From Conspiracy Peddler to Mayoral Hopeful: Spencer Pratt's Reckoning

Spencer Pratt has come a long way from the days when he was promoting 9/11 conspiracy theories on Alex Jones’Infowars. The reality TV figure, now 42 and running for mayor of Los Angeles, sat down with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Thursday, May 28, to confront his past—and his explanation cuts deeper than a simple“I was young and dumb.”

Back in 2009, Pratt enthusiastically endorsed the debunked conspiracy film Loose Change and claimed that anyone who watched it and didn’t see the“truth”was blind. He even promised that if elected president, he’d reveal“the facts of 9/11 that were not presented to the mainstream media.”It’s the kind of stuff that would derail most political ambitions before they started. But Pratt’s framing of his evolution offers something more interesting than a apology: it’s a lesson in how lived experience can shatter ideology.

Pratt credits his shift to surviving the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, which destroyed his home, his parents’home, and claimed 12 lives in his neighborhood. Watching conspiracy theories flood social media about those fires—claims of“lasers”and“land grabs”—Pratt realized he’d been guilty of the same intellectual shortcut. Instead of dismissing the fires as a conspiracy, he came to see them as evidence of something arguably worse: systemic negligence and failure by those in power. As he told Tapper, it’s not that there was a secret plot; it’s that government failed its citizens as taxpayers.

What’s worth examining here isn’t whether Pratt deserves forgiveness for peddling misinformation nearly two decades ago. It’s the uncomfortable truth his turnaround exposes: conspiracy thinking often flourishes when real institutional failures go unaddressed. When legitimate oversight breaks down, when people lose everything through preventable disasters, the human brain reaches for explanations—and sometimes those explanations are more comforting than the reality of incompetence. Pratt’s willingness to name that pattern, especially as he campaigns for office, is surprisingly candid.

His mayoral bid itself is unconventional. He’s surged in the polls despite his reality TV past, and he’s garnered endorsements from President Donald Trump and former The Hills costars. Whether Los Angeles voters are ready to hand city leadership to a onetime conspiracy theorist is a different question. But his public reckoning on this particular issue suggests he’s at least thinking beyond the entertainment value of controversy—a quality that’s become increasingly rare in politics.