As reported by AFN, a "miraculous surge" of late-arriving votes officially propelled far-left LA City Councilwoman Nithya Raman (D) past Spencer Pratt (R) to secure a place on the ballot in November against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass (D).
Jesse Lee Peterson, founder and president of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND), moved to Los Angeles in 1968 when he was 18 years old. He says much has changed for the worse since then, and he does not think either of the Democratic mayoral candidates will restore the city to its former glory.
"When I walked off the plane in Los Angeles, I literally thought that I was in paradise," he tells AFN. "Now, you have homeless people everywhere, and the government here is giving them the right to be everywhere. When I moved here, what little crime you would see would be mostly in the black community, South Central LA and places like that. Now, it is everywhere."
Pratt, a former reality TV star, was a political outsider who wanted an opportunity to clean up his city in more ways than one.
In addition to promising to expose and correct the corrupt system that let much of the city burn down last year and has reduced the general quality of life, he used stencils and power washers to clean messages like "Imagine if the streets were this clean" and "Spencer Pratt for Mayor" onto dirty Los Angeles sidewalks.
Regardless of whether Bass or Raman wins the race in the fall, Peterson is sure things are not going to get better.
"A lot of people believe that this election was rigged," he notes. "I just don't believe that enough people voted for Karen Bass and Nithya Raman. I just honestly feel it was a setup."
If voters did, in fact, not want to give Pratt a chance, "I believe that they're going to live to regret that even more so because the pain is going to be greater now than it was this first time around with Karen Bass," Peterson says. "It was a horrible mistake."
