There’s a specter haunting Los Angeles, and it’s Spencer Pratt. A few days after the former reality TV heel turned Republican candidate lost his second-place spot in the Los Angeles mayoral election to progressive Nithya Raman, he released a statement and video saying that, unfettered from the bonds of actually winning, he has now entered “phase III” of a “war” on corruption and his political opponents.

“You enjoy your worthless meetings at City Hall,” he declared. “You think your election is going to stop me. If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to fucking kill me.”

For a few weeks, Pratt’s war seemed to entail tweeting angrily about Communism, defining it as broadly, flexibly and self-referentially as possible. Communists, he tweeted, were responsible for the demise of Los Angeles’ signature Art Deco building style, for a supposed war on landlords, for the destruction of history and erasure of Little Italy from a map of immigrant neighborhoods produced by the New York mayor’s office, and for making Los Angeles more vulnerable to a coming earthquake. In the midst of all this Red-scaring, Pratt also promised to release unspecified information during the general elections that would damage either incumbent Mayor Karen Bass or Raman, declaring, “We have some recordings of one of your exalted candidates doing and saying something that would make her resign in shame.” Thus far, Pratt has not released any compromising information on either candidate.

In time, though, Pratt has begun returning to the approach that has served him well since launching his nascent political career, which replaced his irrelevance as the lesser-known half of a reality TV couple in The Hills. The approach is simple: talking more and more overtly about voter fraud. Pratt, who soon after his loss posted a tweet implying that homeless people could have been paid to vote for Raman, suggested again on July 8 that fraud could have played a role in his election, while stopping short of definitively saying that it had taken place.

“Whether or not there is widespread fraud occurring, there certainly could be,” he declared in a 9-minute video on July 8, which he posted to both X and Instagram. He also claimed that “dead people” were still on the voter rolls, that organizations supporting Raman had been “hoarding” ballots, and that California laws prevented anyone from taking action to prevent voter fraud. “It’s like a bank heist, but California has no law that you can lock the bank vault, you’re not allowed to have security cameras, and you can’t count the money inside the vault,” he declared. “Robbing the bank is still 100% illegal, but there’s no way to stop it from happening.” Over AI-generated images of a zombie-like figure helping someone fill out a ballot, he also accused “socialist street animals”........

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