I Will Now Roast Spencer Pratt's Billboard

Stick to The Hills, pal!

In case you haven’t heard, Los Angeles has three leading candidates in the upcoming race for mayor. One is the current mayor, Karen Bass. Another is city council member Nithya Raman. The last one is Spencer Pratt—a former reality TV star who just put up an awful billboard on my block.

Pratt first rose to prominence in the early 2000s for starring in MTV’s reality show The Hills. More recently, his house burned down, and it’s hard to decide which of those sounds like a more hellish experience. His mayoral platform is rooted in traditional American values, like family, overconfidence, and being white. The surprising success of his campaign, built around his fame as well as complaints about fire safety, has many onlookers comparing his political instincts to those of a young Smokey the Bear.

And now, this guy has the gall to put up an A.I. generated billboard on my street!

Let’s be clear. I don’t strictly have a problem with A.I. My bigger issue is with things that suck, which applies to both this billboard and to Pratt more generally. The advertisement features all the weird surrealism we’ve come to expect from A.I. art, including the randomly placed hummingbird and the way that sunlight glistens off Pratt’s splooge-covered squeegee. If the campaign wanted me to think he just jerked off a Cyber Truck, then mission accomplished.

Pratt’s outfit is also strange—the red bow tie and blue work shirt is a combination that doesn’t really scream “I have had a job before.” I see hints of ice cream man, janitor, trucker, and dognapper all working together in this characterization. That said, the extremely fake aesthetic actually works well for Pratt as a politician.

Then there’s the question of where exactly he’s squeegeeing. One of the main qualities I look for in mayoral candidates is that they obey the natural laws of physics, so it’s weird to me that Pratt appears to be hovering in mid-air somewhere above central Los Angeles. However, if the guy can actually float, I would pay good money to watch someone buzz him with a drone.

Spencer Pratt would be a terrible mayor. He’s dumb. He’s unqualified. He wasted a million dollars on crystals—and it wasn’t even the meth kind. The fact that he’s close to the top of the ballot would be a good signifier of everything that’s wrong with American politics if there weren’t already so many other signifiers.

More importantly, I don’t understand why he had to pick a billboard on my street. That precious ad space could have been for anything in the world—a shady lawyer, a box of cereal, Angelyne. It really doesn’t matter to me. Frankly, I would rather vote for any of them than Spencer Pratt.

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