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The former television villain has a compelling case to be the city's real life hero.
When the Palisades Fire destroyed Spencer Pratt’s Los Angeles home last year, the former reality TV star began asking questions. How had the city allowed such a disaster to happen? Why had its basic systems failed so badly?
The answers helped turn Pratt from a fire victim into an unlikely contender to become mayor of America’s second-largest city. In the months after the fire, Pratt became a harsh critic of City Hall, denouncing not only its incompetent response to the fires but also its seeming inability to deliver public safety or basic city services. What began as personal outrage has become a broader political message: Los Angeles is broken, its leaders have failed, and only an outsider can force accountability.
On the fires, Pratt played a leading role in uncovering what went wrong. City officials had left nearby reservoirs empty for nearly a year. Hydrants ran dry. The firefighting response was haphazard and unprepared, despite warnings of extreme fire danger. Mayor Karen Bass was out of the country. And the Palisades Fire was not, it turned out, a new fire at all: firefighters had abandoned a smoldering brush fire a week earlier that later rekindled into an inferno.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Daily Wire
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Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.