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MY PERSPECTIVE - The Mainstream Media will be pretending Los Angeles voters have a choice for mayor. They do not.
On one side is Karen Bass, the incumbent mayor who has presided over visible civic collapse: encampments, the destruction of the Pacific Palisades and a good chunk of Malibu while the Santa Ynez Reservoir still sits empty [How!], open drug use, encampments galore, crumpling sidewalks, terrible roads, broken departments, and billions in public spending unaccounted for.
On the other side is Nithya Raman, a DSA member whose political philosophy could be called communism lite. It is not merely left-wing but increasingly anti-police, anti-border, anti-capitalist, and anti-Israel, and its leading candidates in NYC are openly calling for the destruction of America. Why hasn’t Nithya criticized these statements? Her silence must be taken as tacit support. Nithya, prove me wrong.
This is not a choice between two governing philosophies. It is a choice between the wrecking ball already inside City Hall and the demolition crew waiting for the order to plant the explosives.
When Spencer Pratt was still in the race, Los Angeles had a real choice. He was not the candidate of the donor class, the unions, the nonprofits, the homelessness contractors, the activists, or the consultant caste. That was precisely the point. His campaign gave angry voters a way to reject the whole corrupt structure. He was the candidate of change.
Then, as is usually the case, the election dragged on, and a flood of questionable absentee votes obliterated Pratt. This outcome was not unexpected, as it happened with Rick Caruso, who probably would have made a good mayor.
Now the runoff is Bass versus Raman. The media will sell this as experience versus reform. It is not. B-ass-backward® is the smiling face of failure. Raman (I know best™), a soggy noodle of DEI limited intellectual capacity, is also an incumbent (CD-4) and is the ideological acceleration of failure. Both bear tremendous responsibility for LA's condition.
Bass is the machine. Raman is the movement. Bass represents the progressive establishment that has already damaged Los Angeles (beyond repair?). Raman represents a socialist network that believes the damage is not evidence that the ideology failed, but proof that the ideology was never imposed hard enough, comrade.
That is why this runoff is so dangerous. It does not offer correction. It offers a choice between escalation and breakdown and a repudiation of common sense.
Start with Raman because the press will try to sanitize her as a harmless urban planner with better housing ideas. That is nonsense. Raman is a member of DSA-LA. DSA-LA itself stated in 2026 that “two left candidates who are DSA-LA members,” including Councilmember Nithya Raman, were challenging Mayor Bass. This is not a smear. It is the organization’s own statement. DSA-LA also makes clear that its endorsements and political decisions they are member-driven and represent real commitments of their organizing power. (DSA Los Angeles)
A Raman administration would not govern alone. She would power-share with the DSA radicals, activists, council allies, organizers, pressure groups, along with purity tests, social-media enforcers, tenant radicals, abolitionist lawyers, anti-police activists, and operatives who already see City Hall as a vehicle for socialist transformation.
The Los Angeles Times has reported that Raman and city attorney candidate Marissa Roy, both members of DSA-LA, are heading into the general election as democratic socialists, and that DSA already has four members on the City Council. If Raman wins, DSA is not “influencing” City Hall from the outside. Nithya might be the mayor of Los Angeles, or would she be the executive face of a DSA power-sharing arrangement? Raman will protest, saying she is independent, but that is hard to prove given her voting record. This must become an election issue.
We deserve to know whether police policy would be shaped by people who believe policing itself is illegitimate. LA deserves to know whether homelessness policy would be shaped by activists who think enforcement of drug laws is cruel and prison should be abolished. Angelenos deserve to know whether immigration policy would be shaped by people who believe borders should be abolished. They deserve to know whether housing policy would be shaped by people who think private property should be redistributed to the collective.
This is not paranoia. These are the national DSA’s stated goals.
Consider Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist congressional nominee in New York. Reports based on resurfaced social media posts say she called for abolishing police, prisons, and borders; seizing property from landlords; nationalizing industries; cutting the defense budget to zero; and claiming that Israel does not exist. She reportedly called the United States a “f---ing disgrace,” wrote approvingly of wiping dirty hands on the American flag instead of using a napkin, and posted that “a world without borders—just like a world without prisons or police—is possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward.” (New York Post)
No police. No prisons. No borders. No deportations. Seize property. Nationalize industry. Erase Israel. Defund national defense. Mock the flag. Treat America as something to be dismantled, not repaired.
