“It feels like home,” Spencer Pratt said in Spokane Friday night. “I was in a burned-out town today, naked drug addicts on the way here from the airport – home sweet home.”
The former reality TV star and failed L.A. mayoral candidate who railed against that city’s homeless policies was keynote speaker at the Washington Policy Center’s annual fundraising dinner in Spokane on Friday night. After the disastrous midterm results Tuesday, Pratt argued that those gathered in the hotel ballroom should not look to hope to sustain them through the next two years; instead, they should prepare to go to war.
“We’re at war for the country,” he said. “The people we’re at war against, it’s a cult. It’s not politics. It’s a religion, and this is a death cult.”
War was a frequent refrain Friday night in a crowd that seemed beleaguered but determined to fight. Todd Meyers, the policy center’s vice president for research, invoked World War I French Gen. Ferdinand Foch as the Germans advanced and the French flank folded.
“Situation excellent,” Foch reportedly said. “I am attacking.”
Washington Policy Center’s two annual dinners in Bellevue and in Spokane have for years featured big name figures and firebrands in conservative politics, with past speakers including one-time Democratic presidential candidate and later Trump-appointee Tulsi Gabbard, former Cabinet secretaries Dr. Ben Carson and Mike Pompeo, and Christopher Rufo, the documentarian and activist who helped popularize conservative opposition to “critical race theory.”
Other speakers at Friday’s dinner, whose tables were sold for anywhere from $1,500 to $35,000, included former state Attorney General Rob McKenna, who pledged to fight the so-called millionaires tax in court, and Eric Zimmerman, the group’s director of public safety policy, who argued that drug crime diversion was significantly less effective than its proponents allege.
Nathan Rimmer, chair of the Washington Policy Center’s board of directors, argued Friday that Pratt’s experience made him the right man to address the moment, both because he had fought an uphill battle against liberal public safety policies and because losing his home in the 2025 Palisades fire gave him important perspective on the impacts of the Spokane Complex fires.
“(Pratt) personally experienced the consequences of failed leadership and the devastation it causes when you let known criminals like the Spokane arsonist run around in society freely and get away with low-level crimes, and then our leaders act surprised when he torches an entire neighborhood,” Rimmer said.
It’s not clear what Rimmer was referring to. Aaron Farinacci, the man arrested for allegedly starting the Old Trails fire, was convicted of killing his adoptive father while still living in Arizona, and served his prison sentence before moving to Washington. At no point was Farinacci charged with or convicted of “low-level crimes” in the Northwest prior to his August arrest in connection with the fire.
Pratt also argued that he had not been the victim of a random disaster, but that his community had been destroyed by government negligence.
“They stole my house and they forced me into this situation, and they made me a fighter,” Pratt said.
Pratt has long been a professional provocateur, first on MTV and only recently on the political stage. He came to prominence as a reality TV boyfriend in “The Hills,” a show centered on young women in Los Angeles, where he claimed to have leaked rumors about a co-star’s sex tape, then later claimed it was all a lie to convince the co-star to attend his wedding.
The former TV personality has been open about making a calculated decision to play the villain in his personal and professional life, penning the tell-all memoir “The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain” that was published earlier this year. The book detailed a transactional relationship to fame and the profligate spending that followed – including amassing $1 million worth of crystals whose “ancient energy” were meant to make him more famous than Elvis.
Pratt himself hawks crystal pendants under the brand “Pratt Daddy,” which buyers can supposedly use to manifest love, protection, health or wealth. The brand has always been careful to clarify the crystals are not a “medical treatment and not a substitute for care from doctors” – though he has also claimed that a crystal pendant helped his wife’s postsurgery pain in ways “that even morphine could not relieve.”
Pratt lost his home in the 2025 Palisades fire, which he has blamed on the policies of various Democratic officials and credited as the inspiration to run for mayor of L.A. earlier this year – though he could have just as easily chosen to run for governor, he noted Friday night. That campaign, which largely portrayed Pratt as a right-of-center conservative focused on quality of life issues such as homelessness and public drug use, launched Pratt into nationwide conservative celebrity.
