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years ago because of course it has fallen apart. I was born in la, I grew up in la, got married in la, had several of my first children in la. And then we moved from LA 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 LA has fallen apart. Louisiana 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 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. And he's stuck at 30%. So here is the question you should be. 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's 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 LA, 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 LA because LA 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. Okay, so some brief history of la. 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. He was reelected in 1997 with over 60% of the vote. By any reasonable measure, his administration was pretty good. Term limits pushed him out. Louisiana has not elected a Republican mayor since, well, since he left office. In 2001, median home prices increased from the mid $200,000 range to over $900,000. In 2026, homelessness ballooned from a skid row concentration of people to a countywide reality. There are now 43,000 homeless within the city limits of LA alone, LA county. As we mentioned, well over 70,000. The city has spent billions on programs that produced no measurable reduction in the homeless population. Oftentimes that's literally because they are so incompetent they don't have any data on all the programs they fund. Crime spiked, leveled, spiked again. 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. Got a lot going on in the house. We have America 250. We have to be taking care of the kids because the kids don't have school. What I do not have time for is waiting through a bunch of confusing insurance websites trying to figure out if I'm getting a good deal. And that's where policygenius comes in. Here's the reality. Most people know they need life insurance. They just keep putting it off because it feels complicated. Policygenius makes it simple. 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It's policygenius.com Shapiro so how did LA 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. Now there are lots of interesting arguments over whether Prop 187 or the overruling of Prop 187 impacted future vote and future demographics. In other words, was it Latino and white Liberal backlash to 187 that shifted the voting over to the Democrats? Or was it the fact that California could no longer deny services to illegal immigrants and that helped drive demographic change in the state? We well, while all of that was happening, something else really really important happened. This one has been wildly undercovered. Historically. SoCal, Southern California, the LA basin in particular was a Republican stronghold for a long time. Why? Well, it was home to a massive aerospace and defense industry. Companies like Lockheed, Northrop, Hughes Aircraft, McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell, they were all located there and the workforce of these companies, like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. Basically Eisenhower and Reagan Republicans. Well, after the Cold War, federal defense cuts destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs. So a lot of the Republicans living there left to follow jobs elsewhere. Nevada, Arizona. Those people were then replaced by voters who were disproportionately immigrant voters. The demographics of California and LA in particular changed. And then in the 2000s, things got worse because the courts got involved. In 2003, the ACLU filed a lawsuit. It was called Jones vs City of LA. That suit argued that enforcing the city's ordinance against sitting, lying and sleeping on public sidewalks constituted cruel and unusual punishment when no adequate shelter existed. And the Ninth Circuit, being totally crazy, agreed. In 2006, again, the idea was that the Constitution of the United States, framed by the Founders, mandated that the government leave you to live on the street. The settlement that followed effectively prevented the city from ever being able to clear encampments. The ruling didn't say the city couldn't enforce sidewalk laws. It said that the city could not arrest someone for sleeping on the sidewalk and quote unquote, if there was nowhere for them to go. Now, again, maybe this started with good intentions. It's always about empathy, right? But the logical response to the ruling would have been to build a lot more shelters and force people to go to them or go to jail. That's not what happened. What happened is that la, under a succession of Democratic mayors and city councils, chose to treat the ruling as a permanent excuse for never enforcing the law again. For 20 years. They created a gigantic bureaucracy called the LA Homeless Services Authority and LAHSA. They handed the LAHSA hundreds of millions of dollars annually. And then when a court ordered audit was finally conducted in 2025, they discovered that that organization had failed to verify whether the services it was paying for were even provided. The auditor said the documentation was so poor that tracking the spending was nearly impossible. $2.3 billion over four years. 47% of program participants exited back into homelessness. Only 22% found permanent housing. A city councilwoman called the LAHSA, a modern day Titanic. That same woman, by the way, was on the same city council that funded it for decades. Nobody resigned. Nobody was fired. 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 gonna 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 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 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. He 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? Well, on the question of the contractor Alexander Souffer, who allegedly used $23 million in homeless services money through a nonprofit called Abundant Blessings for his own personal enrichment. On the question of an entire homelessness bureaucracy that a federal judge's auditors found to be essentially unauditable. The AG's office has basically done nothing. This is what one party rule produces at the state level. The AG is not a watchdog. The AG is a member of the Democratic Party. He is supposed to be watching. The incentive to investigate fellow Democrats or prosecute political allies. Well, it doesn't exist. So the waste compounds. The fraud compounds, the homeless population compounds. As stated, this past week LA held that mayoral primary in one of the most reliably Democratic cities in the most reliable Democratic state in the country. A large percentage of primary voters voted for a Republican because, you know, they're done. But the odds in that mayoral election still nevertheless lean in. Karen Bass favor the structural advantages of decades of demographic change. One party registration, one party media, one party institutional support. Those don't often flip in a single cycle, if they ever flip at all. The question is whether 72,000 people on the street, $2.3 billion unaccounted for a mayor who wasn't even present during the worst fire in city history, and a new Republican candidate polling decently in the primary qualifies as a genuine catastrophe in la. Apparently it's just another Saturday in la. The unaccountability is the point again. When elections stop being competitive, cities stop working. The cure for bad policy is not more money, it is more competition. Louisiana has had no competition for 24 years, and it shows. I want to hear from you in the comments. Answer me. At what point does the city have to admit the experiment has failed?