LA Times Columnist Crawls Out Of Garbage To Tell World He Loves His City Covered In Poop And Blood

Interesting homeless, homelessness, los angeles, los angeles times, spencer pratt admin May 22, 2026 0 Comments

LA Times Columnist Crawls Out Of Garbage To Tell World He Loves His City Covered In Poop And Blood

Having a good time in Los Angeles is easy. Don’t wear open-toed shoes, don’t make eye contact with the guy sprawled out on the street corner, charge that $17 smoothie to your credit card and take in a deep whiff of smog.

Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano condemned Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt’s “dark vision of the city” in a Tuesday article.

Pratt’s vision seems to be resonating just fine. If Pratt sounds harsh, it is because he refuses to conceal harsh realities with mild language.

It is Arellano’s perspective that demands scrutiny. Arellano takes issue with Pratt’s “doomsday message.”

“Instead of enlisting surrogates to push an uplifting vision for L.A.’s future, Pratt elevates those who speak of the city as a West Coast Chernobyl.” (RELATED: Even CNN Got Karen Bass To Squirm With Peppering Of Questions About Homelessness)

How could an honest observer of Los Angeles not be horrified by the fentanyl-addicted “zombies” crouched under Los Angeles freeways, trapped in personal hells?

As Pratt argued during his debate with Raman and Bass, “No matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth. They are on fentanyl. The DEA statistics say 93% of this is a drug addiction problem … Councilwoman Raman’s plan for ‘treatment first’? I’ll go below the Harbor Freeway tomorrow with her, and we can find some of these people she’s going to ‘offer treatment’ for. She’s going to get stabbed in the neck. These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl, or super meth.”

Pratt’s critiques of city leadership are in no way incompatible with crafting an “uplifting vision” of Los Angeles. They are an essential step to bettering the city. One cannot solve a problem he cannot name.

Arellano initially argues that Los Angeles is already a pretty good, if not great, city.

Los Angeles “is nowhere near as apocalyptic as they make it out to be, when homicides are at their lowest since the 1960s, burglaries are down 30% from last year and unsheltered homelessness has dropped two years in a row,” writes Arellano.

Then, the columnist pivots, arguing Los Angeles was never good in the first place.

He scorns essayist Meghan Daum for calling Pratt the “factory-reset option” for Los Angeles: “Resetting to when, Meghan? The 2000s of the Great Recession? The 1990s of anti-immigrant policies, the Northridge earthquake and the riots? The 1980s and its out-of-control gangs? The white flight of the 1960s? The 1950s of legal segregation and hideous smog?”

It is okay when Arellano criticizes Los Angeles, you see, but not when Pratt or other Angelenos do it. Arellano’s list of grievances is made especially odd by his later assertion: “[I]f you think L.A. needs a complete makeover, then you probably never really loved it in the first place.”

It seems Arellano thinks the “anti-immigrant” Los Angeles of the 1990s needed a complete makeover. (RELATED: Spencer Pratt’s Opponents Propose Dentists For Meth Heads, Ban On Backyard BBQs)

A recent Arellano column is called “How I learned to stop worrying about noncitizens voting in L.A. elections.” In it, he recalls his conversations with various Los Angeles political leaders, and how those conversations led him to overcome his initial skepticism of non-citizen enfranchisement.

“The proposal, already vilified in conservative media, isn’t as radical as it seems. Noncitizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections, but there’s a well-established history of their participation in local ones, including in Vermont and Maryland. They can already vote in L.A. neighborhood council elections, and in San Francisco school board elections if they have a child in the district,” writes Arellano.

Arellano also focused his insight on the subject of getting a colonoscopy for his 47th birthday. The article prominently featured a video of the interior of a man’s body, with the thumbnail of the video displaying the insides of his intestines.

Our columnist’s discernment seems ever so slightly skewed.