Fox News viewers and right-wing social media addicts are positively shocked that Spencer Pratt — the MAGA aligned former reality TV star attempting — is on his way to being eliminated from the Los Angeles mayoral primary, despite the city’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate. Pratt currently trails incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and LA City Council member Nithya Raman in a primary out of which only two candidates will advance..
Conservative news outlets and talking heads have spent the past few weeks trying to convince people that Pratt, a former star on The Hills and tabloid staple, was a shoe-in for the Los Angeles mayoral general election by an unbeatable margin. This is not the case. In Calirfornia’s open primary system, which sees candidates of all parties run in a single pool with the top two advancing to the general, polling consistently showed Pratt was locked in a tight race for second with Raman, with late surveys giving Raman the edge. Raman surged in front of Pratt over the weekend as ballots continue to be counted.
And if you can’t beat them, accuse them of cheating.
California is notorious for its slow ballot tabulation process. While it does take most states weeks to produce official, certified tallies of their results, most can declare winners on Election Night. In California, a state which allows voters to mail their ballots or drop them off on Election Day, even declaring a winner can take an inordinate amount of time. In an already blue state, California’s last minute mail-in and drop-off voters tend to skew heavily blue, but to Republicans — and Pratt himself — the Republican candidate’s drop to third is a sign of shenanigans.
The election denier in chief, President Donald Trump, wrote Monday on Truth Social that there was “no way this could have happened. Rigged Election!”
“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had. 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections! Now they’ll be working on great guy Steve Hilton. Won’t have results for, possibly, TWO WEEKS, according to officials,” Trump wrote in another post, referencing Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, who is currently polling in second behind Democrat Xavier Becerra in the state primary.
Over the weekend, Trump stormed out of an interview with NBC’s Meet The Press after anchor Kristen Welker pressed him to provide evidence for his claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him. His years-long, and false, insistence that he actually defeated Joe Biden in a landslide has led Republicans to regularly allege fraud in their own failed election efforts, Pratt included.
“A net swing of more than 43,000 votes since Tuesday,” Pratt wrote Sunday night on X. “43,000, huh? Where have I seen that number before,” he added, including a screenshot of a news article that there are approximately 43,000 homeless people in Los Angeles on any given night. It’s unclear what Pratt is suggesting, and in any case, the homeless would still have a right to vote if they satisfy the requirements set out by the law.
Elon Musk, who poured millions into Trump’s 2024 campaign, has issued a barrage of posts questioning the validity of the election, which has not even been officially called for Raman. “The reason ID is banned in California (and New York) elections is to enable large-scale fraud. When you combine no ID and mail-in voting, fraud is de facto legalized,” he wrote. Voter ID is not “banned” in California. First-time voters are asked to verify their identity via an array of official state identification cards or proof of residency. There is no widespread evidence of systemic voter fraud in any state of federal election.
Right-wing content creator Benny Johnson, who lives in Florida, wrote that “after 5 days of statistically impossible ballot drops, Nithya Raman has pulled ahead of Spencer Pratt. The DOJ needs to keep investigating. This can’t be allowed to keep happening in America. California’s third world ‘election systems’ need to be banned.”
Andrew Kolvet, spokesman for Turning Point USA, described Raman as a “woman with absolutely zero following, no groundswell of support, and no name ID [who] absolutely killed it in mail-in voting in Los Angeles.”
“Free PSA: If you don’t want us to assume cheating, maybe make it a little less obvious,” he added.
Raman has been a figure in Los Angeles politics since 2019, and is a well-known campaigner within her city. Outraged right wingers, many of whom do not live or vote in Los Angeles, seemed to have confused Pratt’s viral AI-slop ads and Fox News appearances with an actual tidal wave of support for their preferred candidate.
The story of the Los Angeles mayoral race should be that instead of incumbent Mayor Karen Bass winning a clean sweep of the field, two potential challengers managed to pull large swaths of the electorate away from her. She is now likely to face a formidable challenge from a more left-leaning city councilmember, instead of a virtually guaranteed reelection should Pratt have advanced to the general.
But wherever the Democratic Party is hiding their “win this election immediately” vote-rigging ray gun, one would think they’d be more inclined to use it in toss up elections and not deep-blue California.
Apple Maps, August 30, 2026
Pete Hegseth gestures after giving a State of the Force address at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Sept. 30, 2026 in Quantico, Va.
Pete Hegseth’s ‘Warfighter’ Crusade Isn’t About Killing
Pete Hegseth, to his credit, understands one truth about the world: the military’s job is to kill people.
Hegseth, the newly rebranded “Secretary of War,” is obsessed with showcasing clean-cut troops trained to do just that. He refers to it as “lethality,” a word that he used twice in his roughly hour-long State of the Force speech on Wednesday, which laid out his vision for this new, more-violent military: a force of fit, unified “warfighters,” unburdened by the bureaucracy and norms of the past.
