Karen Bass is delusional: Los Angeles is in deep trouble

Does the Mayor actually believe her own words?

Karen Bass went full blue screen of death mode when a reporter confronted her about the January 2025 wildfires upon her return from an overseas ego trip.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Today, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass took to the pages of Time magazine — which apparently still exists — to celebrate what she claims are the many successes of local government in Angel City.

In a word, she’s delusional. Virtually every word in her op-ed is demonstrably untrue, as I will demonstrate.  

She writes that, contrary to the picture painted by President Donald Trump and others, “Los Angeles is not broken. Los Angeles is not adrift. Los Angeles is not a hellscape.”

Madam Mayor, have you been downtown lately? Have you tried walking along, say, Spring Street, Florence Boulevard, Van Nuys Boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard or San Fernando Boulevard, much less alone, after dark? For that matter, have you strolled a few blocks in any direction from your own office?

Of course you haven’t. You’re chauffeured around in big, comfortable, insulated SUVs like the good socialist you really are. Your only interactions with the city you allegedly run are staged photo ops. You haven’t been outside for real in years.

“What’s more,” she declares in a triumphal tone, “Los Angeles is making real, measurable progress on the issues that people once thought were impossible to solve.”

Again, Madam Mayor, no one thinks, or has ever thought, that the crises L.A. is experiencing are “impossible to solve.” Very much the opposite: Normal people recognize that they are almost entirely the handiwork of incompetent politicians like you.

Bass also boasts about the alleged success of her “Inside Safe” homelessness initiative. According to independent analyses, in 2023 Inside Safe spent some $262,000 per person housed, with no data as to how long each person stayed inside nor how many ultimately transitioned to permanent housing. 

Given what we know from long, hard experience with the Homeless Industrial Complex, there is no reason to believe things improved much, if at all, in the subsequent two years. Overall on Bass’s watch the city’s homelessness spending continues to be egregiously wasteful, with virtually zero true accountability.

But wait, she claims that 2025 is the second year in which homelessness declined since the crisis “exploded.” Note the internal contradiction: In the previous paragraph she said L.A. had been battling a “systemic” homelessness crisis “for decades.” Well, which is it? A systemic crisis that has been growing for decades or one that suddenly exploded? The fact that she doesn’t recognize the inconsistency in her own narrative is disconcerting.

In any event, the “two successive years” claim is dubious at best. It’s based on the annual “point in time” (PIT) counts of the city’s homeless population, which show a 5.6% drop between 2023 and 2025. As I and others have documented exhaustively over several years, the PIT count is hopelessly flawed. Bass is celebrating rounding errors in mathematically meaningless numbers.

Things are looking up, L.A.!

She next claims, “Citywide property crimes including burglary, motor vehicle theft, and theft from vehicles also declined.” This is true only if you look at official crime statistics, which are notoriously unreliable. Most obviously, they don’t include unreported crimes, which have skyrocketed in recent years. Personally, I cannot think of a single friend who hasn’t been victimized by at least one crime, including everything from trespassing to assault to violent battery. None of them, as far as I know, bothered to contact the police.

Bass next asserts that the city’s Retail Theft Task Force (always with the task forces) recovered $36 million in stolen goods last year. Conveniently, the city doesn’t make public the total value of stolen goods, so that statistic — even if it’s reliable — is meaningless.

Nothing to see here, folks, no crimes, move along. Scene near MacArthur Park.

Play “Where’s Waldo?” with the picture above. You can count at least ten crimes in that one scene: Drug sales, public drug use, public intoxication, trespassing, vandalism, graffiti, damage to public property, littering, loitering and theft (note the e-scooter above the second woman from the left). If you think the bicycle the guy in the middle of the picture is sitting on was purchased legally, I’ve got a bullet train in Fresno to sell you.

That’s all in thirty feet of a narrow city alleyway. There are hundreds if not thousands of similar scenes throughout the city every day. That’s tens of thousands of individual crimes that never get reported, that never get counted. Tell us another one, Mayor Bass.

Then there’s this knee-slapper: “Small business is the backbone of our city, and it’s why blue cities like Los Angeles prioritize supporting it. Whether it’s cutting red tape for entrepreneurs trying to get started or investing in neighborhood revitalization, local governments must be a partner in growth, not a barrier to it.”

Reality check: Just last year, the number of new small business applications dropped 7.4%. Over the last decade the number of applications dropped by a staggering 50%. And while the city doesn’t maintain data as to how many small businesses have closed, to walk through many business districts is to pass empty storefront after empty storefront. The eyes don’t lie, Madam Mayor.

There’s also the question of the quality of local businesses. Some parts of downtown are indeed bustling, but most of what you see are shady jewelry shops, wholesale retail stores selling the cheapest, lowest quality clothes, appliances, furniture and other goods that look like they just fell off a container ship from Bangladesh, and unlicensed food vendors. Places like Spring Street resemble third world bazaars, not thriving big city shopping districts.

Downtown L.A., or downtown Caracas?

In a very real way, the January 2025 wildfires were a culmination of many years of incompetence, corruption and delusion. They were literal hellscapes in a city that long has been hurtling in that direction. Perhaps they were even inevitable. They were the explosion. You can only mismanage and abuse a megalopolis for so long before something really bad happens.

Bass’s op-ed is an echo of her failure during the fires. As the warnings grew more dire in the days before January 7, she jetted off on a literal ego trip to a foreign country as part of a presidential delegation. That’s what happens when someone who’s spent 30 years as a legislator tries her hand at playing chief executive. In a moment that demanded decisive action and executive decision making, Bass succumbed to her legislative instincts. A presidential delegation was more important than the four million people who suddenly found themselves in harm’s way. Even the squirrels in the trees in my front yard knew something terrible was coming. They’d been acting berserk for two days.

Her op-ed is no different. In a historical moment that requires leadership and direction, she wrote the equivalent of a floor argument in Congress.

Given the realities on the streets and in the city’s bureaucracy, Bass’s victory lap isn’t just delusional, it’s grotesque. I actually hope she’s intentionally lying. Because if she really believes her own words, we’re more screwed than we even realized.