Communist Quango Cargo Cults Have Won The L.A. Mayor's Race And Doomed Hollywood
This act of cultural arson was an inside job
Los Angeles is cooked. Hollywood will not recover from the 2026 mayoral election. Not because Spencer Pratt came in third, but because Nithya Raman has overtaken him in second place through means that are transparently fraudulent, if entirely legalized in Gavin Newsom’s California. Public confidence in the outcome will be nonexistent, the city will belong to vagrants, and all the political power will belong to the communist cargo cults that sustain the vagrancy.
Hollywood “fell off a cliff” right after Bass took office, Pratt has noted. “Karen and Nithya treat productions like a nuisance, and they’ve killed our golden goose” by making Los Angeles an unsafe and unpleasant place for media creators to live and work. In order to bring back production, Pratt wanted “to eliminate every lame reason that makes filming in LA a pain in the neck.” Contrary to the Democratic Party prescription, production incentives are not going to work.
Quick, cheap, easy permitting. Easy parking approvals. Dedicated LAPD patrols in filming hotspots to ensure crew safety. No more addicts roving around the streets. Slashing fees. We need to win back these productions, and tax credits aren’t enough to do it.
Pratt never identified himself as a Republican, or claimed allegiance to partisan principles. His campaign was never ideological. Rather, Pratt’s candidacy threatened the ideology that runs Los Angeles. In the UK, a semi-public body that is financed by taxpayers and appointed by the government is called ‘a quango’, short for ‘quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization’. We may borrow this term.
The quangos of Los Angeles are killing Los Angeles. Burned out, needle-strewn playgrounds in Los Angeles are the praxis (practical implementation) of morality-based economic theories that fly in the face of human nature: communism, basically. The quangos are essentially cargo cults that implement Marxist theories with public resources (money). This program makes the homeless problem bigger.
Then the quangos collect ballots from the homeless (‘harvesting’). Signatures are not necessary as long as a ‘witness’ (the harvester) signs the ballot. It is an open secret in California that the booths conveniently located outside the local county public services centers harvest ballots at election-time. They also collect signatures for petitions.
California makes this all much easier and safer by sending every registered voter a ballot by mail. The homeless can be signed up to receive ballots at DSA offices, or nonprofit offices, or even the Democratic Party office, and then those ballots can be filled out and witnessed by ‘volunteers’, then delivered to drop boxes, without the homeless person ever touching them. Ballot brokers find ballots at apartment complexes, nursing homes, and empty lots, collecting the overflow from voters who have died or moved.
The chain of custody for an unknown number of ballots is therefore unknown, and thanks to California Democrats, impossible to retrace. Laundered votes are legal in California. Gavin Newsom has even protected this form of electioneering by signing new legislation, SB 73, that makes it illegal for election observers to challenge a ballot sent by mail. Validating votes is racist, after all, which is why we cannot have voter ID laws.
The quiet crisis of quango defunding is a major plot thread to the Trump administration and the 2028 presidential election. It is why we see stories designed to make us sympathize with the plight of otherwise-unemployable people losing their nonprofit jobs and shuttering their organizations. It is why we have seen Latin American leftists losing elections ever since USAID funding was cut off.
Now the elevation of Nithya Raman from distant third-place to second place comes at a cost: the permanent diminution of Hollywood. The regulatory burdens of film and television/streaming production in the city now outweigh the incentives offered by the state. Fewer shows and films will be made in Tinseltown, which has taken too many self-inflicted economic blows in the era of programmatic Los Angeles culture war. Put simply, ‘Hollyweird’ is over and woke is broke.
Cargo cult communists direct resources to dependencies through quangos, but the quangos do not alleviate suffering. Suffering increases from the dependency, justifying even greater spending to relieve the problem through quangos. The dependency meanwhile is a reliable voting block. Economists Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer identified this phenomenon, in which politicians shape the electorate in ways that drive out business and shrink the tax base, back in 2002.
They called it “The Curley Effect”, naming it for James Michael Curley, the colorful, four-time mayor of Boston and one-time governor of Massachusetts in the early-to-mid 20th century. The Curley Effect is characterized by wasteful, distortionary redistributive policies that drive out higher-income or opposing voters and businesses — think of the mayors of Seattle and New York chasing away their billionaires. They are not really doing something new, or even ideological.
Ideology is fashionable, but the praxis of the Curley Effect is timeless. By placing onerous taxes on the most productive capital, while giving generous benefits and patronage for their core supporters, politicians in every epoch increase the relative size of their voting base compared to the rest of the polity. Divisive rhetoric shrouds this self-interested behavior in sanctimony, and promotes tribal voting behavior. The Curley Effect is a well-studied phenomenon. Quangos and cargo cult communism and ballot harvesting are not really new. They are not even illegal. They are as old as the American democratic experiment.
But they are destructive, negative forces. Hollywood is a key set of institutions that made our American culture so ‘woke’ for the last decade-plus. Los Angeles is not going to experience a renaissance of independent production under Mayor Karen Bass or Nithya Raman. This is just one more act of cultural arson by the same people who elected both of them. The silver lining to the legalized theft of an election from Spencer Pratt is that the people who make our entertainment content are now free to move to freer, greener pastures.
Who knows what grapes of wrath will be sown.