Raman should be asked about this every day. Does she reject the abolition of the police? Does she reject the abolition of prisons? Does she reject the abolition of borders? Does she reject the idea that all deportations are wrong? Does she reject seizing landlords' property? Does she reject the claim that Israel does not exist? Does she reject the view that America is a disgrace? Does she realize that all her precious immigrants, legal and illegal, drive up rent and housing prices?
If she rejects these ultra-left ideas, why is she still politically aligned with a movement that continues to produce and celebrate candidates who advance them? If she does not reject them, why should Los Angeles hand her the mayor’s office?
The DSA seeks to abolish ICE. It is not a trash pickup policy. It is not a better-permitting policy. It is a radical position on national sovereignty. It belongs in the mayoral debate because Los Angeles is a Sanctuary City inside a Sanctuary State that already treats federal law as optional when it conflicts with progressive ideology.
Then there is Melat Kiros, a DSA-backed Colorado figure, who drew criticism for describing the October 7 Hamas attacks and even 9/11 as “inevitable” consequences of Israeli and U.S. policy. (New York Post)
Raman cannot duck this by saying, “That is New York” or “That is Colorado.” DSA is not merely a local tenant group. It is a national movement. If Raman wants the benefit of DSA organizing, DSA branding, DSA volunteers, DSA ballot harvesting, and DSA political muscle, she inherits the obligation to answer for the movement’s direction.
If Raman wants to be mayor of Los Angeles, she needs to tell voters whether she is willing to break with the anti-American edge of the DSA universe. Not blur it. Not contextualize it. Not reframe it. Break with it.
Karen Bass will try to run as the safe alternative. That is laughable. Bass is not safe. Bass is simply the disaster Los Angeles already knows and is doing its best to ignore
She has already governed. She has already declared emergencies. She has already announced initiatives. She has already held the press conferences, posed in the hard hat, issued the statements, and promised progress. Meanwhile, if you live in LA, you would have to be in a coma to miss how the city has deteriorated in the last 4 years.
The homelessness machine is one of the great scandals of modern Los Angeles. Auditors reviewed $2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that Los Angeles officials had made it impossible to accurately track spending, largely because the city outsourced work to an agency that failed to collect accurate vendor data and to hold contractors accountable. That auditor was probably purposely hired due to advanced knowledge of the substandard job they would. (LAist)
The Los Angeles Times reported that the court-ordered audit found the city could not track exactly how much it spent on homeless programs and did not rigorously reconcile spending with services provided, making it impossible to judge whether services worked or were even delivered. (Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles spent billions and could not prove what it bought. That is fraud, that is larceny, that is grand theft. Raman, who is chair of the Homeless Committee, bears just as much, if not more, responsibility than Mayor B-ass-backwards.
Bass did not create every part of this monstrosity. But she owns it now. She ran on homelessness. She made it the moral center of her mayoralty. She asked to be judged by results. So, judge her by it. The verdict is failure.
Her political history also deserves scrutiny. Bass’s Cuba record is not imaginary. PolitiFact noted that Bass traveled to Cuba as a young woman, returned several times in the 1970s, and later referred to Fidel Castro as “Comandante en Jefe” after his death, language she later said she would not use again. (PolitiFact)
So let us stop pretending Bass is some centrist guardian against extremism. She is not. She is the institutional version of the same disease: centralized promises, bureaucratic control, ideological romance with a communist, contempt for private initiative, which are being taxed and regulated into bankruptcy.
That is why this race is a grotesque sham. Los Angeles is being asked to choose between two candidates who presided over the collapse, and Raman is the tip of the DSA spear, advocating the dismantling of the core institutions that keep a city civilized.
What is the option for residents who want laws enforced? What is the option for homeowners who want encampments removed? What is the option for small business owners who want customers to walk safely to the front door? What is the option for parents who want parks returned to children? What is the option for taxpayers who want every homelessness dollar audited, every failed contractor fired, and every agency head held personally responsible?
There is no option.
(Eliot Cohen is a longtime civic advocate who has served on the Neighborhood Council, the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and the Board of Homeowners of Encino, where he was president of HOME for over seven years. A retired Wall Street executive with a 35-year career, Eliot brings a sharp eye to local governance. He critiques the bureaucratic missteps of City, County, and State officials. Eliot and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
