Spencer Pratt’s ongoing, AI-fueled war against Los Angeles

Former reality television villain Spencer Pratt hasn’t slowed down since losing his bid for Los Angeles mayor in June. Despite not earning enough citywide votes to make it to the November runoff against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, Pratt has continued to post regularly on social media about his big political ideas. That includes excoriating current elected leadership in Los Angeles and, in one video, calling New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani a “vile commie.”

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More recently, Pratt has decided to focus at least some of that energy on a different project: his new media upstart called the WAR Foundation, which he says will produce short “documentaries” about issues affecting Angelenos, Californians and Americans. The videos, released directly to social media, are a mix of artificial intelligence animations and long speeches from Pratt, delivered straight to camera and spliced with news clips.

In an X post on July 7 — the same day that Pratt released a photo of himself in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump — he outlined his broad plan for the organization. In explaining the titular acronym, Pratt wrote the foundation will work to win “the war against political corruption,” advocate “for transparency, accountability and integrity” and restore “common sense.”

In the first video, published July 8, Pratt indulges allegations of voter fraud in California — perpetuated by Trump himself after Pratt’s election loss — saying that Angelenos got “cheated.” (Allegations of widespread voter fraud are unfounded in California, typically spurred on by conspiracy theorists responding to dayslong vote counts due to mail-in ballots.) The video currently has 4.4 million views on X and more than 900,000 on Instagram.

A second video posted on July 15 opens with a grim and dystopian AI-generated video of an eerily empty suburb before revealing a haunted, skeletal Nithya Raman supporter going door to door asking people for their election ballots. Raman, a sitting Los Angeles councilmember, beat Pratt in the June primary and will face Bass in the fall mayoral election.

Citing “communist rot” and “government failure,” Pratt posted that the WAR Foundation’s “hard-hitting media, investigative research, educational campaigns, and strategic partnerships” would help to “empower citizens with the truth.” There is also a merch store, which includes the same trademark-questionable hats that Pratt sold during his mayoral campaign.

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This all dates back to January 2025, when Pratt’s longtime Pacific Palisades home on LA’s Westside burned in the deadly Palisades Fire. Pratt used the disaster as a galvanizing force, launching a bid for the LA mayor’s office a year later with vocal promises to clean up the city and take politicians to task over what he perceives as failures of local governance, like homelessness and crime.

During his campaign, Pratt drew widespread attention for the use of AI videos as a marketing tool. While at the time, Pratt did not explicitly say that he was paying people to make AI videos depicting Los Angeles as a failed city, his campaign did frequently point to the videos on social media. In those videos, Pratt was often depicted as a superhero or savior figure, while politicians like Bass were seen as clowns or villains like Darth Vader.

Pratt did not respond to an SFGATE request for comment on the WAR Foundation in time for publication.