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Chapter 1: Why did Ben Shapiro leave Los Angeles?
Well, folks, I left L.A. years ago because, of course, it has fallen apart. I was born in L.A., I grew up in L.A., got married in L.A., had several of my first children in L.A., and then we moved from L.A. because it had completely collapsed. And I took with me my company and my family and my parents and my in-laws and everybody. Why? Well, because L.A. has fallen apart.
LA has over 72,000 people living on the streets. The city has spent billions of dollars on failed homelessness programs that a court-ordered audit found it couldn't even track. $2.3 billion is gone. The city's response was to blame the paperwork. Don't blame the state. Blame anybody but themselves. Last week, voters in the second largest city in America went to the polls.
The incumbent mayor was in Ghana. Yes, Ghana. When the worst wildfire in LA history tore through the Pacific Palisades and killed 12 people, she is cruising to a November runoff and probably a win. At the time of this filming, with roughly half the votes counted, Karen Bass has about 35% of the vote.
Meanwhile, her closest challenger is Spencer Pratt, a guy who got so pissed off about his house literally burning down that he threw himself into the race to do the most basic things like keep his kids safe, clean the streets, and stop crime.
Chapter 2: What are the current homelessness statistics in LA?
and he's stuck at 30%. So here's the question you should be asking. How does a city get so broken that Spencer Pratt has to run against an extremely crappy sitting mayor and she will still probably get reelected despite her failure to deliver for the city citizens on every single front? The answer is years and years of terrible candidates followed by terrible policies.
The predictable result is a totally dysfunctional one-party rule. 25 years of one party rule to be exact. The story of how LA got here is the story of what happens when elections stop producing accountability. If you're not careful, it can happen to your city too.
Now again, I'm saying all of this is a distance observer from Florida, but I still care about what happens in LA because I have friends and family in LA and the place keeps going down the toilet. The fundamental law of democratic governance is not complicated. Politicians respond to incentives. When they are vulnerable, they do what they are supposed to do.
When they are invulnerable, they do whatever they want. This is not a controversial claim. It is just basic politics. It's why monopolies produce bad products and why the DMV has a line out the door. Well, LA is a monopoly. It's been a monopoly for well over two decades. The city council is 15 members. Nearly all are Democrats.
The county supervisors, almost all Democrats, the mayor, Democrat, the California governor, Democrat. the state attorney general, Democrat, both U.S. senators, Democrat, the entire federal congressional delegation from L.A., Democrats.
Well, when one party controls every single lever of every institution at every level of government, what you typically get is not amazing governance, at least where Democrats are in charge. What you get instead is a feedback loop of failure where nobody is ever held accountable because nobody ever threatens the accountability. The voters have nowhere to go. The politicians know it.
Now, the left will tell you Democrats rule L.A. because L.A. voters are just smart and enlightened and they love progressive governance. The evidence on the street, literally on the street, under the tents on Skid Row and under the medians on the 405, suggest otherwise. For socialists like Karen Bass, chaos on the streets is not their concern. The objective is never to shrink the problem.
It's to expand the state's role in managing it. OK, so some brief history of L.A. The last Republican mayor of Los Angeles was a man named Richard Reardon. He left office in 2001. I was 17 at the time. He was a businessman, not a career politician. He was elected in 1993 in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots and the economic collapse of the aerospace industry.
He was elected during a crisis because crises are typically the only time single party cities occasionally let somebody else have a turn. Think of Rudy Giuliani in New York after decades of Democrat governance. Richard Reardon was a political moderate. He was pro-choice. He worked across the aisle. He expanded the LAPD. Crime dropped. The economy recovered.
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Chapter 3: How has one-party rule affected governance in LA?
Drug overdoses, albeit accelerated by the arrival of fentanyl, surged by over 1,650% between 2016 and 2022 alone. Sanctuary policies have led to a peak population of nearly 3 million illegal immigrants who exacerbate the giant logistical strain on an already incompetent city government to figure out how to accommodate that mass influx. And of course, the city's budget has ballooned.
All the while, everything got worse. In 2001, the city budget was $4.4 billion. In 2026, it is $14.85 billion. Non-adjusted for inflation, that's a tripling over a quarter of a century. Even adjusting for inflation, it doubles. 24 years, one party. These are the results. The left response is the same always. We need more time. We need more money.
And the correct response would be, you had a generation and billions of dollars. You should not get more time. You should get a different party. We'll get some more on this in just one moment. First, June marks the first days of summer. That means that I have a full schedule. I mean, I have a baby due. any day now. We've got a lot going on in the house. We have America 250.
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With PolicyGenius, you can see if you can find 20-year life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for a million dollars in coverage. Head on over to PolicyGenius.com slash Shapiro to compare life insurance quotes from top companies. See how much you could save. It's PolicyGenius.com slash Shapiro. So how did L.A. surrender itself totally to the Democratic Party?
Slowly and then all at once. Typically, there are two factors that people point to when they discuss the movement of California as a state from a purple state to arguably the deepest blue state in America. First, Proposition 187. And second, the decline of the defense industry.
In 1994, Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican, pushed forward Proposition 187 that barred illegal immigrants from using non-emergency health care, public education and other services. That proposition did pass with almost 60% of the vote. It was immediately challenged in court.
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Chapter 4: What historical events led to LA's political shift?
The city asked for more money. Meanwhile, on the state level, the California legislature is now super majority Democratic. That means Democrats can pass literally any bill, override any veto, place any measure on the ballot without a single opposition vote. And they keep doing this over and over.
In 2014, they passed something called Prop 47 that reduced dozens of drug felonies and all property crimes under 960 bucks. to misdemeanors, so more criminals on the street. Shoplifting became fundamentally legal in practice across much of the state because the police stopped making arrests because it wouldn't result in prosecution anyway.
And then people stopped reporting the crime because the police weren't going to come. The state's own data showed property crime reports dropping, not because property crime actually dropped, but because people stopped reporting it. And then the legislature passed Prop 57.
That gave early release to thousands of prisoners classified as nonviolent, a classification that under the bill's language could include people convicted of rape by intoxication, drive-by shootings, and human trafficking. Voters were told it was for low-level offenders. It was most definitely not. LA has a budget that now approaches $15 billion annually. It has a structural deficit.
It just cut nearly $200 million in homeless funding, while homelessness remains essentially unchanged from where it was a decade ago. The city's response to the Palisades fire has been to commission reports and hold hearings and point fingers at the fire department and point fingers at the water department and point fingers at the sun and climate change.
Nobody points at the 24 years of one-party governance that left the city's infrastructure, hydrants, reservoirs, and emergency management systems in a state of institutional decay. When there is no opposition, no one can do the pointing. There is no one to create the threat of change. Again, notice the pattern.
Last summer, LA saw days of riots, vandalism, looting, arson, attacks on law enforcement in the name of anti-ICE protests. People were literally throwing bricks at cop cars. The city estimated $20 million in damage. So what did Karen Bass do? Well, she condemned all ICE raids and opposed deployment of the National Guard. For Democrats, the problem isn't the breakdown of order.
It's the people who try to restore it. The California Attorney General is the state's chief law enforcement officer. The current AG is a man named Rob Bonta, who was appointed by Gavin Newsom, and now he's been elected in his own right. Bonta describes himself as an activist elected official.
He has litigated against the Trump administration on immigration, on environmental policy, on transgender protections. He's been aggressive on every issue that really gets the progressive donors excited. How about that question of the $2.3 billion in potentially mismanaged homelessness funds?
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