“No more diversity quotas, no more gender pronouns, no more identity months,” Hegseth said, pacing back and forth on stage. “Only the warrior ethos.”
If that wasn’t enough, he doubled down moments later.
“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department,” Hegseth said, stumbling over his words slightly. “No fanny, no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops.”
To do this, Hegseth thinks, the military needs to work out. He wants every soldier doing physical training every day. He leads group workouts at the Pentagon, hops in on PT, does pullups and pushups and flexes his muscles. This is all, broadly, fine for a Defense Secretary to do. Go ahead, engage with your troops. (Less normal, perhaps, is his obsession with monitoring troops’ testosterone levels.) But Hegseth’s CrossFit crusade isn’t really about killing.
By any objective measurement, the U.S. military is plenty good at killing. We have more bombs and more planes and more ships and better-trained and equipped troops than any country in the world. The “warrior ethos” Hegseth is so obsessed with is the relic of recruitment videos from the peak of the War on Terror, the years of bearded operators with ropy muscle covered in Kevlar fabric, who kicked in doors and sniped off heads and got their hands dirty. Those guys still exist, of course. They haven’t gone away. If they’re needed again, they will be there.
But combat doesn’t look like that anymore.
On the same day that Hegseth delivered his speech, the U.S. formally withdrew from Iraq, one of America’s last active presences in the wars of occupation that defined the military for the past two decades. War is different now. It is fought with drones and cruise missiles from the decks of ships in the Persian Gulf and dusty air-bases outside of the glittering megacities of America’s Middle Eastern oil merchants. Does every soldier involved in this need a perfect waist-to-shoulder ratio? Does it physically impede America’s interests abroad to have diversity, equity, and inclusion policies? Has the existence of trans servicemembers ever stopped the U.S. military from killing even a single person that it wanted to kill, anywhere in the world, at any time?
Hegseth, I think, would say yes. He has a personal chip on his shoulder. The “woke” elements of Army bureaucracy once removed him from service at Joe Biden’s inauguration because he has a tattoo on his arm that reads “DEUS VULT,” a common rallying cry for a very particular kind of extremist Christian nationalism. But most rational observers, people who are clear-eyed about America’s unparalleled ability to Blow Shit Up, can recognize that all of these arguments are battles of cultural semantics that have basically nothing to do with the military’s ability to kill. With respect to “lethality,” the U.S. military is pretty much fine. If you doubt this, ask an Iraqi.
Hegseth’s relentless focus on violent language and imagery is largely a marketing tactic for what is a more holistic cultural and political shift. Hegseth does not want a military that is indicative of America’s cumbersome, bureaucratic state apparatus in the same way that Trump is relentlessly focused on cutting red tape and federal “waste.” There are certainly inefficiencies in the federal system, but much of that bureaucracy exists for precisely the reason that Hegseth and Trump want it gone: it is a check on unitary power. Hegseth wants a united, homogenous military of soldiers who share his cultural prejudices, who share his bloodthirsty ethos, and who share his religion. In the State of the Force speech and many other recent public appearances, Hegseth has quoted scripture and explicitly referenced his Christian faith, a tacit assumption that he expects the men and women in uniform below him to be Christian. He wants a force that, in his own words, does not buy into the “fake news” media’s “disingenuous headlines about deployment lengths, patently false claims of low troop morale or flat-out propaganda.”
A more malleable military is also a better business opportunity. The Trump administration has been terribly effective at streamlining the process by which they can redistribute money to the oligarchs they choose. The so-called Department of War is no different. In his speech, Hegseth announced an initiative called “Project Meridian,” a sort of tech incubator for military contractors that will be run by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and, bizarrely, Newt Gingrich, who Hegseth said would be joined by “hand-picked private sector leaders.”
“Their work will be focused on discovering, developing and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes without any creative limitations or restrictions,” Hegseth said. “On any future battlefield, from under the earth to beyond the moon, our American warriors will be armed with absolute technological superiority because we will have the foresight to prepare today for tomorrow.”
That’s the window dressing. There’s truth there, of course: the military does have a lot of work to do to adapt to the new forms of warfare playing out in Ukraine. Battle has shifted. But what Project Meridian represents is a shift to a faster, less regulated version of the military industrial complex. There will be less oversight. The money will move where Trump and Hegseth want it to, delivered to the tech barons and traditional defense contractors who best curry favor with the administration. This is for the good of the soldier, regardless of what Hegseth says. It does not make us more deadly. It just makes a select few — some of whom aren’t even American — that much more rich.
After all, that’s the goal, right? A prosperous, united, Christian nation, led by titans of industry who bow only to a single leader who can reshape the world on a whim. No fatties, no weirdos, no radicals. No dissent, crucially. Dissent is traitorous. As soldiers, as civilians, even, all we should think about is how to kill. Hegseth and his hand-picked private sector will handle the rest.