Imagine this:

You’re at a restaurant. The service has been terrible. For years it’s been terrible. Wrong orders, cold food, and a manager who’s on “vacation” when it seems like the whole place is burning down. You’re pissed. Rightfully so. You and every other table in the place are pissed.

And then a person walks in.

He’s charismatic as hell. Great hair. Good smile. Good camera angles. He walks right up to your table, slams his hand down, and says: “This food is disgusting. The management is corrupt. I have been to every Michelin-starred restaurant on earth, and I KNOW what good food tastes like and YOU DESERVE BETTER.”

And you go: “FINALLY. Check, please.” And think to yourself, “I’m following this guy.”

And then you find out he’s never actually cooked a meal in his life, he’s best friends with three restaurant owners who have been shut down for rat infestations, and his last five employers have restraining orders against him.

But he was SO MAD. And he was mad about YOUR thing.

So you trust him anyway.

This is not a new story. This is one of the oldest stories.

Hitler didn’t rise to power because Germans woke up one morning and thought, “You know what sounds great? Genocide.” He rose because Germany was humiliated after World War I, economically gutted, and full of people who were broken and furious about their circumstances. He pointed at a target, stoked the fire, and offered a simple answer to a complicated problem.

The anger was real. The leadership was a catastrophic nightmare.

Trump didn’t win twice because America became dumber, though I reserve the right to believe that on certain days. He won because a lot of people are deeply struggling, feeling ignored, and pissed off about it. He walked in, pointed at the right problems, and said, “I alone can fix it” with the confidence of a reality TV show star.

The anger was real. The leadership was, well, you’re watching it in real time.

And now we have Spencer Pratt running for mayor of my hometown, Los Angeles.

Yes. Spencer Pratt. The guy from The Hills. The man who was the villain of early 2000s reality TV, who doesn’t believe Sandyhook was real, or global warming, who also blackmailed his father during childhood, steals and sells photos of other celebrities to tabloids, and whose own sister has gone on social media to beg LA voters not to elect him.

His sister. I know families have problems, but c’mon.

He lost his house in the Palisades fire, which is genuinely tragic, and the city’s response was 100% a disaster. So he got mad. I think most people are mad. Then he made videos and showed up at rallies. He said all the things we’re all thinking: the leadership failed us, the money’s been wasted, the homelessness and drug use are out of control, and that accountability is nonexistent.

And people in LA are saying: “FINALLY.”

He’s polling at 22%. The incumbent, Bass, is at 30%; it’s not a large margin. He got endorsed by Joe Rogan, Trump, and Paris Hilton. I saw a New York Times piece literally called “Unfortunately, We Have to Take Spencer Pratt Seriously as a Politician.”

This is the Anger Trap in action. Let me break down how it works so that, at least, if we fail, we can fail with our eyes open.

Step 1: Things are genuinely bad. (They often are. The world and bureaucracy are complex)

Step 2: Someone shows up who is loudly, passionately, cinematically angry about the bad things.

Step 3: Their anger feels like leadership. Their certainty feels like competence. Their “outsider” status feels like integrity.

Step 3.5: Their famous friends tell you they’re great.

Step 4: We get so swept up in the feeling of finally being seen that we stop asking whether this person can actually do anything, or who they actually are when the cameras aren’t rolling.

Step 5: We hand them the keys.

Step 6: We act horrified, surprised, or betrayed when they are worse than what we had.

Let’s Talk About Those Famous Friends and Why Famous Endorsements Make No Sense

Paris Hilton endorsed Spencer Pratt. Joe Rogan told his 17 million listeners he’d vote for the guy. And people are like, if Paris and Joe are on board…

Let’s pause here. Maybe, take a breath.

Paris Hilton’s net worth is somewhere north of $300 million. The median net worth of a Los Angeleno is less than $300K. And the average Los Angeleno pays over $2,200 a month for a one-bedroom and is one bad month away from a crisis. Here’s the thing: what do you and the average person living in Los Angeles, Paris Hilton, Joe Rogan, or Trump have in common that would have you voting for the same things?

Paris isn’t evil. I don’t believe she’s actually trying to hurt anyone. But she’s playing a completely different game. She’s Steph Curry out there hunting threes. The average Angeleno is Dennis Rodman, just trying to play defense, grab rebounds, and survive. Neither one is wrong. But you don’t go to Curry for advice on rebounding. And you shouldn’t take Paris Hilton’s advice on who is best going to represent your needs running the city.

Joe Rogan is the same story. The man has endorsed so many things, people, supplements, and ideas that turned out to be somewhere between questionable and disastrous; at this point, a Rogan endorsement might actually be more useful as a warning sign than a green light. (Diddo for Trump)

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: wealthy celebrities and billionaires are not bad people for having interests. Their interests are just not your interests. They’re looking at a mayoral race and thinking about tax policy, development deals, keeping their neighborhoods the way they like them, and maintaining the lifestyle they’ve built. That’s not villainous. It might be selfish, and it’s also human.

