Who the Hell Is Nithya Raman?

Can't wait for the debate.

Okay, now, fess up!

Had any of you heard of Nithya Raman, who has apparently slipped past the former reality TV star Spencer Pratt into second place in the LA mayoral primary, before the run-up to this election?

I hadn’t. And I lived in the city known as the Big Orange from roughly 1969 through 2018, with only brief sojourns in Europe. So call it 48 years.

I worked in Hollywood. I wrote for newspapers and websites. I knew politicians, journalists, studio executives, activists, and assorted crackpots of every description.

I arrived when Sam Yorty from the San Fernando Valley was mayor. All of us smartypants film-and-drama-school wannabe literati thought he was a yahoo. I lived through Bradley, Riordan, Hahn, Villaraigosa, Garcetti, Bass (from afar—by then I had left), and others. I watched Hollywood transform, newspapers shrink, neighborhoods burn, homelessness proliferate, and the city grow from a sprawling postwar metropolis into something quite different.

Yet when Nithya Raman emerged as a serious contender for mayor, my first reaction was not approval or disapproval.

It was: “Who the hell is Nithya Raman?”

Well, now I know her politics are supposed to be on the far, far left of the Democratic Party as she heads into a runoff against merely far-left (one far) former Fidelista incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, whom Ms. Raman endorsed (before Nithya did or did not throw in the towel, depending on who you believe).

Speaking of which, it’s hard to believe she actually beat out Mr. Pratt. The redoubtable Dan Greenfield has a good analysis of that —‘The LA Mayoral Election is Being Stolen”. Subtitle: “How does the third-place candidate win the majority of late-arriving ballots?”

Good question—and for me, especially, since I didn’t even know who she was.

But is that just me? Had the city changed that much since I left in 2018? It was fragmented already. The Herald Examiner, a paper we loved as much for its gossip as for its feisty conservative politics in a sea of liberalism, was gone. The Los Angeles Times was rapidly becoming a ghost of its former self.

The last time I had been out there was in 2021, when I was covering Larry Elder’s ill-fated campaign to unseat Gavin Newsom for The Epoch Times, and even then, things seemed different, yet more fragmented. Los Angeles was said never to have really cohered, but was a series of suburbs, some Brentwood classy and others like struggling Compton, that never had much to do with each other, and this felt, if anything, exacerbated.

And then came the fires in the Palisades and Altadena. Were the people miles away in East Los Angeles or the San Gabriel Valley supposed to care about that, the problems of the rich? For some, it was another country, some smoke on the horizon.

It was easy to see how you could win an election in one councilmanic district with hardly anyone knowing in the next one over who competed or that it even happened. This, I have been told, was part of Nithya Raman’s story. She arose out of Yorty’s old Valley with the Westside not even having heard of her. And now, boatloads of mail-in ballots are being deposited on her behalf. Where did they come from?

California's interminable elections have been under fire, no pun intended, for some time, now more than ever, and justifiably so. The president and others are calling for a DOJ investigation. Violation of states’ rights, they clamor. But mail-in ballots are sent via the United States Postal Service, and it has been argued that this gives the federal government the statutory authority to investigate mail fraud. Perhaps something will finally be done. I am hopeful.

On my good days.

On my bad days, I see it more darkly. New York and a number of other of our big cities, from Boston to Chicago to Seattle, now have unabashedly socialist mayors. What Los Angeles is looking forward to is an election between two lifelong left-wingers. What are they going to debate about? Who separated from Castro first?

Perhaps, if you want to think conspiratorially, Nithya was put in there to make the incompetent Karen, who flew off to Ghana in the midst of the Palisades fire and hasn’t done much about it since, not to mention barely making a dent in the homeless problem, look good. Nithya would seem like an extremist next to “centrist” Karen of the Venceremos Brigade.

But the scariest thing to me, worse than election fraud, as bad as it is, and it is really bad, is that this was indeed a fair election, and this is what the Los Angeles polity actually wants—two Marxists (deny it though they will) competing to run their city.

This is not the LA that I knew, but that's the least of it. My family and I got out. Sometimes I wondered if I had made the right choice. Reading the witty and perceptive X posts of James Woods, I wondered if I should have stood and fought. Ditto for when Spencer Pratt’s hilarious videos started trending online, and it seemed he would be a shoo-in.

Well, that was then, and this is now. Sad as this ending may be, it is only today’s ending. There are blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover—if you’re active. Start with electoral reform. Make the SAVED Act a priority, so only citizens can vote. Vote out those who stand in the way.