After he was defeated in the open primary earlier this year, Pratt suggested without evidence – as did President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and various right-wing media personalities – that voter fraud may have contributed to him losing the race in the deep blue city. He referenced that claim Friday night to supportive laughter from the Washington Policy Center audience, arguing he could have overcome the ballots that “showed up” if he had more time to campaign.
Despite losing the election, Pratt has maintained prominence in conservative social media circles with a self-described goal of “destroying communists,” often with humorous, inflammatory and sometimes false claims. For instance, he claimed that Sen.-elect James Talarico, D-Texas, had been absent from the campaign trail, not due to the flu as Talarico claimed, but because he was checked into a mental health institution. This claim, which Pratt said had come from anonymous sources, was later debunked.
“Obviously, honesty is not a problem for you, so we appreciate that,” said Washington Policy Center CEO Steven Hatting, who joined Pratt on stage.
Pratt argued at length that politicians are almost all liars, except for himself and “the ones in this room,” he added coyly. If he had only lied, he would be mayor of L.A. today, he argued.
“The reoccurring theme of this policy meeting … is information and the power of information,” Pratt said. “Right now, nobody has information because the people everybody in this room is against, they are so good at lying.”
Pratt quickly emerged as an unlikely commentator following the Spokane Complex fires, sharing prayers for the victims and blaming Gov. Bob Ferguson for the disaster.
“First off, your governor is a problem,” Pratt said in a video posted shortly after the fires. “Your state has only done 6,000 acres of prescribed fires, which is seven times less than my own state which is infamous for horrendous forest management. You need to make sure that this clown answers for his dereliction of duty.”
A recent federal report suggests that Washington did lag other states in prescribed burns, with over 11,000 acres burned compared to more than 60,000 burned in California this year. Georgia leads the nation in prescribed burns, having intentionally lit nearly 1.5 million acres this year.
In a statement, Ferguson pointed to steps his administration took to lower regulatory barriers for those rebuilding from the fires – some of which were noted by others at Friday’s event – and to work with the federal government to grant tax extensions for those impacted by the fires.
“Not surprising that a former reality TV personality and failed mayoral candidate does not understand how Washington government works,” Ferguson wrote in a statement. “The individual who handles prescribed burns in Washington state is our Commissioner of Public Lands.”
“If Pratt is truly concerned about Washingtonians impacted by wildfires, he can utilize his relationship with Donald Trump and ask him to approve our request for a federal Major Disaster Declaration,” Ferguson added.
Pratt also claimed via social media that Spokane city officials were hampering the rebuilding process.
“Spokane is refusing to waive demolition permit fees for fire victims,” Pratt recently wrote on social media. “What the (expletive) is the point of paying taxes?”
Spokane did lower demolition fees to the minimum allowed under state law, according to city officials. The department that manages the permits is an “enterprise fund,” which means its operations are paid for by service fees, not by taxes.
But Pratt had little to say about state or local leaders’ response to the fires that devastated Spokane at Friday’s event, and was primarily focused on his own struggles with California’s bureaucracy and framing how he believed conservatives should fight what he characterized as socialism, communism and lax criminal justice policies.
“One of the things I try to do, talking to people about naked drug addict zombies … the Democrats I know have good hearts, they are good people,” Pratt said. “So the way I try to frame the messaging is: If that was your son or your daughter that was addicted to these drugs, would you give them access to more needles? You need to talk to these people and say, your empathy is suicidal. You’re actually killing these people.”
Pratt argued that conservatives are struggling with branding, particularly with young people, when compared with the “really incredible brand that the communists are pushing.”
“And so my goal is education, because you can have all the facts appear in this nice policy, all the smart people, but the education of the younger voters who are on TikTok – they don’t have the facts,” Pratt said. “For me, it’s truly just getting on the biggest platform possible to reach the youth, because the young people, they shouldn’t be this stupid.”
That’s what Pratt said he spends his time doing on X, the social media site formerly known as