But the rest of us, the teachers, the nurses, the people on the 405 at 7am who can’t afford to move closer to work, we’re thinking about something completely different. And somehow, somewhere along the way, we started letting the people with the least skin in our game tell us who should be running it.

We used to understand that the wealthy had their own agenda. Not evil, just different. Now we put them on pedestals and treat them like our gods and their endorsements like wisdom handed down.

But Let’s Back Up. Because We Don’t Even Need the Policy Argument.

We don’t need to debate encampments, emergency management, or budget line items. We just need to ask one question: Is Spencer Pratt friends with Alex Jones?

Yes. The answer is yes. So much so, they vacationed together in Hawaii and went on InfoWars to defend him after Sandy Hook.

For those who need a reminder: Alex Jones told the world that the 20 first-graders murdered at Sandy Hook were “child actors” and the whole thing was staged. He was eventually ordered to pay over a billion dollars in damages to those families for the years of harassment and death threats they endured because of what he said.

Spencer Pratt supports Alex Jones and is friends with Alex Jones. Alex Jones is a bad person.

That should be the end of the conversation. Full stop. No more article needed. You don’t have to agree with me on homelessness policy, fire preparedness, or immigration enforcement. But if the guy you’re about to vote for looks at Alex Jones and says, “That’s my guy,” that tells you everything you need to know about his moral compass. And a mayor’s moral compass matters more than his TikTok strategy.

The rest of this is almost beside the point. But we’ll keep going anyway because I got inspired and fired up to write this.

Anger Is an Emotion. Governance Is a Skill. These Are Not the Same Thing.

Being mad about homelessness doesn’t give you a policy. Being mad about fire response doesn’t give you an emergency management plan. Saying you are going to enforce the law and force all homeless people and drug addicts into housing, treatment, or jail isn’t going to go well, or won’t solve the deeper problems.

Being mad about government waste doesn’t mean you know how to run a $13 billion municipal budget for a city of 4 million people with some of the most chaotic bureaucracy in the country.

LA isn’t broken because nobody was mad enough. LA is broken because it’s genuinely hard to fix, requires years of institutional knowledge and coalition-building, and the charismatic guy promising “zero encampments” on day one either doesn’t know that or doesn’t care.

He’s pledging “zero encampments,” like that’s a plan and not a slogan. He’s promised to cooperate with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement in a city that is 48% Latino. He’s a registered Republican running as an “independent” because the R would tank him in LA. His big vision? Making LA “camera-ready” again. That’s not governance. That’s a TV pitch.

And here’s the part that should make every one of us pause: this is exactly how Trump happened. Twice. Anger. Good camera work. People in LA have a reason to be pissed, the fires, the drugs, the encampments, are fucked, but they are being weaponized by a guy who has no plan beyond burning the building down.

People can change. I believe that. It’s basically my whole career. But change takes time, reckoning, and evidence. Not a slick campaign rollout and the right enemies. If someone has a 20-year history of who they are and what they believe, and the only evidence of change is that they’re now upset about something and have a camera in their face, that’s not transformation. That’s a press tour.

The Bottom Line.

We don’t have to love Karen Bass. We don’t have to defend the bureaucracy. We can be furious about the fires, the homelessness, the drugs, the corruption, all of it. The problems are real. The anger is legitimate.

But “I’m also furious” is not a qualification for the job.

When we’re this mad, we become easy to manipulate. We mistake volume for vision. We mistake charisma for competence. We mistake “they named the thing I’m mad about” for “they can actually fix it.” And the people who are best at exploiting that gap, the ones who are most charismatic, most certain, most theatrical in their outrage, are very often the ones least equipped to lead, and sometimes the ones most likely to make everything worse and take advantage of it for themselves.

So that angry guy is still standing at your table.

He’s still saying all the right things about the terrible food.

Before you hand him the keys to the kitchen, maybe ask if he’s ever cooked before. Make him explain why all his friends who own restaurants have been shut down for infestations. Maybe get curious about the restraining orders, or maybe, just maybe, ask why his sister won’t eat his food. And lastly, you might question what his rich and celebrity friends have to gain by endorsing him.

I don’t live in LA anymore, so I don’t get a vote. But this isn’t an LA problem; it’s on all our doorsteps. Every time we fall for the Anger Trap, the outcomes get worse. And the people who pay the highest price are always the ones who were already struggling the most.

Vote for whoever you want. Just stop outsourcing that decision to people whose entire lives are so far removed from yours that they couldn’t find your zip code on a map. Musk, Rogan, Hilton, Bezos, they’re not endorsing candidates for you or your best interests. They’re endorsing candidates for them.