seconds), violent and illegal “street takeovers”, and a police force so demoralized it won’t be sufficiently staffed for the Olympics.

While it’s true that the mayor of Los Angeles doesn’t have much power compared to the city council and county supervisors, that’s no longer the point. Bass didn’t just watch our city descend into a hellscape, she insisted it wasn’t happening and then tried to silence anyone who disagreed with her.

I’d like to be able to go to dinner parties and nod along with my friends that Nithya Raman is the answer. But she may be worse than Bass, because she’s actually effective. And “effective” would be great, if Raman didn’t have utter contempt for her constituents, tortured dogs, and the city itself.

Raman showed up in Los Angeles in 2013. I’m not saying that someone can’t fall in love with a city over the course of 13 years, but that’s a little hard for me to believe when I see her rolling her eyes at parents who wanted homeless tents moved away from their kids’ school. (Raman also applied for a permit to destroy her historic 1948 Spanish-style house, and in my book, if you don’t love LA architecture you don’t love LA, but that’s besides the point.)

When asked what could be done about an increase in catalytic converter theft, Raman argued it was — get this — Toyota’s fault because they didn’t make them harder to remove. When Rebecca Corry, the Executive Director of the Stand Up for Pits Foundation, which recently sued Bass and the city for the mistreatment of dogs and other animals in shelters and on Skid Row, begged city council to listen during a hearing, Raman got up and walked out.

Let me repeat: Raman walked out when a constituent begged the city to help tortured dogs. Is this worse than Bass claiming the abuse is happening but “neglect” isn’t? I don’t even know anymore, because as much as I try to keep a grip on reality, I too can feel myself getting beaten down, demoralized, hopeless, grief-stricken, paralyzed.

Thankfully (or suicidally?) there’s a part of me that absolutely refuses to let this city go without a fight. This city, filled with coyotes and lizards and Korean spas and mountains and beaches and street artists and jazz clubs and canals and tennis courts and horseback riding trails and art museums and operas and ballets and movie lots and eighty different cuisines, is my fucking city and there is no way I am going bear witness to this shit without screaming far and wide how fucked up all this is.

And so, yes, I am angry and aggrieved and emotional, which is why I’m voting for Pratt, because he is also enraged and heartbroken, and as a result, the only humane option. If you vote in Los Angeles, I’m begging that you do too, because we can’t live like this.

I do wince when Pratt calls fentanyl addicts “zombies,” or sometimes seems, to my ear, like he is pontificating from a sophomore year dorm room about how easy it will be to fix the lack of affordable housing. (He wants to use 3D printing to give abandoned buildings on Skid Row an Art Deco vibe.) But he is the only candidate with whom I share a base reality.

Pratt has made clear he’ll surround himself with “the smartest people in the world” (he’s humble, in this way). His policies include finally auditing the money that goes to local NGOs. With respect to the homeless population, he’s said very plainly that drug treatment will be mandatory for people shooting up on the street — and that anyone who refuses treatment and continues to use drugs on the street will be arrested.

But, mostly, I’m just excited for somebody to finally tell the truth.

I realize Pratt is a long shot (although based on recent conversations with friends, maybe not), and now that ballots have been mailed out there are anti-Pratt social media posts springing up everywhere. (Is this a good sign?) The objections are essentially this: he’s an idiot; he mismanaged his wife’s music career; he blew all his money on crystals; he’s a grifter; he was mean on The Hills (never saw it).

I take issue with the “grifter” accusation because this is a dude who was really just feeding hummingbirds and eating burritos before his house burned down… but even if all the other accusations were true, I’d still run to the polls to vote for him, because above all I value my relationship with reality. And — as I’m sure you know by now — I love dogs.

I don’t know about Bass, but I loved our public high school, where I learned from a very dedicated English teacher about the poet Adrienne Rich. Watching LA descend into despair and chaos while people claim I’m not seeing what I’m actually seeing reminded me of this (partial) verse from Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck”:

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

I am voting to save Los Angeles. The thing itself.

—Adeline Dimond

¹ To be fair, at last night’s debate Raman was asked about this, and she stammered something about moving encampments from one district to the next doesn’t solve the problem. True enough, but in the meantime can we just let kids walk to school without having to see people having sex in cars?

² The RAND corporation corroborates this, citing “growing inaccuracies” in official homelessness counts.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-case-for-spencer-pratt