In my debut column, I wish to confirm that all three leading candidates in the June 2 Los Angeles mayoral primary are idiots.
The first is an idiot because she went to Harvard. The second is an idiot because she did not, but is run by one who did. The third is an idiot, full stop, with no Harvard fingerprints on the operation.
I should know. I am a Harvard idiot.
I have ranked them.
Councilmember Nithya Raman (Harvard ’03, MIT MCP ’08) has chaired the Los Angeles City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee since 2022. The City spends approximately $1 billion a year on homelessness. On March 10, 2025, the Councilmember’s office confirmed in writing that no entity within the City government was monitoring the outcomes of this spending.
The constituent was me.
The Bureau of Homelessness Oversight was established by unanimous Council vote in August 2025. Thirty-five performance measures were adopted. The Bureau has issued zero reports. The Councilmember’s office described the timeline as on track. The office declined to define track.
On February 7, 2026, three hours before the filing deadline, Councilmember Raman filed to run for Mayor on the charge that no one is in charge of homelessness response. The Councilmember has chaired homelessness response for four years. She is running, in other words, to finally have the opportunity to exercise leadership over the area she has been leading.
On May 8, 2026, she distributed a newsletter inquiring why the streetlights of Los Angeles are increasingly off. She does not know. She is running for Mayor.
This is Nithya Raman. She is an idiot in the specific way Harvard prepares one to be. Articulately, with citations, and with the serene confidence that where is the money is best answered by filing legislation to one day find out. She has the vocabulary. She has the framework. She has the Master’s. The failures are not unadorned. They come with a press kit.
This is the worst kind of idiot. I recognize the technique because I use it myself. I have said no one is in charge of rooms I was chairing.
Mayor Karen Bass attended California State University, Dominguez Hills, and the University of Southern California.
Her tenure has been, by any available measure, a sustained municipal embarrassment. The January 2025 fires destroyed roughly 18,000 structures and killed at least 29 people across Los Angeles County. The Mayor was in Ghana. She had flown there three days earlier, despite weather warnings, despite the Malibu fire of the previous month that had chased Streisand, Cher, and Dick Van Dyke from their homes. She returned to a city on fire, praised her Fire Chief, and six weeks later fired her.
Her flagship homelessness program, Inside Safe, has a reported 40 percent recidivism rate. Her LAPD budget is $3.3 billion. Her proposed budget would lay off 1,600 other city workers. The city continues to spend $1 billion a year on homelessness with, per Councilmember Raman’s own published critique, nobody monitoring outcomes. The streetlights are off. Crime is up. The 2028 Olympics are looming. The Mayor has not, as far as I can tell, identified what she is doing about any of this beyond convening additional working groups.
She has, however, been honored at galas. She has done the rounds of L.A. Magazine, Trevor Noah, and The New Yorker. She has been described, by her own staff, as consensus-building and thoughtful.
The picture is unflattering.
I have settled on the appropriate term for the Mayor’s approach to municipal leadership.
I acknowledge that the term is corny. The Harvard Idiot is not taking suggestions.
On closer inspection, the situation is worse than the verdict suggests.
Mayor Bass’s Deputy Chief of Staff is a Harvard Kennedy School graduate. She oversees constituent services, legislative strategy, the budget, operations, and scheduling. She is running the operation. The Mayor is the front.
This explains everything. The Ghana trip. The fired Fire Chief. The 40 percent recidivism. These are not the unadorned failures of a Cal State graduate. They are Harvardly failures. They are mediated through a non-Harvard mouthpiece who cannot quite articulate why any of it is happening.
The Mayor is Bass Ackwards because someone Harvardly is, behind her, Backwarding the Bass.
Mayor Bass is, accordingly, the second-worst kind of idiot.
Mr. Spencer Pratt attended the University of Southern California, where his degree in Political Science required ten years to complete. His home, reportedly valued at $3.8 million, burned down in the Palisades fire. Prediction markets currently give him an 81 percent chance of advancing to the runoff against Mayor Bass.
He did not apply to Harvard. I find this more dignified than Mayor Bass’s situation, which involves the possibility of having applied. Mr. Pratt took the L early.
I have reviewed Mr. Pratt’s operation. There is no Harvard staffer. There is no Kennedy School Deputy Chief of Staff. There is no MPP pulling levers behind the candidate. There is, as far as I can determine, no Harvard within a hundred yards of Mr. Pratt. He is, in this sense, the cleanest political operation in the field.
Mr. Pratt’s TikTok presence includes a sustained interest in hummingbirds, a fascination I find, on inspection, Emersonian. His sister Stephanie has publicly called his campaign a vote for stupidity. I have read this quote several times. It is the only family-of-candidate quote in this election cycle that demonstrates real prose instincts. Mr. Pratt has nicknamed the Mayor Karen Basura, basura being Spanish for trash, and has suggested she may face jail time for obstruction of justice. He has appeared on Joe Rogan.
This is, I am obligated to report, the purest form of idiocy available in this election. It is idiocy without pretension. Mr. Pratt does not present himself as serious. He does not deploy citations. He does not write op-eds. He has no Harvard handler writing op-eds on his behalf either. He calls the Mayor trash in a second language, and he does this because he believes it, and he is, I find most disorienting, not wrong.
I hope Mr. Pratt wins.
The reasoning is as follows. Councilmember Raman is an idiot who pretends she isn’t. Mayor Bass is an idiot pretending she isn’t being run by an idiot who is also pretending. Mr. Pratt is an idiot who is openly, joyously, uncamouflagedly an idiot, who has not at any point in his public career suggested otherwise, and who is therefore the only candidate in the race whose self-presentation matches reality.
I respect this. I cannot, in my own life, achieve it. If elected to anything I would immediately write an op-ed about why my failures were a more interesting form of success, or, more likely, would hire a Harvard Kennedy School graduate to write it for me. Mr. Pratt would do no such thing. Mr. Pratt would lose his house, get angry, and run for office. He has done three of the three.
I live in Copenhagen. I will not be voting.