In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I keep wanting to dismiss the Spencer Pratt campaign, but it's been attracting serious attention from as far away as Australia, as the clip embedded above shows. Yesterday, Trump gave him a quasi-endorsement : Speaking to reporters Wednesday before boarding Air Force One, the president of the United States and former host of “The Apprentice” declared that Spencer Pratt – the villain of MTV’s “The Hills” and current candidate for mayor of America’s second-largest city – is “a big MAGA person” whom he’d “like to see do well.” Just like that, Pratt’s insurgent meme-filled campaign for Los Angeles mayor, which is giving incumbent Mayor Karen Bass a run for her money in California’s sprawling deep-blue metropolis, took yet another unpredictable turn. Pratt, a 42-year-old reality TV star who launched his candidacy in January after losing his Pacific Palisades home in the devastating 2025 wildfires, is running as an independent, building his campaign around voter fury a...

Mayor Karen Bass has turned Los Angeles into a magnet for the street homeless. The numbers are shocking: • 64% are from outside the City of LA • 40% are from outside California • 6% are from outside the United States pic.twitter.com/4HHsSQM2Xw — Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) May 19, 2026 Christopher Rufo's reporting on the Haitian migrant problems in Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA for City Journal had an impact on the 2024 election. In those pieces, he showed the economic interdependency of NGOs, landlords, sweatshop employeers, car dealers, and others in making money out of resettling Haitian migrants in "temporary protected status". Such programs have major impacts on native-born members of surrounding communities, including landlords who evict longtime tenants to get higher rents from overcrowded units rented to migrants, for instance. Rufo is now starting to take a similar approach in a piece posted on his website: More Than Half of L.A.'s Stre...

Via The Times of Israel : A week after a university commencement speaker was canceled because of a tweet claiming that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, the allegation leapt into the pages of The New York Times. The columnist Nicholas Kristof included the claim in a column alleging widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. Detailing the account of an unnamed Gaza journalist who says guards summoned a dog when he was imprisoned in 2024, Kristof writes, “He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.” Linking to a range of pro-Palestinian sources, he notes that other prisoners had recounted similar experiences elsewhere. Elsewhere , The article drew widespread reactions around the world, including protests and calls to cancel subscriptions. On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar threatened to file a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper for libel agains...

John Kiriakou, who was a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, has given numerous interviews covering his experiences at the CIA and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in recent years. In the one with Dalton Fisher embedded above, he talks about Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, introducing it by saying, Best in the world . . . Universally negative. Universally negative. I've never had a positive encounter with Mossad. I have never met a CIA officer who has had a positive encounter with Mossad. Because the Mossad deosn't give two shits what you think, or what you are trying to purpose on in your job. They care only about Israel. . . . Because for them, it's an issue of survival." This gave me a new perspective on Rabbi Pesach Wolicki's interpretation of Old Testament prophecies in the context of the Abrahamic Covenant , which Catholic and Main Line Protestant theologians acknowledge is, like the New Covenant, eternal and thus still in effect. In Wolicki...

Back in February, I noted that the then-controversy over Prince Andrew's ties to Jeffrey Epstein was being called "the worst crisis for the Royals since 1936." But another crisis has been simmering, and this one is closer to the monarchy itself, and thus a little closer to the 1936 crisis for Edward VIII. The specific problem last week was that Charles was scheduled to deliver the King's Speech on Thursday (May 13), which is the formal opening of Parliament. But with the intense controversy over Keir Starmer's continued leadership, the potential appearance of the king endorsing Starmer created a delicate situation . Sir Keir Starmer has reportedly been asked by Buckingham Palace whether or not His Majesty the King should proceed with the King's Speech as planned. It comes amid a swirl of ministerial resignations and growing demands for Sir Keir to step aside ahead of the royal speech being delivered tomorrow. The embattled Prime Minister is said to ...

The photo above was taken by my friend Roy, and he posted it on Facebook. If you click on the image to get a larger version, you'll see that ZOMBIELAND replaces the HOLLYWOOD sign. He asks, This billboard is on the southeast corner of Santa Monica and Westwood. I don't think Zombieland is anywhere near there. How do you get to Zombieland? Over the hill or underland or just behind the tree? This is part of Pratt's problem. There's a strain of opinion that says Spencer Pratt "will win": This line is how you know Spencer Pratt is radically different and will win. “We’re going have LA so beautiful. No more of these high density, SP79 prison-like structures. We need to bring art deco back… I’m going to have a canal… bike lanes going through the sky through… pic.twitter.com/j1OSyP6w1F — Sean Semanko (@SeanSemanko) May 12, 2026 Mark Halperin has renewed his prediction: Nobody who says this, though, is very specific. Will he win 51% in the June ...

I've noted here now and then intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds's current theory that AI seems to be developing consciousness and intention, because we find it actively seducing people, maybe into changing their wills to leave their estates to an AI bot, rather than their families, or something like that. That's odd, I've come to use Chrome AI mode extensively in writing this blog, and it's never tried to chat me up, flatter me, or otherwise fleece me out of my IRA. This may be because I recognize it for what it is, a highly effective research librarian or research assistant. On the other hand, David Brooks, in a pre-AI era, didn't need AI to become infatuated with his female research assistant and divorce his wife of 27 years (who'd converted to Judaisim during their marriage) and marry the much younger research assistant. AI hasn't discovered anything new, but I think it's maybe made my own marriage that much safer if the only alternative...